Major Abraham Kirkpatrick was not one to mince words. “There is a few of them Damned Cherokees,” he reported in July 1784, “near 40 men, settled on Siota about the old Chillicoffee Towns . . . These is the Villains that killed the family at the blue licks,” he continued, “as is still doing mischeif […]
Brevet Major General Peter Muhlenberg woke up in the ruins of Fort Littleton on the morning of March 6, 1784, mounted his horse, and continued his journey through the snow-covered mountains of western Pennsylvania.[1] With him were a servant, a pack horse, and a German veteran of Casimir Pulaski’s Legion.[2] They rode to Bedford, site […]
There is a fine line between courage and stupidity. Eight men congregated at Smithfield Plantation in southwest Virginia on April 7, 1774, prepared for a perilous adventure. They were young men in high spirits, ready to set off into Virginia’s mostly unexplored western wilderness. Their intrepid leader was Deputy Fincastle County Surveyor John Floyd. Their […]
Located far enough away from American-controlled Kentucky but enough close to the British-allied Native Americans in the Western Great Lakes region, Fort Detroit became the center for British military operations to counter American activities in present-day Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio during the American Revolutionary War. These operations included raids on American settlements as well as […]
The American Revolution west of the Appalachians produced a number of stories, which in their constant retelling evolved into legends. They created a unique frontier mythology. Just as ancient Greece had Achilles and Odysseus, America west of the Appalachians had Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton. An American officer and frontier scout, Samuel Brady, became one […]
The Revolutionary War in the Ohio and Upper Mississippi River Valleys is generally looked upon as a side show to the main conflict along the Atlantic Seaboard. However, the impact of the forces in the Old Northwest Territory was much greater than their small size could have anticipated. Historian Pauline Peyton posited that had the […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews author and JAR contributor Eric Sterner on his new book about George Rogers Clark and the Illinois Campaign of 1778–1779. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. Dispatches can […]
BOOK REVIEW: Till the Extinction of This Rebellion: George Rogers Clark, Frontier Warfare, and the Illinois Campaign of 1778–1779 by Eric Sterner (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2024. $29.95, cloth) In Till the Extinction of This Rebellion: George Rogers Clark, Frontier Warfare, and the Illinois Campaign of 1778–1779, Eric Sterner presents a focused overview of one […]
The description of the United States as an “Empire of Liberty” is one of the most often repeated phrases of the American founding. Long associated with Thomas Jefferson, the phrase has been used by statesmen and authors alike. But what does “Empire of Liberty” mean? What were Jefferson’s intentions with the phrase and what are […]
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 […]
Book Review: Cavalry in the Wilderness: Cavalry in the Western Theater of the American Revolutionary War and the French and Indian War by Stephen L. Kling, Jr. (St. Louis, MO: THGC Publishing, 2021) As author Steven L. Kling, Jr., notes in the preface to Cavalry in the Wilderness, until recently cavalry operations in the American Revolution […]
We asked our contributors: Which personality of the American Revolution or the founding era (other than Benedict Arnold) is remembered for the wrong reasons, and why? Jason Yonce Silas Deane, like his friend Benedict Arnold, contributed so much to the patriot cause only to fall from grace. His infamous letter to Robert Morris could have […]
The phrase “fourteenth colony” describes a province in British North America that did not revolt alongside the original thirteen colonies. Such a province usually had one or more connections to the American Revolution. The phrase is misleading and has been thrown around freely in literature on the Revolutionary era. There have been at least eight […]
The settlers who chose to make their homes in the upper Ohio in the mid to late eighteenth century faced a wide variety of challenges to survive in this backcountry, ranging from the distance to centers of trade and population to the difficulty in practicing agriculture in old-growth forests. That this frontier, the area surrounding […]
When the American Revolution began, the Virginia Colony faced not one military-territorial contest, but four. Its ousted Royal governor, Lord Dunmore, was in the Chesapeake actively plotting a forcible return to power. A longstanding dispute with Pennsylvania over the headwaters of the Ohio had turned violent. A formal peace with the Shawnee on the northwest […]
George Rogers Clark and William Croghan: A Story of the Revolution, Settlement, and Early Life at Locust Grove by Gwynne Tuell Potts (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2020) “The phenomenon of fame confounds and fascinates, indiscriminately raising some to glory while consigning apparent equals to exile.” This is Gwynne Tuell Potts’s insight in her new book […]
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, […]
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 […]
The story of the Revolutionary War tends to focus on operations and events east of the Appalachian Mountains, with good reason as most of the war took place in at area. West of the mountains, the story of George Rogers Clark in the Ohio Valley is famous and found in many history books. The expedition […]
For a high ranking British official about to be captured by Rebel forces, it was an ominous portent of future treatment. Surrounded at the frontier outpost of Fort Sackville on the Wabash River, Detroit Lt. Gov. Henry Hamilton received a less than cordial demand for surrender on the morning of February 24, 1779. In an […]
Having recently discovered Journal of the American Revolution, I have spent many hours reading through the archive. I particularly enjoy reading the discussions that Top 10 Lists provoke and benefiting from such an incredible exchange of information and opinions. As there is a Top 10 List for Continental Army Generals, I decided to compile this […]
Taxation without representation has been the traditionally accepted cause of the American Revolution. Such an understanding of the Revolution, while valid, does not give credit to its complexity. An often-neglected aspect of Virginia’s American Revolution experience is the importance of the frontier. Soil exhaustion, a recurrent problem of Virginia’s tobacco economy, turned planters into land […]
From the outset, it was a military operation whose strategic goals were combined with a fierce quest for vengeance. On January 3, 1778, Lieutenant Colonel George Rogers Clark received a congratulatory note from Virginia’s executive council, which had approved a campaign into the far reaches of the Illinois country. Although the British post at Kaskaskia […]