Empires of Rebellion
The American Revolution was a series of wars over wild west frontiers
This is an installment of “Sestercenntenial Moments,” marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and its memory in our national life. For more on the background of the series, see here.
There were a lot of reasons for the government of His Britannic Majesty King George III to be happy with the Treaty of Paris signed on February 10, 1763, ending the Seven Years War (what we on these shores know as the French and Indian War). Besides bragging rights in a centuries-long rivalry, Great Britain made major territorial gains in the Americas, notably Canada and island possessions in the Caribbean. But in the eyes of many policymakers in London, perhaps the greatest prize of the war was financial—not in terms of payments or trade but rather in terms of savings: the hope was that Britain would no longer have to spend vast sums on military protection of its western North American frontier from threats from France and its Indigenous allies, or spend large sums to support (some would say bribe) their own.
The border problem was also a domestic one. Repeatedly over the course of the last century, Britain had to step in to sort out the messes created by overweening American colonists, who literally and figuratively pushed boundaries on the western frontier in places like the Ohio Valley. That’s why, later that year, the British government issued the Proclamation Line of 1763, prohibiting British settlement in a loosely Appalachian diagonal line running from Pennsylvania into Georgia.
The decade that followed were frustrating to British hopes. Part of the reason for that were Native peoples, who had their own agenda, ranging from Pontiac’s famed rebellion in the Great Lakes region to wily confederations like the Iroquois, who made the best of difficult hands, pushing back with force when they deemed it necessarily. Part of it was also incorrigible colonists like George Washington, who engaged in a gray market of real estate speculation on territory whose provenance was uncertain at best. For these people, the whole point of the French and Indian War was to open up territory, not close it off.
For a variety of reasons, then, military intervention was still deemed necessary. That’s why in the summer of 1774, the governor of Virginia, John Earl Murray, the 4th Lord Dunmore, led an expedition into the region where modern Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania converged to wage what was known as Lord Dunmore’s War against primarily Shawnee people of the region. On October 10, 1774, at the Battle of Point Pleasant, Dunmore’s forces won a decisive victory that would secure the region for the British and open the road for the settlement of the region (later the state) of Kentucky.
In the wider sweep of American history, Lord Dunmore’s War is little more than a footnote. But it’s also a revealing snapshot of a world in a revolutionary situation. When Lord Dunmore left the Virginia capital of Williamsburg to head to the frontier, political unrest in the colony was bubbling up but had not yet fully catalyzed. By the time he got back, a Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia, led by Virginians who no longer wished to be part of the British empire.
Dunmore returned to Williamsburg expecting to be greeted as a conquering hero. And he was—to some. But by this point, the political situation on the ground had changed. Richard Henry Lee, an informed observer of Virginia politics who two years later would be the one to initiate the call for the United States to declare its independence in Congress, said, “It is expected that much dislike will be taken at the Indian maneuvers of Lord Dunmore.” Lee argued settlers should bear the cost of the war themselves. In so doing, he invoked a long tradition of tension between eastern and western Virginia that had brought about Bacon’s Rebellion against the Williamsburg government in 1676.
Dunmore was formally thanked by the House of Burgesses, and he, in turn, expressed his own thanks. But he was deeply alarmed by the pace of rebellion that had accelerated in his absence. He informed the British secretary for the colonies, Lord Dartmouth, that the authority of the Virginia government was “entirely disregarded if not wholly overturned,” and that the Congress in Philadelphia “had set themselves up superior to all other authority,” leaving the official government of the colony “feeble.” He recommended blockading American ports and ceasing government functions under the Crown. That, he felt, would bring Virginia, and the rest of the colonies, to heel.
As we know, Dunmore was wrong. But he doubled down on his advocacy of a hard-line approach to the Revolution, detonating what might be termed the nuclear option a year later when he issued Lord Dunmore’s Declaration of November 7, 1775, when he offered freedom to enslaved people who left patriotic owners and joined the British army. There was probably no event that galvanized Virginians of multiple races more than that one, which, along with Lord Dunmore’s War, made plain the racial backdrop that was never far from the internecine white conflicts that drove the American Revolution.
Lord Dunmore’s War is also a reminder that the American Revolution was also an imperial war—insurgents seeking the power to form one empire from the body of another. Its success created what Thomas Jefferson famously called “an empire for liberty” in 1780, when it was still being waged. In our day, “empire for liberty” may sound like a contradiction in terms. But as always, freedom is always relative and contextual: freedom for whom to do what. We may rightly celebrate it, but also be mindful of its limits, costs, and ambiguities.