The Fort Gower Resolves

"Overlooking the Backtrail" by Doug Hall. (DougHallGallery.com)

"We will bear the most faithful Allegiance to his Majesty King George III, whilst his Majesty delights to reign over a brave and free People."

The months before the first shots of the Revolution were full of resolutions and declarations, but only one of them was made by men in arms. The leaders of a victorious militia army, full of bravado on their way back from the frontier, made a statement that was hard to ignore. Like the other declarations, it insisted on American rights while professing continued loyalty to the King. That loyalty was clearly conditional, however, making the document read like a not-so-veiled military threat.

Virginia, Britain’s oldest and biggest American colony, had charter territory reaching all the way to the Mississippi. While the colony made a genuine effort to respect Indian rights by barring western settlement on land not acquired by treaty, individual settlers ignored these restraints. In 1768, the Treaty of Fort Stanwix extended the settlement line to the Ohio River and opened what are now Kentucky and trans-Appalachian West Virginia to settlement. The treaty was made with the Iroquois, who claimed authority over the region. However, the tribes who actually lived there objected and in 1774 that lead to war.

Tensions were also starting to boil over between the colonies and the Great Britain. Most Americans strongly objected to Parliament’s levying of “internal” taxes on the colonies because they had no elected representation in London. Parliament clamped down hard on Massachusetts after the Boston Tea Party by blockading Boston Harbor and taking other measures.

In Williamsburg, Virginia’s House of Burgesses responded by declaring June 1, 1774 a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer. The Old Dominion’s governor, the Earl of Dunmore, dismissed the legislature. The Burgesses then met at a tavern, where they proposed a non-importation policy against British goods (the word “boycott” did not yet exist), proposed the First Continental Congress, and scheduled the first extralegal Virginia Convention for August 1. The intervening two months were to allow delegates "an Opportunity of collecting their sense of their respective Counties."

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The vicinity of Fort Gower in a 1974 photograph. The exact location is now evidently underwater. (Ohio History Connection)

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