Background
Fincastle County existed as a political entity for only four years, between late 1772 and the end of 1776. The county covered all of present-day Kentucky, much of what is now southern West Virginia, and more than a dozen current Virginia counties. In the 1770s, this part of the Ohio River Valley was inhabited and claimed by the Shawnee, Cherokee, and Iroquois as well as by Virginians and Pennsylvanians. Parliament’s Proclamation of 1763 had ruled that the valley belonged to Native peoples, but a series of semilegal treaties and land grants had subsequently allowed colonists to encroach on the region, leading to a conflict known as Dunmore’s War in the summer and autumn of 1774.
Following the political upheaval caused by the Boston Port Act and the other Coercive Acts passed by Parliament as punishment for the December 1773 Boston Tea Party, white male freeholders met in committees throughout Virginia in the summer of 1774 to appoint representatives to the Virginia Convention and instruct them through resolutions such as the Fairfax Resolves. Enmeshed in Dunmore’s War, Fincastle and other western counties did not hold meetings and write resolutions prior to the opening of the first Virginia Convention on August 1, 1774, in Williamsburg.
Fincastle County’s first meeting and resolutions came at the behest of a different political body, the First Continental Congress. Meeting in Philadelphia from September 5 to October 26, 1774, the First Continental Congress produced the Continental Association, a nonimportation, nonexportation, and nonconsumption agreement meant to pressure Parliament into repealing the Boston Port Act and other problematic policies. The association’s eleventh article stipulated that colonists in every town and county should choose a committee to identify community members who violated the association and publish their names in a local gazette so they could be socially and economically ostracized. When Fincastle County freeholders finally met on January 20, 1775, they did so under the auspices of the Continental Association to set up an enforcement mechanism.
The Fincastle Resolutions
Glanville, the leading scholar on the Fincastle Resolutions, argues that the meeting of freeholders probably occurred at James McGavock’s tavern in Fort Chiswell. Attendees chose an enforcement committee of fifteen men and wrote to Virginia’s delegates to the First Continental Congress. The prominent settlers, speculators, and military men who comprised the Fincastle County Committee included Major Arthur Campbell, Captain William Campbell, Colonel William Christian, Captain Walter Crockett, the Reverend Charles Cummings, Lieutenant William Edmondson, Major William Ingles, Captain Thomas Madison, Captain James McGavock, Captain John Montgomery, Colonel William Preston, Captain William Russell, Captain Evan Shelby, Captain Daniel Smith, and Captain Stephen Trigg. The author of the address is uncertain, but it was delivered to Purdie’s Virginia Gazette, likely by Christian, who is known to have been in Williamsburg shortly before the Gazette published the document on February 10, 1775.
These men were used to war. Six of them—William Campbell, Christian, Crockett, Ingles, Russell, and Shelby—had fought in Dunmore’s War, and Russell was one of the officers present for the drafting of the Fort Gower Resolves. The remaining nine committeemen had defended their settlements from potential Shawnee and Cherokee raids during the war. Most of the committeemen also participated in land speculation. The majority were surveyors, scouts, or grantees, and Glanville called Christian and Preston “first-rank land speculators” who worked closely with Virginia’s royal governor, John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore.
The Fincastle committeemen were also political leaders with strong connections throughout the colony. Trigg and Christian served as Fincastle County’s representatives in the House of Burgesses, and Preston had served as a burgess for nearby Augusta County from 1765 to 1770. Crockett, Ingles, McGavock, Montgomery, and Russell were justices of the peace for Fincastle County. Christian and Madison were brothers-in-law of Patrick Henry, the renowned political radical who was one of Virginia’s seven delegates to the First Continental Congress; William Campbell and Russell also became Henry’s brothers-in-law within the decade.
The Fincastle Resolutions reflect the colonial violence and “land hunger,” in the words of historian Richard O. Curry, that permeated the committeemen’s lives. The address began with an apology to the congressional delegates for the late response, blaming this tardiness on the need to “chastise” the Shawnee for the “many murders and depredations they have committed against us.” The committee members expressed profuse gratitude for the delegates’ “noble efforts for reconciling the Mother County and the Colonies, on rational and constitutional principles” and wholeheartedly agreed to abide by the Continental Association. Like other colonists who drafted similar resolves, the members of the Fincastle Committee positioned themselves as loyal British subjects, noting their “worthy Governour” and their “love and duty to our lawful sovereign George III.”
The Fincastle Resolutions aligned with many continental objectives and norms but had obvious local motives. When discussing the specific injustices that Parliament had committed, the resolutions did not mention the punishment of Boston, taxes, or trade restrictions, all of which appeared prominently in other county resolutions. Instead, the committeemen elaborated on their personal experiences in leaving Great Britain to explore “this then uncultivated wilderness” and in fighting Native peoples for land. The committee members wrote of the “fatigue and dangers” they faced in hopes of “enjoying those rights and liberties which had been granted to Virginians and were denied us in our native country.” They raged at Parliament’s attempts to “strip us of that liberty and property” found in America—that is, the British government’s refusal to explicitly allow land grants in and around Fincastle County. Even compared to the resolutions passed by the men of other western counties who participated in Dunmore’s War—Pittsylvania County (January 26), Augusta County (February 22), and Botetourt County (March 11)—the Fincastle Resolutions are notably local in their parsing of imperial grievances.
Like the Fort Gower Resolves, the Fincastle Resolutions ended with a declaration that Fincastle men were ready and willing to take up arms in defense of their liberty and property:
“But if no pacifick measures shall be proposed or adopted by Great Britain, and if our enemies will attempt to dragoon us out of these inestimable privileges which we are entitled as subjects, and to reduce us to a state of slavery, we declare, that we are deliberately and resolutely determined never to surrender them to any power on earth, but at the expense of our lives.
These are our real, though unpolished sentiments, of liberty and loyalty, and in them we are resolved to live and die.”
The truth of that declaration was soon put to the test. Dunmore had already determined that county committees were “Terrors” whose resolves constituted “dangerous Measures.” Though many Fincastle County residents became Loyalists, hoping for the protection of the British army against their Native neighbors, the majority of the committeemen fought on behalf of the liberty and land they held so dear.
