Return to Milestones Vol. 4, No.3
1755-75, EVENTS LEADING TO WAR
Until 1775, war had touched lightly at the mouth of the Beaver. Here the French had built their Indian allies a village, Saucon or Sawkunk, and here the Delawares had renounced their allegiance to France and returned to the British. Major Robert Rodgers had marched his famous Rangers through here in 1761 enroute from Detroit to Fort Pitt, and in 1764, Bouquet had marched his army on the way to the Muskingum to force the release of white prisoners.
By the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768 the Iroquois controlled Indians ceded all lands south of the Ohio as far as the Tennessee, with the understanding that no settlements were to be made beyond the Kanawha. This had not kept land-hungry frontiersmen and speculators from encroaching for neither Britain nor Virginia was willing (or had the necessary men and money) to control so large and attractive a prize.
Years of sporadic raids by both white and redmen brought about Dunmore's War in 1774. A series of raids by Chief Logan of the Mingos, embittered by the murder of defenseless women and children including his own wife, resulted in the battle of Point Pleasant and retreat of the defeated and embittered Shawnees to acknowledged Indian country across the Ohio.
As the Revolution began along the shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario, the Americans faced the Iroquois - still neutral, but certain to side with England. To the West there were the Shawnees, the Delawares, a Christian tribe inclined to be friendly, and the Wyandots on the southern shore of Lake Erie.
Complicating matters were the Mingos, displaced Senecas dedicated to driving the whites from Kentucky. Their fighting force was small but they could enlist hot blooded young Shawnees and Delaware braves.
Congressional policy was to maintain neutrality of all and its experienced representatives, Richard Butler, George Morgan, and William Wilson had accomplished this during the first two years in a series of treaties at Fort Pitt.
Temporarily the Americans in 1775 were in a strong position. The invasion of Canada had blocked the supply route to forts at Niagara and Detroit so the British avoided trouble on this front. At the Treaty of 1775 the formerly subservient Delawares told the Iroquois that they, the Delawares, owned the land between the Beaver and Cuyahoga Rivers. In 1776 the British still were not ready to support a general war on the frontier, and the Delawares, Shawnees and Wyandots resolved to preserve their neutrality on the promise by the Americans that the Ohio River would forever be a boundary between the whites and the redmen.
So shaky a truce could not last. While the British could supply arms and favorable trading terms, the Americans could offer only promises, frequently broken. Offsetting goodwill engendered by men of understanding such as Morgan, Butler and Wilson were the landhungry Virginians, known to the Indians as the Long Knives and the Surveyors, the "red flags" harbingers of lost hunting grounds.
By 1777 times changed. Col. Hamilton at Detroit received orders to en!ist all the tribes in a war on the settlements, and in the East, Burgoyne's grand plan so impressed the Iroquois that they took an active role in his campaign. Washington's problems in the East contributed to the general uneasiness, for in January of 1777, the 8th Pennsylvania, recruited to defend the frontier, was ordered to reinforce Washington's depleted regiments at Morristown.
A third Treaty of Fort Pitt in 1777 was a disaster; for renegade whites, enraged by the latest Indian raids, killed one of the emissaries of the Senecas. While the Governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia expressed quickly regrets, sent presents and promised to punish the perpetrators, nothing happened, for witnesses did not appear at the trial. More damaging to peace was the murder of two Indian hostages, Chief Cornstalk and his son, by Virginia Militia in December. Again the perpetrators were acquitted for lack of witnesses, and Indian anger, disillusionment and distrust mounted.
In the summer of 1777 Washington sent one of his best officers, General Edward Hand, to organize the defense of the frontier and to attempt an expedition against the Indians in their own country. Hand found the settlers unwilling to provide men or supplies and it was not until February 1778 that he led a force of 500 mounted militia toward the Cuyahoga where the British had stored arms. He got only as far as the Mahoning, where trigger happy troops killed several women and a small boy in the infamous "Squaw Campaign".
As the Indians stepped up the frequency of their attacks on women and children in lonely settlements, the best efforts of responsible men who knew and understood the Indians went for naught. With Valley Forge in the past and with the French Alliance becoming a reality in the late spring of 1778, the Board of War, sitting at York, and over Washington's objections, ordered two regiments of the Continental Line diverted to the West. The strategy of maintaining a string of small blockhouses along the wide frontier would be abandoned, and the enemy would now be attacked in his own towns. More important, regular troops, Continentals, were to take the lead.
Adjutant Thomas Pickering, in his letter to Washington of May 19, 1778, endorsed the strategy, but was critical of those asking for aid:
To repell the incursion of the Indians and reduce the disaffected to obedience, nothing in our opinion, will be effectual but a regular force under the direction of good officers. The inhabitants appear, many of them, to be a wild and ungovernable race, little less savage than their tawny neighbors, and by similar barbarities have in fact provoked them to revenge."
Not until 1794 would the tomahawk and musket be laid aside.
THE CAMPAIGN
The planned expedition against Detroit began in late May at Valley Forge when the two Continental regiments received their marching orders. The 8th Pennsylvania was raised in Westmoreland and Bedford counties in the fall of 1776 to protect the frontier, but when Washington became desperate for men it was ordered East and left Hannastown in mid-January of 1777, 684 strong. Poorly clothed, without tents or medical attention, 50 men, including both commanding officers, died on the 450 mile, mid-winter march (150 miles overmountains).
Three rifle companies of the 8th joined Morgan's Rifle Corps in time to take part in the victory at Saratoga which brought France into the war. The remaining four companies fought at Brandywine, where a rejection of a report by one of its patrols helped lose that battle, and suffered casualties at Paoli and Germantown.
The 13th Virginia was recruited in what is now southwestern Pennsylvania and northwestern West,Virginia in the Spring of 1777. Several companies were held at Fort Pitt but the others took part in the fight at Brandywine and Germantown. both regiments went through the ordeal of Valley Forge and the drills and discipline of Von Steuben.
Major Richard Campbell had the 13th on the road to Fort Pitt by late May, but Col. Brodhead was slow in getting the 8th under way because of lack of clothing. When the regiment did arrive at Carlisle on July 8, McIntosh had to send it up the Susquehanna Valley to protect settlers fleeing the Wyoming Valley massacre, and it did not arrive at Fort Pitt until September 10.
The expedition was six weeks behind schedule when McIntosh arrived at Fort Pitt in early August and learned that the Board of War, after Virginia refused to support the expedition, had changed the plans for 1778 to an harrassing foray against Indian towns in Ohio. He then began plans for a string of fortified supply bases between Fort Pitt and Erie, the first one to be at the mouth of Beaver Creek.
In the Treaty of Fort Pitt in September 1778 the Delawares gave permission for the Americans t6 move through their territory on the way to Detroit, possibly the first breach in the American promise to observe the Ohio as a boundary.
McIntosh had a supply trail, the Brodhead Road, cut along the southside of the Ohio to Beaver Creek and in late September the construction of the first fort built north of the Ohio, Fort McIntosh, was begun under the direction of Col. Cambray, a French artillery officer, Supplies, packhorses and militia were slow arriving, but by late October, McIntosh had the largest army to serve west of the mountains during the Revolution encamped around the fort site.
On November 4, when the beef cattle arrived, McIntosh left the completion of the fort to a company of the 13th Virginia and some artificers, and began the march along the Tuscarawas Trail with his army of 450 Continental's, 800 militia, a pack train of 690 horses and 500 cattle. Bad weather, undisciplined militia, and lack of forage slowed the march. It was 16 days before the column reached the Tuscarawas River.
With the enlistments of the Militia expiring and food supplies short, McIntosh began to erect Fort Laurens, garrisoned it with 180 men of the 13th under Col. John Gibson and returned to Fort McIntosh. Fort Laurens remained under seige most of the winter until McIntosh relieved it after a forced march of three days, and it remained the furthest outpost of the Continental Army until its evacuation in August of 1779.
Despite unhappy militia, lack of supplies, and wrangling subordinates, McIntosh had stablished and maintained two posts in enemy territory. At this time, he requested recall and was sent to the Southern theater where he took part in the attack on Savannah, and was captured at Charleston.
THE FIRST REGIMENT
After the Treaty of Peace in 1783, Congress, while opposed to the concept of a standing army, had the problem of protecting its northwestern frontier. After it rejected Washington's plea for an army of four regiments of infantry and one of artillery to protect New England's border with Canada, the Great Lakes from Oswego to Mackinac, the Ohio Valley, and the frontiers of Georgia and the Carolinas, Congress disbanded its Continental Army, except for 55 men at West Point and 25 at Fort Pitt.
The next day it "recommended" that Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania furnish a force of 700 men for one year's service, to be under the direction of the Secretary of War. This resolution of June 3, 1784 created the first national peacetime force in American history, the progenitor and lineal ancestor of the establishment that has continued to this time. The role of Fort McIntosh in this event is probably its most important contribution to history.
Born of a military policy based as much on land dispute, fear of standing armies and state interests, as on the defense needs of a nation, a force enlisted for service out of state and thus not a militia, not for long term service and not equipped by the states: this was the First American Regiment.
None of the states used its militia to fill its quota. Each man was recruited individually for Federal service, "liable to all the rules and regulations formed for the government of the late army of the United States, plus any such rules as Congress thought may be established."
There were to be six companies of infantry and one of artillery under the command of Lt. Col. Josiah Harmar, a Pennsylvanian with a fine war record, and also good political connections.
Only Pennsylvania furnished troops in 1784 and on December 4, the regiment arrived at Fort McIntosh to take up its duties at its first permanent post. These were the first professional soldiers and "the drill discipline and court martials of Von Steuben's manual were a new diet for these recruits who could find no other means of survival than to join the army for shelter, food and clothing." The greatest percentage of them had been born in either Ireland or Germany.
In 1785 Congress retained the 700 man limit but extended the term of service to three years and it became known simply as the First Regiment. When the framers of the Constitution did not forbid a standing army it was redesignated the 1st Infantry and in 1790, the 2nd Infantry was authorized.
The 1st Regiment had the nearly impossible task of defending a frontier extending from the upper reaches of the Allegheny to the upper Wabash. These troops did manage to slow down the conflict between settlers and Indians, monitored to some degree the pace of settlement, provided intelligence, and built a chain of forts without which the campaigns of the 1790s would have been delayed.
Poorly trained, equipped and led as these men often were, their behavior under fire was one of the few bright spots in the defeats of Harmar and St. Clair. When the militia fled they stood firm and took their losses, proving to Congress the necessity of "regulars". Thus when General Anthony Wayne took command and reorganized the army in his Legion, one of his first concerns was for his "two older regiments", the destitute men of the 1st and 2nd Infantry, 1st and 2nd Sub-Legions), and he incorporated the best of their men and officers into the other sub-legions.
With the coming of peace on the frontier the army dropped the name of "Legion" and consisted of four infantry regiments, plus cavalry, artillery and engineering units. In 1815 it was again reorganized, and the First Infantry was renamed the Third thus giving that regiment the distinction of being the oldest regiment in the Regular Army based on its first service.
THE TREATY
Both the United States and the state of Pennsylvania faced problems in the winter of 1784-85 which made the Treaty of Fort McIntosh a necessity.
At its first post war treaty with the Indians at Fort Stanwix in October of 1784, the United States Commissioners rejected Iroquois claims that they had been pressed into the war. The tribe was forced to cede all claims (except for a tract expressly reserved for them in both New York and Pennsylvania), as well as any to lands in the West. Not as payment, but as a present, the Indians received $5,000 in trade goods.
There were uncovered points in the treaty, however. Neither the Delawares, who occupied most of the Pennsylvania lands, nor any of the western tribes were represented, and their claims had to be settled. More importantly, the boundary between white and Indians in the vast lands of the Northwest Territory, which the United States was eager to open for settlement, had to be drawn.
In Pennsylvania, the legislature in 1780 had promised a donation of lands to its Revolutionary soldiers and had made provision for issuing them certificates equivalent to the drop in purchasing power of their compensation. These certificates were to be receivable for the purchase of any unlocated lands. In 1783, land west of the Allegheny River was set aside to facilitate the redemption of these certificates and provide money for promised bounties. Excepted from these lands were " reserved tracts" at the mouth of the Beaver and the Allegheny for future town sites. Beaver and Allegheny in 1785, and Erie in 1792 are the three planned towns of the Commonwealth.
Pennsylvania, however did not have title to these lands, the Penns having established the principle that the sole authority to purchase land was vested in the government, and Northwestern Pennsylvania had not been bought by the Commonwealth.
At Fort McIntosh in 1785 the United State Commissioners were General Richard Butler, Arthur Lee, and Colonel George Rogers Clark. Butler had served under Bouquet and Forbes had been an Indian Agent, had made the long march of the 8th Pennsylvania in 1777, was second in command to Morgan at Saratoga and Wayne at Stony Point, and was the first American officer on the ramparts at Yorktown.
Lee, a fourth generation member of the famous Lees of Virginia had been one of the United States Commissioners who had negotiated the French Alliance.
Clark, one of the founders of Kentucky, was the outstanding military figure on the frontier because of his incredible march and capture of Vincennes in 1779, a victory which won the West for the Americans.
The terms of the Treaty of Fort McIntosh in January. 1785 were imposed rather than negotiated. The Indians: Delawares, Wyandots, Chippewas and Ottawas; were told that France had renounced all claims, that Britain had not stipulated anything in their favor, and, since they had taken sides against the United States, they were to come under its protection.
The Indians had come to Fort McIntosh with great reluctance, but finally 400 men, women and children were assembled, and their chiefs responded to the American officials. They cited the Treaty of 1768 making the Ohio River the boundary for whites and Indians, and reminded the Americans of their solemn pledge at the Treaty of Fort Pitt in 1776 when the Americans promised that the Ohio was forever to be a boundary between them.
Commissioner Butler's reply dashed all hopes:
"The details of these claims and titles may appear to be of consequence among yourselves. But as to us and to the business of the Council Fire which have called you, they have no relation ... because we claim this Country by Conquest ... it is of this it behooves you to have a clear and distinct comprehension."
To the Indians it was an incomprehensible speech. They did not consider themselves conquered for they had wiped out two militia expeditions and destroyed a convoy of desperately needed ammunition sent up river from New Orleans. Five years later they were to inflict one of the most humiliating defeats in the history of American arms on General Arthur St. Clair, a defeat in which Butler was to lose his life.
The articles of the treaty were few; providing for Indian hostages until all white had been returned; for the acknowledgement by the Indians that they were under the protection of the United States, and that the United States would take over the border forts, Detroit among them, something not realized until the War of 1812.
Article III was the most important, for in it, the Indians ceded their rights to nearly two thirds of Ohio:
"The boundary line between the United States and the Wyandot and Delaware nations, shall begin at the mouth of the River Cayahoga, and thence run up said river to the portage between that and the Tuscarawas branch of the Muskingum; thence down said branch to the forks of the crossing place above Fort Lawrence; then westerly to the portage of the Big Miami which runs into the Ohio, at the mouth of which stood the fort which was taken by the French in one thousand seven hundred and fifty two; thence along said portage to the Great Miami or Orme River, and down southeast side of same to its mouth, thence along the south shore of Lake Erie to the mouth of the Cayahoga where it began."
The fact that other Indian nations (the Miamis and others who also occupied this land), were not present at the treaty was ignored. In May, 1785, Congress passed landmark legislation, the Land Ordinance of 1785, establishing the system of pre-surveyed sale of public lands which made possible the settlement of the Northwest Territory.
In September of 1785, survey teams, based at and guarded by troops from fort McIntosh began to run the Seven Ranges in Ohio. The National Park Service has installed a monument on the Pennsylvania-Ohio line in Ohioville Borough marking the point from which the boundaries of most of the western states and territories have been measured.
The commissioners for Pennsylvania then gained clear title to all of Northwestern Pennsylvania from Pine Creek near Williamsport to the Ohio line. The Delawares and Wyanclots, (the latter included because earlier they had ceded this land to the Delawares), were assured they were now included in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, and for permitting the Americans to "buy" this land twice were given $2,000 in trade goods.
Already forced by the whites and the Iroquois out of their ancestral grounds in Eastern Pennsylvania, the Delawares now were to give up the forests and streams of Northwestern Pennsylvania, land in which they and their fathers had hunted for generations without denying this right to others.
This information, in somewhat different form, will be inscribed on plaques to be placed at the site of Fort McIntosh so that visitors may be informed-of the significance of the happenings at the fort.