Kentucke's Frontiers

3. Revolutions

3. Revolutions As the Boonesborough convention met and Henderson consolidated as much power as he could, Lord Dunmore faced the final days of his governorship. In May 1775, the Virginia Convention openly expressed sympathy for the rebellion that had erupted in Massachusetts. In June, George Washington accepted a post as military commander of a new continental rebel army. The security of Virginia’s royal government seemed to be unraveling monthly. Seeking military support, Dunmore ordered his troops to abandon the western outposts that secured the Virginia backcountry from Indian attacks and return to Williamsburg, and the governor retreated to a British ship at the mouth of the James River, where he plotted how to retain control of Virginia. With family names such as Washington, Jefferson, Lee, Henry, and Randolph leading the anti-­ imperial outcry, Dunmore declared martial law and gathered an army of some three hundred loyalists and soldiers. Among them were a handful of runaway slaves who had shown up at the governor’s mansion in April. Their presence inspired Dunmore to take a more drastic measure , and in November, he proclaimed “all indentured Servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free that are able • Kentucke’s Frontiers 64 • and willing to bear Arms, they joining His Majesty’s Troops as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper Sense of their Duty, to His Majesty’s Crown and Dignity .” By the end of the month, over eight hundred had joined the “Ethiopian Regiment” and occupied Norfolk, and another thousand sought refuge there. With labels declaring “Liberty to Slaves” attached to their uniforms, the soldiers posed a difficult ideological problem for slave-­ owning rebels in the Virginia Convention , whose response was to threaten runaways either with being shipped to the West Indies for sale or, if necessary, with death. By the end of 1775, with weakened western defenses and a Native Ameri­ can threat on the western borders, and an enlarging and increasingly African Ameri­ can army congregating in Norfolk , white Virginians faced a racial context to their rebelliousness against the crown that had not existed a year prior. The peril of slave insurrection joined with the terror of Indian warfare , both armed and encouraged by the British. Before Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, Ameri­ can colonials had actually interpreted the racial divide in quite different terms. Many whites, such as Massachusetts’s James Otis in 1764, had imagined the colonies populated by millions of “good, loyal, and useful subjects, White and Black,” assuming a loyalty on the part of their slaves as the threat of British-­ backed Native Ameri­ cans loomed large. By the time of publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in January 1776, however, the unholy triumvirate was unmistakable: “There are thousands, and tens of thousands , who would think it glorious to expel from the continent that barbarous and hellish power which hath stirred up the Indians and Negroes to destroy us.” Months later, Thomas Jefferson ’s Declaration of Independence reiterated the theme as one of his complaints against George III: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Thousands of white Virginians, some living in Kentucke, fully understood what Jefferson meant as they listened to the Decla- Revolutions • 65 ration being read across the commonwealth. Indians posed an external threat, and blacks posed an internal one. Men, women, and children who crossed into trans-­ Appalachia in the years of the Revolutionary War carried the anxieties and anger of this racialized fear with them. The Emergence of George Rogers Clark Within this heightened racial atmosphere, the peopling of Kentucke proceeded. The expedition to clear the Wilderness Road had ushered Susannah Boone into Kentucke at the beginning of the summer of 1775. By September, Daniel Boone had returned to North Carolina to escort a new party of wives and families westward , including his own family and the McGarys. By the end of the month, another group of family settlers, led by Richard Callaway , reached Boonesborough, followed closely by Squire Boone and his family. The arrival of women and children in Kentucke marked a significant shift in the settlement process. Previously, men had been free to hunt and survey; if they returned to a settlement that had been destroyed by Indian...