When the Continental Congress, on June 14, 1775, called upon Virginia to raise two of the ten companies of riflemen for service in Boston, westerners again demonstrated enthusiasm for the American cause. Upon the advice of Horatio Gates, Washington named two veterans of Dunmore's War, Hugh Stephenson of Berkeley County and Daniel Morgan of Frederick County, to command the companies. The two captains filled their companies within a week, mostly with young men equipped with rifles, tomahawks, scalping knives, and other accoutrements. Morgan left Winchester on July 15, and Stephenson set out from Shepherdstown two days later. Eager to arrive in Cambridge first, and knowing that their simultaneous arrival would give more credit to Stephenson, who outranked him, Morgan ignored an agreement to join Stephenson at Frederick, Maryland, and hastened on to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he arrived on August 6, five days ahead of Stephenson.
Although there were instances of disloyalty and disaffection during the war, West Virginians generally answered the call of their country with promptness and even enthusiasm. They participated in nearly every major battle, including Quebec, Saratoga, Cowpens, and Kings Mountain. Among the officers who achieved military distinction were Major Generals Horatio Gates and Charles Lee, Brigadier General Adam Stephen, and Captains Hugh Stephenson and William Darke.
Indian Relations. The greatest immediate danger to West Virginia residents lay in the possibility that western Indians might join the British. Peace with western tribes, envisioned in the Treaty of Camp Charlotte, no longer served British interests. In February 1775 Lord Dunmore instructed John Connolly to make the Indians allies. Connolly obtained pledges of friendship from the Delaware and a few of the Mingo chiefs. About a month later Dunmore ordered the disbanding of garrisons at Forts Dunmore, Fincastle, and Blair and the evacuation of the posts.
The defenseless frontiersmen appealed to both the Continental Congress and Virginia authorities for protection. On August 7 the Virginia Convention ordered Captain John Neville and a hundred men from Winchester to Fort Dunmore, now hastily renamed Fort Pitt. Already it had named a commission consisting of Thomas Walker, Andrew Lewis, James Wood, John Walker, and Adam Stephen to confer with tribal chiefs and seek their neutrality. Wood visited the Indian villages at great personal risk and arranged a conference at Fort Pitt in September.
The Treaty of Pittsburgh was essentially a victory for Virginia Indian diplomacy. The Shawnee, Delaware, Mingo, Seneca, Wyandot, Potawatomi, and Ottawa recognized the Ohio River as the new Indian boundary and pledged neutrality in the war between England and the colonies. The tribes generally honored their pledges during the first two years of the war. Their neutrality and the occupation of Fort Pitt by colonial forces encouraged an uninterrupted advance of settlement into the transmontane parts of West Virginia until 1777. Under cover of the strong forts along the Ohio River and dozens of small private forts, trans-Allegheny settlers actually found themselves in a better defensive position in 1777 than they had been at the beginning of the war.
Loyalism on the Upper Ohio. The first major threat to settlers on the upper Ohio was a Loyalist move known as “Connolly's Plot.” After he abandoned Fort Dunmore, John Connolly joined the governor aboard a British man-of-war off Yorktown. There he proposed to Dunmore a plan to cut the colonies in two by capturing Fort Pitt with a force of British and Indians, which he would assemble at Detroit. He believed that many settlers, whom he would woo with generous land grants, would join him. Should the plan fail, he proposed to destroy Fort Pitt and Fort Fincastle and rejoin Dunmore at Alexandria. Dunmore referred Connolly to General Thomas Gage, the commander of British forces in America, who also found his plan attractive.
When his route from Boston, where he talked with Gage, to Detroit was cut off by the American capture of Montreal, Connolly disguised himself and set out by way of Virginia and Maryland. John Gibson, a Pittsburgh trader to whom he had confided his intentions, alerted the West Augusta Committee of Safety. Authorities arrested Connolly and a companion as they passed through Hagerstown, Maryland, and their plan, with its danger to the backcountry, ended in failure.
In 1777, when most of the Indians joined the British, Loyalism flared anew on the upper Ohio. Several frontier leaders, among them Alexander McKee, Simon Girty, and Matthew Elliott, espoused the British cause and went to Detroit. Colonel Zackwell Morgan of Monongalia County and five hundred men were needed to quell disturbances in northern West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania.
The Indians Join the British. Amid reports that Henry Hamilton, the commandant at Detroit, was exerting pressure upon the Indians to join the British, Virginia took steps as early as 1776 to defend her trans-Allegheny settlements. In the summer of that year Matthew Arbuckle constructed Fort Randolph, a stockade with blockhouses and cabins, to replace Fort Blair, which marauding Indians had burned the previous summer. Arbuckle and his men remained at the post as its garrison. Virginia authorities also placed militiamen at several private forts in the Greenbrier and Monongahela valleys and assigned scouts to keep watch along well-used Indian trails.
Despite all precautions, small bands of Indians terrorized isolated settlements throughout the backcountry beginning in the autumn of 1776. Congress favored a policy of restraint, lest decisive action provoke a general Indian war, but it yielded to the urging of Virginia authorities to the extent of sending Brigadier General Edward Hand to Fort Pitt on June 1, 1777, with orders to coordinate all defense measures on the upper Ohio.
British military strategy for 1777 increased the danger to frontier settlements. The general design called for expeditions from Canada, Oswego, and New York, led by John Burgoyne, Barry St. Leger, and William Howe, respectively, to converge on the Hudson Valley and cut off New England from the remainder of the country. In June Hamilton convened a council of tribal chiefs northwest of the Ohio River for the purpose of enticing them to join the British and engage in diversionary attacks on the trans-Allegheny frontier.
Hamilton won pledges of support from Chippewa and Ottawa chiefs and a few of the Mingo and Wyandot, and other tribes began to waver in their neutrality. Nonhelema, a sister of Cornstalk and a friend of the whites, informed Matthew Arbuckle on July 25 that the Shawnee had called off a visit to Fort Randolph when they heard of the council at Detroit. Four days later David Zeisberger, a Moravian missionary, reported to Hand that all the Indians northwest of the Ohio, except the Delaware, were likely to join the British.
Indian Attacks of 1777. When missionaries and others informed him that the Indians were preparing an attack against some undisclosed target in early August, Hand ordered Colonel David Shepherd, the lieutenant of Ohio County, to take charge of Fort Henry (formerly Fort Fincastle), which had no regular garrison, and to assemble there all militia companies between the Ohio and Monongahela rivers. Eleven companies answered Shepherd's call. The end of August came, without an attack, and Shepherd sent nine of the companies home, leaving only two, under Captains Samuel Mason and Joseph Ogle, with about sixty men, at Fort Henry.
On the night of August 31, about two hundred watchful Wyandot and Mingo, accompanied by a few Delaware and Shawnee, crossed the Ohio River and concealed themselves in a cornfield near Fort Henry. The next morning at about sunrise, six Indians fired upon Andrew Zane, John Boyd, Samuel Tomlinson, and a Negro, who were seeking horses for Dr. James McMechen for his departure to the Monongahela Valley. They killed Boyd, but they allowed Tomlinson and the Negro to escape in order that they might lure others outside the fort. Zane allegedly escaped by leaping over a cliff seventy feet high.
The Indian strategy worked perfectly. Mason left the fort with fourteen men in search of the Indians. Suddenly scores of Indians, instead of the few he had anticipated, fell upon him and his party. Hearing their cries, Ogle rushed to their aid with twelve more men. Of the twenty-six men, who were outnumbered about eight to one, only three, including Mason and Ogle, escaped death. The Indians then besieged the fort for three days and three nights, but its thirty-three defenders stood their ground. After burning about twenty-five houses outside the fort and destroying horses and cattle, the attackers withdrew, leaving most of the people homeless and without food or clothing.
Meanwhile, Hamilton dispatched fifteen bands of Indians from Detroit. Within six months they presented him with 73 prisoners and 129 scalps. They made forays against settlements as much as 150 miles east of the Ohio River, attacking within