LORD DUNMORE commanded Virginia forces and led them to victory in a war to defend the colony against attacks by a Shawnee-led Indian confederacy. To the casual observer, achieving a defensive objective by pursuing an offensive strategy may seem paradoxical, but it explains Virginia’s actions in Dunmore’s War. The colony’s last royal governor planned and conducted an invasion of an opponent’s homeland that achieved a victory not measured by the numbers of enemy combatants killed and noncombatants slain, areas of land ceded, reparations obtained, or the monetary value of a ruined economy, but by the formal recognition of an established border, a promise to cease cross-border incursions, return of captured property, and repatriation of prisoners. The Virginia colony fought a limited war for limited defensive objectives, at the end of which it offered the Indians generous peace terms. While such a view runs counter to those found in some recent scholarship, which contend that the war was nothing more than an unjustified land-grab, it should not come as a surprise. The character of the outcome reflected that of the limited wars fought in Europe during the same period.
Dunmore’s War not only reflected eighteenth-century concepts of limited conflict but a more timeless reason the Virginians went to war in 1774. Among lists of governmental responsibilities, security of borders and protection of citizens and their property from foreign invaders have always ranked high. With confidence in the validity of the treaties that defined the Ohio River as the boundary between the area open to settlement and Indian country, the colonists considered the presence of every hunting party on the south bank as a treaty violation. Given the clash of cultures and frequency of such incidents, encounters turned violent until both sides resorted to armed conflict to settle their differences. Virginians justified their reaction as a response to an unjust aggressor.
From April to August 1774, Shawnee and Mingo military operations forced thousands of settlers to abandon their backcountry homes and farms and flee to the safety of less vulnerable areas. Those who remained risked all as they lived and worked in constant fear of attack. Defensive measures, such as conducting patrols and building forts in which settlers took refuge, afforded a degree of protection but did not stop depredations. As the situation grew more desperate, Governor Dunmore offered to lead an offensive against the Indians. He argued that doing so would achieve a more favorable military outcome, cost less blood and treasure, and take less time than staying on defense. Forcing the enemy to fight in his own country rather than in the colony provided the Virginians the motivation for invading Shawnee country, not the acquisition of territory.
Despite the prowess that Indian warriors exhibited in combat, Virginia militiamen went to war confident in their own abilities. Although the two forces shared some apparent similarities in technique, such as men taking cover to return fire, the militiamen did not simply copy fighting methods of their Indian opponents. Warriors usually attacked only when they held such an advantage that guaranteed their success in a battle of annihilation. When they did not possess such an advantage at the outset, they created it as the fight developed in order to finish it on their terms. For example, Indian braves typically retreated before a numerically superior army and traded ground for enemy lives until the opposing force was either lured to its destruction or so weakened that it retreated.
The Virginia forces developed tactics of their own, known as skirmishing or bush-fighting, to counter their opponents’ advantages. The soldiers of the backcountry combined techniques learned from native warriors with the British army’s petite guerre doctrine as adapted to the terrain and enemy found in North America and integrated the use of the rifle. A uniquely European contribution to this style of warfare, the rifle provided an individual soldier with a weapon of greater range and accuracy than the standard musket. Originally developed for hunting, rifle technology’s military application caused a further revision in the tactics Virginia soldiers had honed in previous conflicts.
When on defense, the militiamen relied on aimed fire more than massed volleys but employed both with effect. When on offense, the Virginians ideally sought to force opposing warriors to either yield ground and disperse or left them no alternative but to attack at a disadvantage against the disciplined firepower of cohesive units. When executed properly, the militia tactic is described by some historians as essentially acting not on the strategic offense but the tactical defense, albeit in a very basic sense. The differences and similarities in the styles of fighting employed by both combatants were demonstrated at the Battle of Point Pleasant. That decisive tactical victory made possible the strategic victory reflected in the terms of the Treaty of Camp Charlotte.
The doctrine of acting on the strategic offense but tactical defense is also evident in the final phase of Dunmore’s War at Pickaway Plains. The Virginia army marched deep into enemy country, threatening the Shawnees’ principal towns with destruction, thereby demonstrating the strategic offense. The soldiers then built Camp Charlotte and prepared to fight from behind sturdy entrenchments on the tactical defense if the Shawnees chose to oppose them. Given two equally unacceptable options, either abandoning their towns or attacking the fortified camp, the Shawnees agreed to terms dictated by Dunmore.
The actual peace terms did not match those perceived in many current secondary accounts of Dunmore’s War. What the Treaty of Camp Charlotte did not require of the Indians is of equal significance. Dunmore neither imposed harsh terms on nor demanded punitive concessions from the defeated enemy. Instead, he required the Shawnees to accept the cessions negotiated by the Six Nations and Crown representatives in 1768. Although sounding harsh to present-day audiences, Dunmore’s requirement for the Shawnees and Mingoes to surrender hostages while waiting for a formal treaty was a conventional practice in Indian diplomacy. The holding of hostages guaranteed the Shawnee and Mingo representatives would attend the council to negotiate the formal peace treaty at a later date.
The popular perception that Dunmore’s expedition had great success in enlisting volunteers with the promise of generous land bounties is also incorrect. In the accounts of those who volunteered, the desire to acquire Indian land was conspicuously absent. In contrast, soldiers volunteered primarily to serve and defend their country of Virginia. Many also cited the desire to prevent or avenge the murder and abduction of loved ones and neighbors, as well as the destruction of their homes and loss of property, at the hands of Shawnee and Mingo raiders. Given such motivations, it is remarkable that Dunmore’s army achieved success without the troops resorting to the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants or large-scale destruction of Shawnee and Mingo towns and cornfields.
A related fallacy about Dunmore’s War that has appeared in some recent scholarship holds that recruitment for the expedition was not difficult given the allure of acquiring land and plunder. The records indicate that some officers experienced difficulty in raising their units. In such cases, captains combined understrength companies to form one with sufficient numbers to enter service. In some communities, militia officials resorted to filling their vacant ranks by a draft. Others sent recruiting agents to communities in other colonies, primarily North Carolina and Maryland, to seek individual volunteers. Counties not included in the call-up also responded to the governor’s call. Dunmore, Bedford, Culpeper, and Pittsylvania all raised companies for the expedition as well as to defend neighboring Fincastle and Botetourt Counties. Clearly, recruiting troops to serve in Dunmore’s War was more difficult than is often asserted.
Although the militia of the western Virginia counties performed reasonably well in general during Dunmore’s War and at the Battle of Point Pleasant in particular, it displayed weaknesses that cannot be ignored. Service in the militia on the frontier was markedly different from that in more secure areas of the colony. By necessity, the soldiers of the backcountry took their obligations to attend training assemblies and otherwise participate more seriously than their counterparts in the Tidewater, for example, because of the proximity of an actual threat. Living in communities vulnerable to attack, by necessity they received more practical experience in being called out for alarms or ordered into active service for short, and sometimes frequent, periods of active service. Many of them volunteered to serve multiple tours of duty during the emergencies of 1774.
Although more proficient than the militia companies that mustered for one day every calendar quarter, the militia of the frontier counties remained part-time citizen-soldiers and not professionals. Breaches of discipline among militiamen, such as desertion on the expedition, did not result in the same severe punishment inflicted on British regulars for similar offenses. Such weakness notwithstanding, the militia establishments of the western counties had a core of men who demonstrated at least a quasi-professional level of proficiency and could be depended on in emergencies. Throughout the Revolutionary War, many veterans of Dunmore’s War volunteered for service in the Continental Army, and as members of the militia defended their communities and responded to countless local alarms, and served in expeditions against British forces and their Indian allies.
To the objective observer of Dunmore’s War, the righteousness of each side’s cause turns on the different perceptions of the provisions of the Treaties of Hard Labor, Fort Stanwix, and Lochaber, negotiated between 1768 and 1770, as well as the Cherokee Grant of 1772. They were negotiated in good faith by representatives of the British Crown and native peoples, ratified by King George III, and of benefit to the colony, and Virginians generally accepted them as valid agreements. Although not a principal party, Virginia commissioners usually, but not always, succeeded in having the Crown’s negotiators consider the colony’s interests. In contrast, the Shawnees rejected the Ohio as the boundary and maintained that parties who spoke on their behalf at the treaty councils did not represent their interests. This distinction is often missing from recent studies of the conflict and its causes, which tend to focus on the Shawnee position.
Not unlike the Virginia colony’s leaders, Shawnee and Mingo war chiefs took responsibility for the protection of their people and the safeguarding of their nations’ territory, both homeland and hunting ground. Vacant land that Virginians may have legitimately viewed as open to settlement and improvement from their perspective and moved to occupy, Indians also rightly looked on as an invasion of an area vital to their people’s economy and survival. Crossing the Ohio to raid Virginia settlements, from the Shawnee point of view, may be likened to their Big Knife opponents’ conducting a defensive war with an offensive strategy and not waging one of aggression. From their respective positions, each side in Dunmore’s War perceived its actions as right. The conditions that contribute to these divergent perceptions must be equally considered in order to more fully understand the conflict.
Deconstruction of the events to a struggle between the two primary combatant entities results in simplistic explanations. Dunmore’s War involved more participating polities than the colony of Virginia on one side and the Shawnees, with some Mingo allies, on the other. It was much more complex, and the complexity had important effects, as has been shown.
Relations between the British Empire and its colonies on one side and Indians on the other were likewise intricate and transcend the events of 1774. For example, the sometimes-contentious relationship that existed between the various native peoples of the Ohio region and the Six Nations of Iroquois, as well as the Cherokees, are too significant to ignore. Likewise, those that existed between Great Britain and its colonies in general, as well as between the colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania in particular, are important to the study of the causes, conduct, legacy, and memory of Dunmore’s War.
The Iroquois Confederacy, or Six Nations, was an essential British ally that influenced the situation on the frontier as it pursued its national interests. Guyasuta, the confederacy’s viceroy for the Ohio area, exercised direct leadership of the Six Nations’ immigrant community known as the Mingoes and represented the confederacy’s authority and suzerainty over other native peoples, including dependent nations such as the Delaware, and those under its dominion by right of conquest, like the Shawnees. The viceroy worked closely with the Indian Department’s Alexander McKee to further the mutual interests of the Crown and the central council at Onondaga.
The Iroquois Six Nations had benefitted from its cession of Shawnee hunting ground to the British in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. Amid growing dissatisfaction with Virginia’s settlement of the ceded area, the possibility of a Shawnee-led confederation of Ohio-area Indians forming, and attempts to alienate the Mingoes from the authority of the central council at Onondaga, the Six Nations had little sympathy for the Shawnees in their dispute with Virginia. Through the efforts of Guyasuta and representative deputies the council sent to support him, the Six Nations exerted its political, diplomatic, and military power and influence to isolate the Shawnees from potential Indian allies and resolved the situation in its own favor. The Iroquois ordered member and dependent nations not to join the fight against the Virginians. The Mingo faction that followed Logan to war arguably might have refrained from its alliance and remained neutral if not motivated to avenge the Yellow Creek massacre.
The Six Nations domination of the native peoples of the region meant that the Shawnees essentially fought without allies. Various bands of Delaware warriors not only declined to join with the Shawnees but were ready to follow Chief White Eyes when he offered Dunmore their services as scouts and auxiliaries on the expedition. The Iroquois’ action guaranteed the Shawnee defeat, kept Dunmore’s War limited, and prevented a wider conflict from erupting between their British allies and a potential pan-Indian confederacy.
As the Six Nations of Iroquois had assumed the mantle of the most powerful Indian polity in the north, the Cherokees represented its counterpart in the south. Like the Iroquois, Cherokee leaders had also acted in their nation’s interest when they ceded land the Shawnees considered their hunting ground to Virginia. Notwithstanding any resentment the transaction caused, the Shawnees also sought Cherokee assistance for their fight against the Virginians. When some vocal leaders urged military action in reprisal for the murder of a tribal member by an unapologetic settler, the Shawnees stood to benefit by having numbers of Cherokee warriors joining them in the fight against the Virginians; whether as allies or cobelligerents made little difference.
Under the leadership of Oconostota and Colonel William Preston, respectively, Cherokee and Virginia representatives engaged in meaningful long-distance diplomacy that averted war. Assisted by Indian Department deputy superintendents and facilitated by well-intentioned traders acting as intermediaries, the two sides resolved their differences without armed force. By refraining from the fight against the Virginians, the Cherokees further isolated the Shawnees and protected their own interests. Like that of the Six Nations, although more benign, Cherokee involvement had a significant influence on the outcome of Dunmore’s War. An important aspect of this conclusion is that other Indian polities—namely, the Six Nations and the Cherokees—played a significant role in the Virginia victory, although not as combatants.
Lord Dunmore had assumed the royal governorship of Virginia in 1771, not long after repeal of the Townshend Acts, the second of what many colonists viewed as unconstitutional taxation laws imposed on them. The period that followed repeal began what historians describe as the “quiet time” before the Revolutionary War. Governor Dunmore took advantage of the political climate and pursued policies that at times conflicted with those of his superiors in the British government. He proposed policies and signed legislative acts that many Virginians viewed as beneficial to the colony. Although he also acted in his own self-interest, Dunmore lived in an era when using one’s public office for personal gain did not necessarily constitute corruption or wrongdoing. Like many of his prominent Virginia contemporaries, he sought the acquisition of land for his own and his family’s benefit. Accusing Dunmore of extending Virginia’s boundaries solely for personal gain is not only inaccurate but judges his actions by the standards other than that of the time in which he lived. Virginians in general perceived many of Dunmore’s policies, especially those that promoted settlement of western territories within the boundaries defined by Virginia’s royal charter and valid treaties, as in the best interest of the colony entrusted to his administration.
The boundary dispute between Virginia and Pennsylvania is often explored only with regard to the Indian conflict of 1774 as an example of Dunmore’s aggression. Both colonies claimed the strategic Forks of the Ohio and surrounding area in the period preceding and during the Revolutionary War. Although Pennsylvania had moved more quickly to develop the area as part of its Westmoreland County, Dunmore led a belated but effective effort to add it to Virginia’s Augusta County. The area not only had tracts of land for speculation and development but was an important location for control of the lucrative trade with the Indians of the Ohio Country. The Grand Ohio Company’s plan to establish the inland province of Vandalia as the fourteenth English colony further complicated the competing claims of the two older colonies. Much of the land the proposed new colony encompassed fell within the area granted by Virginia’s royal charter. If any aspect of Dunmore’s War may be characterized as a land grab it is the establishment of Vandalia by the Grand Ohio Company for the benefit of its London and Philadelphia investors, not Lord Dunmore. The governor countered by establishing county court and militia apparatus in the area. The competing interests and biases of each colony’s partisans are reflected in the primary source documents written by these participants.
Dunmore’s War was more than an armed conflict between the colony of Virginia and the Shawnee nation of Indians. Virginia viewed the conflict as a defensive war to protect its people and borders, including legally acquired land, against foreign invaders. The colony achieved victory with a limited offensive operation conducted to achieve limited objectives. The Six Nations of Iroquois, the Cherokees, and the colony of Pennsylvania had all acted in their own respective interests, and each made significant contributions to the causes, course, and outcome of Dunmore’s War. The last conflict of the colonial era may have been limited, but it was nonetheless a complex and significant prelude that helped shape the events that followed.