Chapter Six:
Americans
The Europeans who presumed to lay claim to North America had absolutely no idea how big it was. By Virginia's first colonial charter, awarded it by King James I in 1606, the colony claimed all the lands of the continent between 34 and 45 degrees north latitude, a swath of territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific approximately between the present sites of Wilmington, North Carolina, and Columbus, Ohio. James expanded the grant three years later, giving Virginia the seacoast two hundred miles north and two hundred miles south of Point Comfort, on the Chesapeake Bay near Williamsburg, which would become the capital of the colony, and all the lands west of the southern terminus of the grant and northwest of the northern. This area outlined in Virginia's second colonial charter of 1609 included all of what would become Euclid Township, and West Virginia, and Kentucky, and fifteen states west of the Mississippi in their entireties, plus most of Ohio and southwestern Pennsylvania, along with big chunks of California, Alaska and western Canada.
West—west! not north like the Hudson or the Connecticut—through the heart of this empire ran the Ohio River, which began its long journey to the very center of the continent in territory Virginia claimed at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers at the present site of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Youghiogheny River, feeding into this natural highway, ran just a few miles' portage from the Potomac River, near what's now Cumberland, Maryland, and the Potomac ran down the Allegheny Mountains all the way to the Chesapeake Bay. Virginia and its (from their point of view) Ohio River, almost inevitably, given this configuration, were going to play decisive roles in the destiny of the region which included what became Euclid Township.
With the old French threat in North America eliminated by Britain's triumph in the French and Indian War, Britain's American colonists began swarming into the rich lands surrounding the Great Lakes, bringing them into contact and, predictably, conflict with the Native tribes who lived there. The British, having just and at long last won peace with the Indians allied with the French, were weary and heavily indebted from the war and saw the benefit in not provoking the Natives into renewed conflict. The new British king, George III, only three years into his reign, was forced to address this problem, and tried to order it away with the Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763:
"... Whereas it is just and reasonable, and essential to our Interest and the Security of our Colonies that the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom we are connected, and who live under our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts of our Dominions and Territories as, not having been ceded to or purchased by us, are reserved to them... as their Hunting Grounds... And We do further declare it to be Our Royal Will and Pleasure... to reserve under our Sovereignty, Protection, and Dominion, for the use of the said Indians... all the Lands and Territories lying to the Westward of the Sources of the Rivers which fall into the Sea from the West... And We do hereby strictly forbid, on Pain of our Displeasure, all our loving Subjects from making any Purchases or Settlements whatever, or taking Possession of any of the Lands above reserved, without our special leave and License for that Purpose first obtained... We do further strictly enjoin and require all Persons whatever who have either willfully or inadvertently seated themselves upon any Lands within the Countries above described... forthwith to remove themselves from such Settlements."
Colonists thinking of going west were ordered to stay to the east of the Appalachians. Those already west were ordered back.
The Americans ignored this order. Its very issue they added to the pile of grievances that would very soon lead them into rebellion.
Eleven years later, the Quebec Act of 1774 made the newly conquered lands south of the Great Lakes part of the now British province of Quebec and under the administration of the Governor of Canada. The Act's guarantee of freedom of worship for the largely Catholic French in the ceded region further irked the mostly Protestant Americans who were suspicious of the Roman Church's practitioners. This too the colonists added to their pile of grievances. With the French gone, London sought finally to impose its old sovereignty over the American Colonies and levy new taxes to pay the war debt. The colonies had been more or less loosely administered up until then. The new vigor of imperial law and taxation, and a standing army to enforce them on the distant districts accustomed to governing themselves, disgruntled many of the colonists and their political leaders. As relations between Britain and the colonies grew colder and colder, clashes grew hotter and hotter.
*
Throughout the decade following the French and Indian War, Virginians had ventured into the trans‑Allegheny West in defiance of the Proclamation of 1763, causing friction with the Indians then living in the region whose right to the land had been promised by George III himself. But the King's will in the vast wilderness between the mountains and the Mississippi was left to be enforced by just a few hundred royal troops occupying a handful of vulnerable and isolated forts in an area that today comprises a dozen states, and the dwindling will of the colonial leaders of the Ohio Valley region—Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry—to do as they were told from London. Illegal settlers poured west, using the Ohio River as a highway to the interior. One of them was a young man eager to elevate his status in the world named George Rogers Clark.
Clark came from a Virginia family that today might be called middle class. (His younger brother William would become famous early in the next century as the Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. But that was all yet to come.) Their father owned land, but not much, and enslaved people, which were counted as valuable property at that time in that place, but not many, and far from being gentlemen planters like their neighbors the Jeffersons, Clark and his nine siblings assisted with the farm work which supported their father's household. Clark grew up in the Virginia Piedmont on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains and attended school with neighborhood boys James Madison and John Tyler. He had a reputation as a poor student, and found his interests piqued more by the habits and customs of the exotic Indian tribes and strange wild animals that inhabited Virginia's mysterious Western interior than by his books. Recognizing that he would never excel as a scholar, at the age of 19 Clark began to learn the trade of survey with his grandfather.
In 1772 he participated in an expedition down the Ohio River from Fort Pitt, reconnoitering lands in the Ohio Country from base camp near the mouth of the Kanawha River, today Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The following year he joined a team pushing even further west down the Ohio, exploring south of the river in Virginia's far western Kentucky district. All the while in his career as a surveyor Clark was locating and claiming title to some of the best agricultural lands in America, lands that would secure for him and his family the elusive wealth, influence and social status so coveted among the planter class of colonial Virginia. The titles of course would be contested, both by British law and by the Natives whose lands King George's Proclamation of 1763 protected. For the Shawnee and the Wyandot/Huron living in the region, White encroachment constituted the catalyst of an ongoing war of survival. For George Rogers Clark removing British authority and the Indians from Virginia's Western regions would secure for him personally a brighter future.
But the Indians in 1774 pushed back in a big way. In the spring of that year sustained hostilities erupted on Virginia's Western frontier, when Shawnee, Mingo, Cherokee, Wyandot/Huron, and Ottawa joined together and rose up against White settlements in Virginia's Ohio Country and the Kentucky District—shades of Pontiac just a decade earlier—and hordes of White settlers and traders fled once again to the safety of Fort Pitt. Virginia's Royal Governor, John Murray, Lord Dunmore, mobilized the colony's militias. George Rogers Clark himself, still surveying the Ohio Valley when the attacks began, participated in one early raid on the Shawnee in the Ohio Country on the Muskingum River. By the end of the summer Lord Dunmore had mustered 3,000 Virginia militiamen at Point Pleasant. One thousand Shawnee, Wyandot/Huron and Ottawa attacked the post on October 10, 1774, and were beaten back by the Virginians—with Clark among them, who by then had become a militia captain—in the decisive battle of what came to be known as Lord Dunmore's War. Having bested the Indians at Point Pleasant, Dunmore's Virginia militia then crossed the river into the Ohio Country and marched on the Shawnee capital at Chillicothe, but before they could reach the town and burn it the Shawnee met the Virginians and sued for peace.
Besides quieting the frontier for a while, the brief experience of Lord Dunmore's War, fought exclusively by colonial militia, showed the Virginians that they didn't need Royal troops to protect their Western outposts from the Indians. In his efforts to secure British lands for the King, Lord Dunmore actually helped encourage the unruly frontier Virginians even further toward rebellion. Less than 13 months after the victory at Point Pleasant, Dunmore, Virginia's last colonial governor, would flee to the safety of a British warship and order the city of Norfolk shelled from the sea. Patrick Henry, an influential member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, would assume executive control in Williamsburg as the first governor of independent Virginia. By then the war for independence was well underway.
*
Royal troops had occupied Boston since 1768 to enforce compliance with the new tax laws. Over the next few years clashes between the Massachusetts colonists—as upset by the occupation to enforce the acts as by the acts themselves—and the King's troops grew uglier and uglier, resulting in the incident in 1770 known today in the United States as the Boston Massacre, and the destruction of valuable cargoes of tea in the holds of three ships in the harbor at Boston three years later known as the Boston Tea Party. In early 1774 George III ordered the port of Boston closed to punish its rebellious citizens, a stab at the heart of the port city's economy. News of Boston's plight and her resistance united the other colonies against London. From Massachusetts to South Carolina radicals began to collect weapons and organize to resist.
In April 1775 Gen. Thomas Gage, the British military governor in command of the occupation of Boston, learned of one such store of rebel weapons in the nearby town of Concord, Massachusetts, and dispatched a troop to seize them. On the morning of April 19, 1775, this force was confronted en route at Lexington by Massachusetts militia. A skirmish ensued. The British scattered the rebels and continued on to Concord where they burned what few military supplies they found and started on the 16 mile march back to Boston. On this march back the real battle began. All along the way militiamen and armed farmers attacked the column, killing and wounding Royal soldiers by ones and twos before disappearing into the anonymous countryside. Shaken and bloodied the British retreated into Boston to the safety of the high ground atop Bunker Hill. Colonial militias surrounded Boston and the British garrisoned there suddenly found themselves under siege.
The Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia created a unified command of the forces from the 13 British North American colonies which rose up to rebel—East and West Florida and the Canadian colonies had declined—under George Washington. The siege at Boston became a stalemate with Washington unable to dislodge the British and they unable to break out from their peninsular redoubt. However, in May 1775, American colonel Henry Knox captured the weakly defended and isolated interior fort the British had taken from the French at Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain in 1759, claiming an absolute treasure in heavy artillery. Then, in a logistical master stroke, Knox transported the guns to Washington at Boston, who used them to fortify the undefended Dorchester Heights overlooking the British encampments, their fleet in the harbor and the entire city. Astonished but terrified the British abandoned their now untenable positions on March 17, 1776, and sailed for Nova Scotia.
Boston was a heartening victory for the Americans, but their last for quite a while. An American invasion of British Canada up the old water highway of the Hudson Valley led by Benedict Arnold that winter failed, and Washington's campaign following the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776 around strategic New York on Long Island and Manhattan was ill‑conceived and nearly disastrous.
Despite its strategic importance the British had been compelled to abandon Fort Pitt—deep in the interior, unsuppliable, unreinforcable and thus indefensible—to the rebels in 1775. American general Edward Hand assumed command of the fort on June 1, 1777. Later that year he received word that the British from Detroit, which they still occupied, had positioned a forward store of supplies and weapons at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, on the present-day Whiskey Island and the Port of Cleveland. Hand marched with 500 Pennsylvania militiamen from the fort in February 1778 into the Ohio Country to capture this valuable cache of materiel.
Hand's force became lost in the forest. They failed to find the Cuyahoga. Neither did they engage any major enemy force, either British or Native. Just east of where Youngstown now sits Hand's men killed an Indian child, two women and one old man before abandoning the campaign and returning with two captive Indian women to Fort Pitt. These pathetic prizes from a botched operation earned the debacle the moniker of the "Squaw War," or "Squaw Campaign." Gen. Hand lost the respect crucial to a frontier commander as a result of the campaign and resigned his command of the fort the following spring.
*
Recognizing Detroit as the strategic key to the region north of the Ohio River, plans arose immediately among the Americans to effect its capture. As early as 1776 subordinates presented the idea to Gen. Washington, who approved, but Congress felt the real war was in the East and would not release the precious men and supplies to undertake an operation.
No ethnically European outpost west of the mountains, neither British nor American, possessed a force sufficient to dominate the region, and the tenuous peaces and alliances with the myriad Native groups always weighed heavily on the minds of the opposing commanders at Fort Pitt and Fort Detroit. Supply and manpower posed constant problems to the frontier outposts of both sides. When precious trickles did run the Western commanders had difficulties transporting them to the posts in need and ran the very high risk of their destruction or capture. Thus the Revolution on the frontier was destined to be a brawl.
George Rogers Clark spent 1777 with Daniel Boone in the western part of Virginia that is now Kentucky directing the defense of Virginia's Ohio Valley settlements there against attacks by the Shawnee. His pre‑war knowledge of the area and battle experience in Lord Dunmore's War had already elevated him by then to the rank of major, at the grizzled age of 24. During this long and harrying year holed up within wooden stockades firing at Indians through narrow slits in hewn log walls he worked out a plan that he thought would deliver Detroit, and with it the region south of the Great Lakes, to Virginia. The river highways were the keys to control of the West Country, and through his earlier experience surveying the Ohio and its tributaries Clark understood how thinly they were protected. Only a few forts, undermanned and neglected, commanded the lower Ohio past the falls of the river at what is now Louisville, Kentucky. A fort at what is now Vincennes, Indiana, guarded the entrance to the Wabash River above the Ohio. North of the Ohio's confluence with the Mississippi, forts at Kaskaskia and Cahokia in what is now Illinois watched over the east bank of the continent's spinal waterway. Trails from all of these outposts led to Detroit, and removing the forts from British control would deny the Detroit garrison their supply and support and would provide bases forward of Fort Pitt from which to launch a decisive attack, as well as removing the venues from which the British encouraged Natives to attack American settlers.
In the spring of 1777 Clark sent spies to assess the defenses at Kaskaskia and Vincennes, and they reported back that the forts were practically undefended. Clark wrote to Patrick Henry in Williamsburg that summer, describing his proposal for an expedition from Fort Pitt against the British forts in the Ohio Valley. A few months later he met with the governor, who both approved the plan and promoted him to lieutenant colonel. Clark departed in January 1778 and began assembling his force at Redstone on the Monongahela south of Fort Pitt, at what's now Brownsville, Pennsylvania (a place which would go on to provide Euclid Township with some of its first permanent settlers, but that is getting ahead of the narrative). At Redstone Clark immediately ran into difficulties.
The strategic Fort Pitt area remained in dispute at that time between Virginia and Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvanians of the area whom Clark hoped to recruit for his expedition cared little for securing Virginia's claims on the Ohio Valley. Squabbles over military and civil jurisdiction hampered recruiting and discipline. Consequently undermanned, Clark moved forward to Fort Pitt in May 1778, and from there down the Ohio, just hoping to pick up men along the way.
At the end of June the expedition reached an abandoned French fort, Fort Massac, located between the Mississippi and the Wabash Rivers south of Kaskaskia and Vincennes. There they stored their canoes and proceeded overland across the southern Illinois prairies toward their first target, Kaskaskia. Six days later they reached their objective. Just after midnight on July 5, 1778, Clark's force quietly surrounded the fort and the town in its protection. Neither the British soldiers nor the ethnically‑French denizens knew of their approach. Clark's men caught the garrison commander in his bed, and the force took Kaskaskia without a shot fired.
From there Clark sent one of his captains, John Bowman, with 30 horsemen north to take Cahokia. Three days later Bowman secured that fort, and Virginia then controlled the whole of the Ohio River, plus the Mississippi north to Saint Louis.
At least as important, and probably more, as any military victory was the diplomatic victory achieved by Benjamin Franklin in Versailles that same month when France declared war on Britain and came into the conflict on the American side. The French populous of the Ohio Valley, living under British control since the end of the last war in 1763, were kept deliberately ignorant of French support for the Americans for strategic reasons by the British military, and they knew nothing of the new Franco‑American alliance. Furthermore they had been propagandized by the British to believe that if Americans did come they would slaughter the French settlers to rid their new territories of the scourge of Catholicism.
Suddenly and unexpectedly under American control and stripped of British protection, the terrified French citizenry of Kaskaskia elected a brave clergyman, Father Pierre Gibault, to speak with Clark and discover his intentions. To Gibault's great relief he learned for the first time of the French-American alliance and received assurances that his people would not be harmed in any way. Clark's policy of friendship proved advantageous for the Virginians as well. Vincennes yet remained in British hands, but by a happy coincidence the outpost was part of Father Gibault's frontier parish. The priest traveled to the Wabash fort and convinced the citizens there to declare their allegiance with the Americans. On July 20, 1778, a small detachment of Clark's men occupied the rundown and abandoned British fort that controlled Vincennes, Fort Sackville.
The first phase of Clark's Ohio Valley campaign had succeeded better than anyone could possibly have hoped.
*
Clark had hardly crushed the British in the West, however. Within days the commander at Detroit, Lieutenant Governor of Canada Henry Hamilton, learned of the capture of the Ohio Valley forts, and immediately made preparations for a counter‑attack. In October Hamilton and 150 British regulars, Indian allies and British-allied Canadian French moved south from Detroit and up the Maumee at what is now Toledo, portaged to the Wabash, then descended on Vincennes. On December 17, 1778, the outpost became British again, and Hamilton took up residence there in his new forward command from which he planned to retake all the British forts which had fallen once the weather broke in the spring. Clark, still in Kaskaskia, received word of the British re‑capture of Vincennes. But Clark also heard that the British had left the post undermanned. Winter had descended on the country and Clark knew Hamilton's problems with resupply and reinforcement would be as acute as his own. Hamilton would not expect a winter attack, and for good reason, as it was suicidal. But without action Clark risked losing all the gains of his entire Ohio Valley campaign. He gambled on an unheard of winter counter‑attack and on the fifth day of February 1779 left Kaskaskia overland toward Vincennes with 170 men.
At first the mild weather they encountered seemed a good thing. But the unfrozen rivers in their way had flooded, turning just about all of what is now southern Illinois into a shallow ice‑water lake. Rather than a plod across cold dry prairie grass, the majority of the journey from Kaskaskia to Vincennes consisted of knee‑, waist‑, and in some places chest‑deep water just above freezing, which threatened to kill Clark and his men long before they ever reached the enemy. But what followed was one of the most epic stories of endurance in American military history, one still studied and celebrated among elite U.S. forces today.
For the better part of two weeks Clark and his men struggled through the frigid morass. They camped at night on the few tiny islands of slightly higher ground they found in their paths, the men often collapsing as soon as they emerged from the freezing water onto dry earth. Clark's men grew sick and weak, but the haggard group slowly progressed toward their objective. On the final morning of the march the troop awoke to find a thin sheet of ice covering the surface of the swollen Wabash River. Clark knew they were near the end of their ordeal and in an effort to hearten his soldiers he blackened his face with gunpowder and gave an Indian war whoop then plunged himself into the freezing chest-high water. The example worked to rally the men, and they followed their commander into the cold water one final time for the last terrible push. Half‑dead and frozen, Clark's troop reached Vincennes on February 23, 1778. But having survived the march they still had to retake the fort. And taking it a second time proved harder than the first.
At sunset Clark's troop marched through the town, warning the French citizens to stay in their homes. They began their new assault on Fort Sackville shortly after dark, and once the moon had set began digging trenches toward its walls.
The following day Governor Hamilton proposed a cease fire. It was a gambit. He hoped that reinforcements would arrive from Detroit during the delay. Clark refused, fearing the same reinforcements. Clark had also taken measures to hide his scant numbers from the British commander, displaying numerous battle flags and never marching his whole troop in plain sight. Hamilton believed he faced 500 to 1,000 battle-ready rebels, and not Clark's eight‑score frozen rag‑dolls. Clark feared if Hamilton discovered the true size and condition of his force he would never give up the fort.
Clark did all he could to terrorize the British defenders, suggesting that his eagerness to press the battle arose from his men's thirst for the blood of the British who had stirred up the Indians to attack their homes. While the British mulled Clark's terms he had four British‑allied Indian prisoners his men had taken that day tomahawked and scalped in front of the fort in view of the defenders on the ramparts. These grim overtures rattled the men inside. Shortly after the British agreed to give up.
Clark succeeded in holding his gains on the Ohio. Though eager to press on to the ultimate prize of Detroit, the exhausted state of his men after the winter ice water march and the large numbers of prisoners of war now in their possession forced Clark to conclude that the campaign could not go forward that season. The ultimate prize would have to wait.
*
At the end of the 18th century, the histories of Connecticut and of Northeast Ohio dovetail, and one raised in Northeast Ohio will find the names of Connecticut's leaders of the 1780s vaguely familiar: Wadsworth, Huntington, Atwater, Hubbard, Cleaveland. The American Revolution was the crucible for many of the figures who would become both the creators and the first settlers of Euclid Township and all of New Connecticut. These Connecticut patriots had a war hero, and though largely forgotten even in places that still bear his very name, they wanted him remembered forever.
Jonathan Trumbull grew up steeped in the severe New England Puritanism that had produced witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts not 20 years and barely 50 miles distant from the Lebanon, Connecticut, of his birth. In his teens Trumbull trained for the ministry at Harvard, and after completing his studies in 1730 was offered the pastor-ship of a church at Colchester, Connecticut, but before he had a chance to accept the post his older brother's ship, the Lebanon, which Joseph Trumbull, Jr. co‑owned with their father, Joseph, Sr., was lost at sea. Trumbull's father called upon his younger child to help with the family business, Trumbull and Son, now to be with a different Son. Within four years Jonathan had taken over the concern, retailing necessaries to the inhabitants of Lebanon and its environs.
Though fate had changed his ministerial path, it could not alter Trumbull's Puritan background, Puritan training and Puritan outlook. He saw his purpose in life as serving God, himself as God's instrument. Sending barreled meat and livestock to Boston, Providence and coastal Connecticut wasn't mere commerce, but God's work. He did increasing business and the name Jonathan Trumbull became one of note in eastern Connecticut. His customers, however, were often cash‑strapped, not an unusual condition in rural 18th century New England, and Trumbull was too liberal offering credit. In his generosity he burdened himself with massive debts, and spent a large portion of his adult life often just holding off bankruptcy.
Trumbull entered government at age 23 as town deputy for Lebanon to the Connecticut General Assembly, and five years later became Justice of the Peace for Windham County, all the time continuing the family retail and provisioning business. He married well, which increased his social standing, and got his first military contract in 1746 with a merchant from Norwich named Hezekiah Huntington to supply the Connecticut colonial militia with arms during another of the ongoing conflicts between the British and French Empires in North America known as King George's War. Ten years later he and Huntington would pair up again to provision Connecticut troops during the French and Indian War.
Trumbull's reputation in the General Assembly increased steadily for thirty years, with dedicated and competent service on behalf of the colony, service that, through Trumbull's Puritan filter, made him increasingly adversarial to distant and, Trumbull felt, immoral London. In the series of taxes levied on the American colonies to pay the debts incurred during the French and Indian War and the ever more heavy‑handed imperial military force employed to enforce them, then punish resistance, Trumbull saw no less than the work of the devil. For Trumbull, the new taxes represented something far beyond the added weight they would put upon his own sometimes desperate state of personal finance. He saw Britain as debased, corrupted by sin. Taxes from Connecticut would fund the pensions of British soldiers, retired from evil lives of killing and rape, now spending those retirements in wicked idleness, and the money of the pious inhabitants of Connecticut on gambling, liquor and whores. The Anglican Loyalists of Connecticut had been involved with petitioning the Church of England to appoint a bishop for the American colonies, and the prospect of an English bishop lording corrupted authority over and exerting a corrupted and corrupting influence on Trumbull's city on the hill Puritan Connecticut virtually maddened him. In 1765 Trumbull walked out of the Assembly chamber rather than administer the oath to carry out the terms of the Stamp Act to colonial Governor Thomas Fitch, an act which helped get him the number two deputy‑governor spot on the gubernatorial ticket with William Pitkin of Hartford the following year. Strong anti‑British sentiment in Connecticut carried the pair into office. When Pitkin died in 1769 Jonathan Trumbull assumed the governorship.
When armed rebellion erupted just down the pike from Lebanon in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1775, Governor Trumbull immediately sprang to the American cause. The Revolution had no more enthusiastic supporter, for Trumbull saw the conflict as much more than a tax revolt. It was holy. And with experience provisioning armies in the field in two previous wars, massive allotments of fertile Connecticut's grain, livestock, sugar and lumber—and before too long militia companies—were soon on their way to Gen. Washington and the Continental Army, sometimes to local protests that Connecticut's sons and stores were better used for Connecticut's own defense.
During the war Trumbull convened the Connecticut Committee of Safety in a building adjoining his home in Lebanon no fewer than 900 times, and welcomed not only George Washington, but John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette. But Trumbull's enduring fame as the hero of Connecticut's Revolutionary War effort came as a result of three instances of, if such a thing can be so‑called, heroic logistics.
In the early months of 1778 George Washington wrote to Governor Trumbull from the Continental Army's desperate winter quarters at Valley Forge, describing the plight of the army where starvation and cold threatened to destroy what the King's regiments thus far could not. Trumbull rallied every farmer in eastern Connecticut, and with significant help from Henry Champion, had the first herd of 300 Connecticut cattle to Washington within days. His hungry army consumed the entire herd in less than a week. More followed. Many more.
Two years later Washington selected Morristown, New Jersey, for winter quarters, expecting easy supply there from the Southern colonies. But three days into January the worst blizzard of the war cut the army off. Washington wrote again to Governor Trumbull, pleading that, without supply, the army, and with it American Independence, would dissolve. Connecticut's community of farmers, though, were unwilling to help; the Continental paper currency with which they were paid was growing more and more worthless. But under Trumbull's prodding Connecticut's farmers once again saved the American army from destruction with cattle and grain.
Washington rejoiced when France entered the war on the American side, but found his joy alloyed by the burden of having to feed a new allied army while he already had difficulty filling the stomachs of his own. When the general received word in the summer of 1780 of the impending arrival at Newport, Rhode Island, of a force of 6,000 French troops under the Comte de Rochambeau, he once again wrote to Trumbull for help. Trumbull had misgivings about how much he could provide given the waning support his entreaties had received, but promised Gen. Washington that he and Connecticut would do all that was in their power.
The French ships arrived in the Narragansett Bay and landed their hungry soldiers in July 1780. Immediately and with surprising enthusiasm the livestock pens and granaries of Connecticut emptied and their contents moved with astonishing rapidity toward Newport.
It was more a display of Yankee pragmatism than Yankee patriotism: The French paid in gold.
Governor Trumbull still got credit for saving the army.
*
After the recapture of Vincennes by Clark's Virginians, the war in the West devolved to stalemate, always over the same issues: manpower and supplies. Neither side could muster enough of both to move decisively on the other. Col. Daniel Brodhead at Fort Pitt planned an expedition into what became Northeast Ohio in the late spring of 1780. Efforts to assemble men and supplies progressed slower than he anticipated and he pushed the attack back into June, then to September, then called it off in October. In the Mohawk Valley an American attack under Gen. John Sullivan planned to move all the way to Lake Erie, but stopped after running short of supplies.
Meanwhile, small‑scale Indian attacks on isolated white settlements occurred all across the frontier, exacerbated by an influx of new settlers encouraged by Clark's victories and their casting‑off of British rule and with it the noisome Proclamation of 1763. But more Whites on the frontier only meant more settlements to defend. Grand plans to finish off Detroit had to be abandoned several times between 1779 and 1782 while Clark and the other Western commanders fought off Indian attacks and launched offensive operations against Indian towns and crops to remove those bases from which the Natives descended on the settlers. In the summer of 1780 Clark burned the Shawnee towns of Chillicothe and Piqua in what is now southern Ohio, and though sorely tempted to continue on from Piqua to Detroit, he aborted the advance due, once again, to concerns over supplies.
The interminable Indian attacks caused increasing hatred for Natives to fester among the American militiamen serving in and around Fort Pitt. Col. Brodhead succeeded in gathering 300 men for an attack on Coshocton, in what is now east central Ohio, in April 1781, and after the raid his men executed 15 helpless bound Native prisoners. The rest included some Natives of the Delaware tribe converted to Christianity—known as Moravians, for the German missionary sect to which they had converted—who actually were friendly to the Americans. But the militiamen had grown less and less inclined to distinguish between Christian and pagan Natives, or between friendly Delaware and hostile Shawnee. Brodhead had great trouble in preventing his men from killing the Moravian Delaware prisoners on the march back to Fort Pitt. Unfortunately for the Moravian Delaware the Americans would return to Ohio, with horrific repercussions for both sides.
In the East, British strategy shifted toward the Southern colonies and the war swept across the Carolinas and Virginia through 1780 and into 1781. That summer British general Charles Cornwallis marched his army to the end of the peninsula between the York and James Rivers in Virginia so that his men could be transported by sea to reinforce the garrison occupying New York. Washington, in conjunction with his French allies under Rochambeau and Lafayette and a French fleet from the West Indies, moved to snare Cornwallis on the narrow neck of land. They succeeded in trapping the enemy force and laid siege to them at Yorktown in the last days of September 1781. Surrounded, the British surrendered on October 19, in what turned out to be the climactic battle of the American Revolution.
Yorktown effectively ended the war in the East, but in the West the overall stalemate remained, punctuated by sudden violent attacks by Natives of various tribes who, for all the settlers on the frontier knew, could be anywhere at any time. Paranoia and hatred grew intense in the settlements and among the commanders tasked with protecting them, and they searched for a way to end the Indian threat in the West with one decisive blow.
*
The tiny village of Gnadenhutten, on the Tuscarawas River not far from Coshocton, had been founded just a few years earlier in 1772 by David Zeisberger, a Moravian missionary who had gone among the Delaware Indians and introduced them to Christianity. A tolerant farming village—the Delaware chief, Newcomer, had not adopted Christianity himself, but allowed his people to worship freely however they chose—Gnadenhutten found itself caught between two worlds in a time of high and violent tension. The Christian Indians there were objects of suspicion among both the other Natives and the White settlers. Though the Delaware at Gnadenhutten remained neutral in the war, frontier Whites believed that they sympathized with the hostile British‑allied Wyandot/Huron, sheltered them, and secured for them provisions for raids on American settlements.
Col. David Williamson led an expedition of Pennsylvania militiamen against Gnadenhutten from Fort Pitt in the autumn of 1781. The Gnadenhutten Indians learned of their approach and, though neutral, still wisely feared the Americans and retreated west to Sandusky. When Williamson and his men arrived they found the town all but abandoned. The few Natives remaining in the town Williamson took prisoner and carried back to Fort Pitt, but he freed them shortly after.
Once released, according to one source, the recent prisoners either killed or took captive a family named Montour in a settlement south of the fort. A second family was killed around the same time to the northwest of the fort at Buffalo Creek, near today's Kittanning, Pennsylvania, and one survivor of the attack reported that the leader of the raid was a Moravian Indian, thus pointing a finger squarely at the Natives whom Col. Williamson had chosen to release.
For his clemency, Col. Williamson faced harsh criticism and damage to his credibility as a military leader, one of the few tools aside from brutal coercion that a frontier commander had to enforce discipline in the backcountry. It seems that he determined not to open himself to such criticism again.
In February 1782, Williamson, with 160 men, again left Fort Pitt for Gnadenhutten. The force arrived at the village on March 8 and found the Moravian Delawares there returned from their sanctuary at Sandusky to harvest their crops. The Americans surrounded the village and rounded up the Indians, who insisted they were Christians and did not resist. Unsure of the Americans' intention toward them, the Indians were happy when told they were to be marched back to Fort Pitt as prisoners. But that night Col. Williamson and his men met around their campfires. Likely still stinging from the criticism the last time he had taken Indian prisoners back to the fort, Williamson told his men he would leave it up to them whether to kill the Indians there or to bring them back.
Possibly Williamson miscalculated. Possibly he hoped his men would vote to march the prisoners back, thus absolving himself from responsibility if further trouble came from the decision. But after the surprise uprisings led by Pontiac in 1763, and Lord Dunmore's War in 1774, and the grinding war on the frontier, the settlers in the Ohio Valley had come to regard the Natives of the region as scheming and dangerous, not people to trust or to turn one's back on. The frontier militiamen and their fathers and uncles and brothers had been fighting Indians there since the 1750s. They'd had their crops and cabins burned, their friends and families killed and scalped and carried away in the interminable clashes with the Natives. They hated Indians. Exacerbating the indictment, during the day in the village the soldiers discovered various articles and bits of clothing belonging to the American settlers killed earlier in the season. The militiamen voted for death.
The Delaware men and women had been held separately in two buildings. The Americans sent messengers to each and informed their occupants of the decision, derisively saying that if they were Christians they should use the hours they had left to prepare to die as Christians.
Through the night, across the fields and into the forest rose the sounds of hymns and psalms sung by the Gnadenhutten Delaware, who still did not violently resist. They kept singing as the sun came up on March 9, 1782, and members of their groups were dragged by ropes around their necks to two huts the militiamen had deemed "The Slaughter‑houses."
With horrifying frugality for their precious gunpowder, the men of Col. Williamson's troop declined to use their guns and instead knelt the Indians down one by one, laid their heads upon blocks, and one by one smashed their skulls with mallets. In addition to 28 Delaware men the Americans killed 29 women and 39 children this way.
As the executions progressed the others awaiting their turns continued to sing their hymns. When the deathblow fell on the third from the last the final two remaining ceased their singing. When these last were killed the Pennsylvanians burned the two death houses, then fired the remainder of the village, completing the worst and most egregious atrocity of the American Revolution.
Williamson's blood-stained militia returned to Fort Pitt. The men knew the Moravian Indians they'd murdered had found sanctuary with the Wyandot/Huron at Sandusky the first time they'd come, and saw there a continuing threat, and wanted to finish the job. The militia agreed to reassemble a few weeks later to march on Sandusky where any of their enemies who'd been missed at Gnadenhutten were sure to be found.
*
On May 20, 1782, a force of 483 American militiamen departed Fort Pitt, headed deep into the Ohio Country toward the British-allied Wyandot/Huron town at Sandusky. A company from the nearby settlement at Ten Mile (a place which would also go on to provide Euclid Township with some of its first permanent settlers, but that too is getting ahead of the narrative) joined the regiment two days later, and on May 26 in camp the force held elections for their officers. Col. Williamson, who'd led the recent Gnadenhutten expeditions, stood once again for command, but, in what must have been a troubling disappointment, the men chose William Crawford, a Continental Army colonel and friend of Gen. Washington from his boyhood home in Berkeley County, Virginia, as their leader. Col. Crawford, no doubt, felt edified; Col. Williamson, no doubt, rebuked and rejected. But as the troop crossed into the Ohio Country neither commander could have known that what surely seemed to one good luck and to the other bad could not have been more the opposite.
The soldiers marched for a week and arrived on the Sandusky Plain on the fourth of June 1782. The Wyandot/Huron knew they were coming, and the following day Native warriors sprang an ambush on the approaching American column. Fierce fighting continued during daylight, with the Americans suffering the loss of 20 percent of their force and nearly exhausting their ammunition, but when the sun set the Indians retreated to the forest, leaving Crawford's men in possession of the battlefield, where they slept clutching their muskets that night.
Thinking themselves victorious at sunset, the Americans awoke the next morning to discover the Wyandot/Huron not only surrounding them but also heavily reinforced. Finding themselves in danger when they had so recently believed they were masters of their enemies must have unnerved them. Depleted of manpower and low on provisions and powder the officers decided to withdraw.
They waited for night to return and began their march home under cover of darkness, leaving a few men behind to keep fires burning, hoping to fool the Wyandot/Huron into thinking they were still in camp. The ruse was overused and ineffective. The Wyandot/Huron discovered the retreating Americans and attacked in the dark. Discipline broke down among the soldiers and the retreat disintegrated into a panicked rout. Hungry for revenge for Gnadenhutten, the Indians pursued and slaughtered the Americans fleeing through the forest in the dark, massacring them for the sakes of the Moravian Delawares. Few of the militiamen survived the night.
The Wyandot/Huron took Col. Crawford alive, but were disappointed with their prize. They had hoped to capture Williamson and make him pay for the atrocity at Gnadenhutten. But in the desired commander's absence they decided to take their revenge on the one they had.
On the morning of June 11, 1782, Natives stripped Crawford naked and painted him black, an ominous symbol signifying one for whom death, and quite a horrible one, awaited.
They bound Crawford's hands and led him from the house in which they held him to a stake driven into the plain surrounded by piles of wood and kindling and tied him to it. The Indians avenged Gnadenhutten on Crawford with torture that lasted for hours. They first loaded muskets with blank powder charges and fired the searing, concussive blasts against his skin. They did this seventy times. They cut the colonel's ears off and branded him with hot irons. They scalped him, and Native women threw glowing coals on his skinned head. Finally they lighted the fire and burned him.
The Wyandot/Huron allowed a few of their American prisoners to live, to witness their revenge and to return to Fort Pitt with the tale of Crawford's death as a warning. One of these men was a key figure in the birth of Euclid Township.
Exhausted, and awaiting the results news of the victory at Yorktown would bring to peace negotiations in Europe, the rebel leaders ordered a halt to offensive operations on the western frontier. As bloody 1782 faded into autumn in the dangerous wilderness surrounding Fort Pitt the settlers there anxiously guarded their homes.
*
The Anglo‑American war ended in the West, for the most part, with the capture of Hamilton and Vincennes in 1779. In the East it ended at Yorktown in 1781. Britain fought the French and also the Spanish, who had opportunistically thrown in their lot with the Americans and declared war on Britain as well, wherever they found them across the globe for two more years.
But the war between the Americans and the Indians in the Ohio Country and throughout the West didn't end when the Whites' war did. Indian raids on isolated White settlements continued. White militias burned Indian towns and crops. It just went on and on.
The treaty of peace with Great Britain signed by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and John Jay on behalf of the United States in Paris on September 3, 1783, recognized a new sovereign country from Maine in the north to Georgia in the south and west to the Mississippi River. Besides recognizing the gains won by Clark's victories in the Ohio Valley, the British commissioners knew of the large number of settlers from the former colonies and French sympathetic to their American allies who already inhabited the region north of the Ohio. Maintaining their claim could only bring the British more trouble, and 19 years of war in 30 in America was enough.
Jonathan Trumbull's enthusiasm to the cause of independence and sustained contribution to the war effort brought him accolades and honors for the short remainder of his life following the war. George Rogers Clark got his bounty, three counties worth, on the Indiana side of the Ohio opposite the falls at Louisville. He built a cabin on the river and settled there, in what's now Clarksville, Indiana. After the peace the financiers and suppliers of the Revolution would seek new ventures for profit, and many of the lesser commanders would join them and the new American government in looking to the lands of the West to find it. The war had also brought many of the rank and file soldiers west for the first time, and in the rich lands they had glimpsed during their service they thought they saw opportunities of their own.
Thus in the late summer of 1783 the territory of Euclid Township changed hands once again and fell under the control, at least nominally, of the newborn United States. But that ultimate fate would remain far from certain for more than a generation. In 1783 it wasn't clear to anyone that Ohio would stay American, for long or even at all. The British had signed a piece of parchment but were still the most militarily powerful nation on Earth. They threatened just across the lake from Canada and kept their strategic garrison in Detroit, illegally and despite the treaty. Let anyone strong enough come and throw them out. And just like with Pontiac and his followers in 1763, the Whites' war ended but the Western Indians never stopped fighting, and they wouldn't in the Ohio Country for another decade and more. No, it wasn't clear to anyone in 1783 that Ohio would stay American. To settle the issue fully two more wars yet remained.
The information in Chapter Six is drawn from the following sources:
Axelrod, Alan. Chronicle of the Indian Wars. Prentiss Hall, 1993.
Creigh, Alfred. History of Washington County from its First Settlement to the Present Time. B. Singerly Printer, 1871.
First Virginia Charter, text. Department of Humanities, University of Groningen, The Netherlands website. http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1601‑1650/virginia/chart01.htm
James, James Alton. The Life of George Rogers Clark. AMS Press, 1970.
Myers, Paul W. Washington County, PA. Frontier Rangers, 1781-1782. Closson Press, 1987.
Roth, David M. Connecticut's War Governor: Jonathan Trumbull. Pequot Press, 1974.
Royal Proclamation—October 7, 1763, text. Yale University website. www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/proc1763.htm
Second Charter of Virginia, The; May 23, 1609. Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Law Library website. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/va02.asp
Waller, George M. The American Revolution in the West. Nelson-Hall. 1976.
Ohio Historical Society website
ohiohistory.org