Fort Laurens, 1778-1779

The Revolutionary War in Ohio

James B. Gidney, Thomas I. Pieper

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 1976
• ISBN:
  9781612777467
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

While the main action of the Revolution swirled along the Atlantic seaboard. Ohio was a no man's land between the Colonists' Fort Pitt and the British Fort Detroit. A campaign to neutralize Detroit and win the allegiance of the Indians in Ohio was instigated by General Washington in 1778, and in the fall of that year Fort Laurens was erected on the banks of the Tuscarawas River as the planned first step to secure the Western Frontier. But fortunes of war, logistics, and supplies, to say nothing of reconsiderations by the higher command, doomed the venture to failure. Fort Laurens remains the deepest—indeed, the only—Revolutionary War military settlement in what is now the state of Ohio.The brief history of Fort Laurens is a story of courage mixed with confusion, of bravery and hardship, of a little Valley Forge on the western side of the struggling nation. The long winter in which an ill-equipped handful of men scrounged for food and withstood attack to maintain their outpost in the wilderness is an undeservedly neglected part of the Revolutionary War story and a thrilling beginning to the Ohio story. This book is the first complete account of the episode, drawing on all the documentary evidence available and placing it in the context of the larger struggle for independence.Today the site of Fort Laurens is a state historical monument with a visitors' center and museum visited by thousands each year. It is also the scene of an archaeological dig which is more firmly establishing the outlines and structure of the original fort as well as confirming and clarifying the historical evidence. Fort Laurens brings this part of the story up to date, and new maps help the reader appreciate the scope of the Fort Laurens campaign and the odds it faced.

1. War in the West

In the summer of 1778 the American colonies were gradually gaining the upper hand in their struggle for independence from Great Britain. In October of the previous year British hopes for subduing the rebellion had been dealt a shattering blow when General John Burgoyne had surrendered his entire army to the Americans at Saratoga. Burgoyne’s defeat inspired the French government, which had previously restricted its intervention to supplying arms to the Americans, to assume the role of belligerent and enter an alliance with the colonies. From this point on the triumph of the American cause appears, at least in retrospect, all but certain. It was possible, of course, that in shedding dependence on Great Britain the Americans might merely fall under the domination of France, but that problem would not have to be faced until victory was achieved.

However, although the prospects were good in the chief areas of population to the East, they could hardly have appeared good to those American settlers who were spread out along the thousand-mile line of the western frontier.* If this line is defined as one in which the more advanced settlements were within half-a-day’s travel from the nearest settlements behind them, the western frontier of 1775 stretched from German Flats, seventy miles west of Albany, southward around the eastern end of the Catskills to the New Jersey line about thirty miles west of the Hudson. From there it moved waveringly westward to the forks of the Susquehanna, then angled southwestward to follow Forbes’ Road from near Bedford across the ranges of the Alleghenies (more or less the present route of the Pennsylvania Turnpike) to the northern bend of the Ohio below Pittsburgh. It then ran south on the eastern bank of the Ohio (the western bank being still largely unsettled) until it reached the present Moundsville, West Virginia, not far downriver from Wheeling. It then turned back eastward in a zigzaggy line to the western wall of the Valley of Virginia near Harrisonburg. From there it moved down the hills and valleys of Virginia, turning south-westward to follow the Clinch River. Readers unfamiliar with the area can easily define the western limit by finding in an atlas (or on a road map) the point at which the Clinch flows from Virginia into Tennessee. It will be noted that this point is still somewhat to the east of the Cumberland Gap; hence settlers moving through that major gateway to the west were already beyond the protection of the settlements. At some distance beyond the point at which the Clinch crosses into Tennessee the line of settlement turns southeast and at that point we leave it. It is essential to an understanding of the development of the southern states, but is not a part of our present story.

The pattern of settlement thus resembles more than anything a crazy quilt. The line was a thin one, vulnerable at countless points. Moreover, much of it was held in settlements many, many miles removed from other settlements. To take the most obvious example: because of the relative ease of passing the mountain barrier through the Cumberland Gap, the towns of Boonesborough and Harrodsburg were thrust well beyond any settled area at a very early date. Harrodsburg was at least 120 miles northwest of the Cumberland Gap which, as previously noted, was itself well beyond the frontier line. To move from the colonial capital at Williamsburg, the prospective settler would have to travel 400 miles to the Cumberland Gap if he went by a fairly straight route. If, as seems more likely, he curved north to Charlottesville and then southward, the distance would be closer to 450 miles. By that time, very much on his own in a dense wilderness, he was still at least 120 miles from Harrodsburg. Most of the route had to be made over the thinnest tracks—or none at all—carrying the settler, his family, and all his goods in a horse- or oxen-drawn wagon. If he arrived at last at the little cluster of dwellings called Harrodsburg, his journey was at an end, but it would be a gross distortion to describe him as having reached a point of “safety.”

To the settler who gave up to go back east, the distances were the same and the mountains of the same altitude. It might occur to some of them, however, that instead of going home they might take refuge at the “Forks of the Ohio,” the present site of Pittsburgh. There they could find something approximating safety because, despite King George’s order that none of his “loving subjects” should cross the mountains, a few hundred Americans were living there. However, if the Harrodsburg settler contemplated achieving safety in any such way, he would very likely have second thoughts almost immediately. For if he traveled to Pittsburgh in the most convenient way, i.e., by the Kentucky and Ohio Rivers, he would cover about 650 miles, more than those he had covered since leaving the settled parts of Virginia. Of course, he could try to shorten the distance by going overland, but the difficulties of taking a wagonload of goods and people through such a country numb the imagination.

The most sensible solution to the frontier predicament would have been for all the settlers to go back east until the war was over. Most of them didn’t. There is no way to explain their ability to hang on—or their desire to do so. We know they did and we can at least speculate that their determination to stick it out was a large factor in ultimately making the United States a continental nation rather than a maritime state existing only to the east of the Appalachians.

For these western people the war was a constantly renewed and lonely battle for survival against the British and their Indian auxiliaries. General George Washington and the Continental Congress were aware of their plight but, harassed as they were by their own straitened circumstances, could offer little help.

Headquarters for British military operations in the West were at Detroit. Located on the west bank of the river which connected Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie, it was a solid fortification with palisades some nine feet high, but suffering some from neglect. Its defense was entrusted to four companies of the Eighth (King’s Own) Regiment, two companies of Butler’s Rangers, and one company of the Fourth Regiment—about 500 men in all, although not all of them lived in the fort. Its commandant was Henry Hamilton, Lieutenant Governor of Detroit, whose use of the Indians in terror raids throughout the western country had earned him among Americans the name of “hair buyer.”

Hamilton had been instructed by the war office in a letter of March 26, 1777, that Indian allies were to be employed in making diversions and exciting alarms on the frontier without harm to its peaceful inhabitants. Even supposing this policy to be genuine and not mere hypocrisy, it was intended only as a stopgap until British-Indian forces had grown large enough for more aggressive action. When the time was ripe they expected to carry the war into the Ohio Valley. Their objective was Fort Pitt, head-quarters of the American army’s Western Department, located at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers.

According to George Morgan, Indian agent for the Western Department at Fort Pitt, there were approximately 10,000 Indians in the department in the summer of 1778. A substantial number of these were already attached to the British while many, perhaps most, of the others were subject to some British influence. The command at Detroit generously satisfied the needs of the Indians, whether for blankets, bullets, or whiskey. In addition to such material satisfactions, the Indians were influenced to support the British by previous association, by a conviction that the British would win, and, perhaps above all, by their perception that the British were serving their interest in resisting American efforts to settle the West.

Hamilton’s attempts at recruitment were not limited to Indians but extended to the sharpshooters of the Virginia and Pennsylvania borders. However, these efforts were not very successful. Frontiersmen and settlers remained loyal to the cause of independence because to them independence meant their right to penetrate the West, from which the British were trying to exclude them. It is probable that, with very few exceptions, colonials fighting on the British side had not been won over, but had been loyalists from the start.

American officials, like the British, tried to win Indians to their cause but, for the reasons adduced, they succeeded in persuading very few. The only Indians to support the Americans were the Delawares of the Turkey clan on the Tuscarawas River and the Turtle clan farther south on the Muskingum. The Wolf clan maintained a kind of neutrality which turned to hostility as the war went on.*

It may appear surprising that the Delawares, whose lands lay athwart the route from Pittsburgh to Detroit and who were thus exposed to innumerable perils, both from the British and the other tribes, should favor the American cause. That they were so disposed was owing to the establishment of the Moravian towns—Schönbrunn, Gnadenhütten, and Lichtenau—in the Delaware country. There Moravian missionaries had settled with a number of converts, most of them Delawares. The Indians lived in the mission towns but to a large extent continued in their old way of life. The Moravians had insisted that conversion should not destroy that way but simply add Christianity to it. In addition to hunting and agriculture, however, some of them cultivated crafts (one, we are told, made a spinet for the church) and all attended school. David Zeisberger and John Heckewelder, the instructors, taught with the aid of a Delaware-English spelling book prepared by Zeisberger himself.

Because their converts loved and trusted them, the missionaries, themselves highly favorable to the American cause, were able to influence the Indians to that preference. The converts in turn helped to keep the Delawares neutral throughout much of the war. As the subsequent narrative should make clear, Delaware neutrality “tilted” toward the American side.

Chief White Eyes of the Turkey clan and his Moravian advisors had done what they could to win the other tribes of the Ohio country to the American side. Their efforts produced little, if any, positive results, while arousing some hostility. The Mingoes, detached bands of Senecas who remained faithful to the Iroquois alliance with Great Britain, occupied the area near what is now Steubenville, Ohio. From there a sudden attack might be launched against the Delaware towns at any time. Hence, the Delawares were menaced from the east as well as the west. They had therefore requested the protection of a fort to be built on their land. At the time the request was made no troops could be spared from Fort Pitt, but the project was shelved rather than rejected.

Since April 10, 1777, command at Fort Pitt had been entrusted to General Edward Hand. Hand had served in the West in the French and Indian War and was thus familiar with its people and their problems. Among the problems was Colonel Morgan. The Indian agent owed his post to a scandal which had removed his predecessor, George Croghan, one of the most enterprising woodsmen of early America. Croghan had lost the position because of doubts about his loyalty. In view of the fact that he had devoted virtually his entire adult life to advancing the interests of Great Britian against those of France (a consecration not altogether puzzling in a Protestant Irishman), his pro-British sympathies should have occasioned no surprise.

Morgan’s case is more complicated. Although he too was suspected of tory sympathies, it is hard to see why. On the scanty evidence available, we may guess that he was thought to be too friendly toward the western Indians, particularly the Delawares, but his major deficiency was plain enough. As Indian agent it was his responsibility to keep the western Indians quiet. The preference of most of them for the British made such an assignment impossible and, although it was hardly Morgan’s fault, he must have been blamed for it.

Whatever the justice of the complaints, they led to the despatch of a congressional investigating commission to Fort Pitt. It suffered the fate of most commissions, for the internal problems of the Department, however vexing, were among the lesser worries of the Continental Congress. Far more ominous were the perils to which the region was subjected, and which—at least so Americans thought—had their source in Detroit. On November 20, 1777, a letter from the Vice-President of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania calling attention to these perils was presented to the Congress. Sympathetic to Pennsylvania’s plight yet reluctant to act in haste, particularly as it had few forces at its disposal for the defense of the West, the Congress had recourse to another commission. Two representatives were instructed to go to Fort Pitt and there to look into the problem, bring the Shawnee and Delaware chiefs into council to solidify their friendship, and arrange for an expedition against Detroit.

This final instruction makes clear that the high command was adopting a new policy. During the ghastly winter of 1777–1778, George Washington had devoted much thought to the possibility that the Western Department could go over to the offensive. In view of the desperate shortage of virtually everything needed for warfare, it was a dangerous gamble. Nonetheless, whatever the chances of taking Detroit, the desirability of doing so was hardly in doubt. In the summer of 1778 the decision was made to try it.

*For a complete and accurate description of the frontier line at the outbreak of the American Revolution, consult Dale Van Every, A Company of Heroes (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1962), pp. 7–8.

*The Shawnee chief Cornstalk had kept his people neutral until his murder by Virginians in 1777.

2: Planning the Campaign

As the Americans were reaching the decision to attack westward, the British plans to use Indian allies for raiding and other types of operation eastward were approaching fruition. Fur traders actually protested to the governor of Canada because of the drain on manpower resulting from the conversion of Indian hunters to warriors. The Indians themselves were not reluctant to make the change, a natural one for them. News had reached them that the Shawnee chief Cornstalk, together with his son and Chief Red Hawk, had been murdered after entering Fort Randolph on the Kanawha under a flag of truce. Since Dunmore’s War Cornstalk had maintained an uneasy peace. Following his murder, many of the Shawnees were ready to pick up the hatchet from the British, while other tribes were merely confirmed in their conviction that there could be no peaceful coexistence with the Americans.

In February Daniel Boone and twenty-six other frontiersmen were captured by Shawnees while boiling salt at Blue Licks, Kentucky. This was a direct result of Cornstalk’s murder. Ordinarily such captures did not take place in winter. It was the hunting season and, moreover, the season in which a raiding party left its tracks plainly in the snow. The murder of Cornstalk, however, had driven the Shawnees to such a rage that the apologies and sympathies of such well-known Americans as Colonel William Preston, George Morgan, and Governor Patrick Henry were not sufficient to restrain them. The capture of Boone, perhaps the best-known hunter and woodsman of the frontier, was certain to shake the confidence of settlers all along the western line.

This loss was followed by the defection on March 28 of three of the ablest leaders on the American side—Alexander McKee, Matthew Elliott, and Simon Girty. Although Girty’s sympathy toward the Indians was well known and his loyalty as well as that of the others had been questioned, they were apparently regarded by most of those at Fort Pitt as faithful to the American cause. When they left the post to offer their services at Detroit, so soon after Boone’s capture, a shock amounting to widespread demoralization ran along the frontier. Welcomed at Detroit, they served the British side effectively throughout the rest of the war.

The defections from Fort Pitt were a permanent blow to the Americans; Boone’s capture was only temporary. Choosing surrender rather than death for himself and his companions, Boone moved northward with his captors to Chillicothe.* As Chief Blackfish came to know him, he decided he liked and admired Boone more than any other man. Boone could do anything an Indian could do and do it just as well; he always kept his word, and he understood and easily fell in with Indian ways of living and thinking. Blackfish liked him enough to adopt him and when, on March 10, he sold his captives to Governor Ham...