How Dunmore Won a War but Lost the Fight

This week we’re marking the anniversary of an obscure treaty that ended an equally obscure war that proved to be one of the most consequential conflicts in early American history. 

It’s not surprising, as Dunmore’s War, which our contributor Glenn Williams calls the last conflict of the colonial era, was fought in the shadow of the American Revolution. By the time it was concluded with the Treaty of Camp Charlotte on October 19, 1774, the First Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia and revolutionary rumbles were shaking Britain’s thirteen North American colonies.

The epicenter of the war was the land west of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Augusta County, which at the time stretched from the Shenandoah Valley to Pittsburgh—a hotly contested area also claimed by Pennsylvania—and Fincastle County, which stretched from Southwestern Virginia through parts of today’s West Virginia into what is now Kentucky. 

This land was technically supposed to be off-limits to white settlement thanks to King George III’s Proclamation of 1763, which reserved the territory for Indigenous nations. But a series of diplomatic maneuvers by both Native nations and Virginia officials pushed the settlement boundary further west. White settlers moved into the fertile lands south of the Ohio River, where they came into conflict with the Shawnee and Mingo who had long hunted the area. 

Simmering tensions exploded after the Yellow Creek massacre, when white settlers murdered thirteen Mingo, leading to raids against backcountry settlements by Mingo and Shawnee warriors. This led to pleas to Virginia’s last Royal governor, John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, for military action. He responded by raising a force to march west.

The war provided Dunmore with a brief respite from his increasingly tense relations with rebellious Virginians after he had dissolved the General Assembly the previous spring for protesting Parliament’s Intolerable Acts punishing Boston for the Boston Tea Party. But even as tensions on the frontier flared and Dunmore gathered his forces, the colony was on the road to revolution, as disaffected Virginians adopted a series of county resolutions protesting the usurpation of their rights. The first of Virginia’s Revolutionary Conventions took place in August. 

The conflict came to a head on October 10 at the Battle of Point Pleasant at the confluence of the Ohio and Great Kanawha rivers, where the Virginia militia defeated a confederation of Shawnee and Mingo warriors. The Treaty of Camp Charlotte was agreed to on October 19, 1774, opening modern-day Kentucky to settlement and beginning the inexorable march of white settlers into the Ohio River Valley.

The war should have been an unalloyed success for Dunmore. After all, he had given frontier settlers exactly what they wanted—the freedom to move into a vast swath of the Ohio Country. But even as the victorious troops made their way home, other forces were brewing. Dunmore and his militia officers stopped at Fort Gower, a crude stockade at the junction of the Hocking and Ohio rivers, in early November. There they likely heard news of the Continental Congress and the continued stand-off between Britain and Boston. According to Daniel Morgan, one of the officers present, “We as an army immediately formed ourselves into a society, pledging our honors to assist the Bostonians, in case of a serious breach.”

The result was the Fort Gower Resolves, in which the officers, while still professing their loyalty to the king and their gratitude to Dunmore, declared not only their willingness to protect the colonies’ “just Rights and Privileges” but also their military readiness to do so. It marked the first time colonists announced their willingness to take up arms against Britain. The Revolution would begin the following April. By June, relations with the colonists would be completely ruptured, and Dunmore was forced to flee Williamsburg.