USA > Virginia > Washington County > Washington County > History of southwest Virginia, 1746-1786, Washington County, 1777-1870 > Part 19
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appointed, at the Lead Mines, the county seat of Fincastle county.
The Virginia convention of 1776 was one of the most important conventions ever held in the State, whether we consider the char- acter of the members, or the work done by them. The Virginia Colony at this time was in open revolt, and Lord Dunmore, the Governor, was an exile from the State.
The King by his proclamation had declared the citizens of the Colony rebels and enemies, and now the people by their representa- tives proceeded in an orderly manner to establish a government for themselves.
The constitution and bill of rights adopted by this convention clearly defined the fundamental principles of all free government, and the Declaration of Independence, enunciated at this time, was, beyond question, the forerunner of the Great Declaration of Inde- pendence adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4th, 1776. The Bill of Rights adopted by this convention, is as follows :
"1st. Whereas, George the Third, King of Great Britain and Ireland and Elector of Hanorer, heretofore intrusted with the exercise of the kingly office in this government, hath endeavored to pervert the same into a detestable and insupportable tyranny, by putting his negative on laws the most wholesome and necessary for the publick good ;
By denying his governours permission to pass laws of imme- diate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation for his assent, and, when so suspended, neglecting to attend to them for many years ;
By refusing to pass certain other laws, unless the persons to be benefitted by them would relinquish the inestimable right of repre- sentation in the legislatures ;
By dissolving legislative assemblies repeatedly and continually, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions of the rights of the people ;
When dissolved, by refusing to call others for a long space of time, thereby leaving the political system without any legislative head ;
By endeavoring to prevent the population of our country, and, for that purpose, obstructing the laws for the naturalization of foreigners ;
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By keeping among us in times of peace, standing armies and ships of war ;
By affecting to render the military independent of, and superior to the civil power :
By combining with others to subject us to a foreign jurisdiction, giving his assent to their pretended acts of legislation ;
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us ;
For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world ;
For imposing taxes on us without our consent ;
For depriving us of the benefits of trial by jury ;
For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended of- fences :
For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever :
By plundering our seas, ravaging our coasts, burning our towns, and destroying the lives of our people ;
By inciting insurrections of our fellow-subjects, with the al- lurements of forfeiture and confiscation ;
By prompting our negroes to rise in arms among us, those very negroes, whom, by an inhuman use of his negative, he hath refused us permission to exclude by law ;
By endeavoring to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an un- distinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions of exist- ence ;
By transporting, at this time, a large army of foreign mer- cenaries, to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny al- ready begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy unworthy the head of a civilized nation :
By answering our repeated petitions for redress with a repeti- tion of injuries ;
And, finally, by abandoning the helm of government, and de- claring us out of his allegiance and protection.
By which several acts of misrule, the government of this coun- try. as formerly exercised under the Crown of Great Britain, is TOTALLY DISSOLVED .*
The result of this action by the Convention was the formation
*9 Hen. Stat., page 112.
.
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of a stable and efficient government for the State, and the organi- zation of the militia of the commonwealth.
This Constitution was proclaimed on the 29th day of June, 1776, on which day the Committee of Safety, designated by the con- vention of 1775, relinquished their authority, and Patrick Henry was elected the first Governor of the Commonwealth. At the same time the Privy Council, Treasurer, Attorney General, and the other state officers were elected by the convention. This conven- tion, by a resolution, adopted a design for a seal for the new com- monwealth. The design adopted was as follows:
"To be engraved on the Great Seal, Virtus, the genius of the Commonwealth, dressed like an Amazon, resting on a spear with one hand and holding a sword with the other hand and treading on Tyranny, represented by a man prostrate, a crown fallen from his head, a broken chain in his left hand and a scourge in his right. In the exergon the word "Virginia" over the head of Vir- tus, and underneath the words, "Sic semper tyrannis." On the reverse a groupe, Libertas, with her wand and pileus. On the other side of her Ceres, with the cornucopia in one hand and an ear of wheat in the other. On the other side Eternitas, with globe and phoenix. In the exergon these words : Deus Nobis Hæc Otia Fecit."
This declaration of the Virginia convention is said to have been the first declaration of independence recorded in the world's his- tory. The American people, until this time, had not seriously con- templated a complete separation from England, but now that the British Parliament had refused to listen to their petition and was waging an active war against them, Richard Henry Lee, a repre- sentative from Virginia in the Continental Congress at Phila- delphia, in the month of May, gave notice that on a day named he would move the Congress to adopt a Declaration of Independ- ence.
Early in this same month the Continental Congress had adopted a resolution for the purpose of ascertaining the sentiment of the American colonies on the subject of the independence of America. The motion of Mr. Lee was postponed from day to day, until the first day of July, two days after the adoption of the Virginia Con- stitution and Bill of Rights, when the Continental Congress re- solved itself into a committee of the whole, and began the con- sideration of the report of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benja-
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min Franklin, Roger Sherman, and R. R. Livingston, the com- mittee who had been appointed on the 11th of June to prepare a Declaration of Independence.
It is worthy of note that this committee, when appointed, agreed that each member should draw up a Declaration of Inde- pendence according to his own ideas, with the understanding that. the one that best conformed to the wishes of the committee as a whole should be adopted as the report of the committee. It is stated that Mr. Jefferson's Declaration, being the first read, was unanimously adopted by the committee without debate, the other members refusing to submit their papers for consideration.
The Continental Congress, after three days of heated discussion, adopted the report of the committee, which report has since been known as the Declaration of Independence, and is as follows :
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of man- kind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to such separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident : that all men are created equal : that they are endowed by their Creator with certain un- alienable rights : that among these are life, liberty, and the pur- suit of happiness: that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laving its founda- tion on such principles and organizing its power in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, would dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes ; and accord- ingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed; but when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism,
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it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all hav- ing in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. To prove this let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and neces- sary for the public good.
He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operations till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the rights of representation in the legislature-a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, un- comfortable and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly for opposing, with manly firmness, his invasion of the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the legislative powers, incapa- ble of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise, the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without and convulsions within.
'He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreign- ers, refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.
He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.
He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither
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swarms of officers, to harrass our people and eat out their sub- stance.
He has kept among us in times of peace standing armies with- out the consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the military independent of and su- perior to the civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their pretended acts of legislation.
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us,
For protecting them by a mock trial, from punishment, for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States,
For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world,
For imposing taxes on us without our consent,
For depriving us in many cases of the benefit of trial by jury,
For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offences,
For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring Province, establishing therein an arbitrary government and enlarg- ing its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies,
For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws and altering fundamentally the powers of our governments.
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislature for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns. and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is, at this time, transporting large armies of foreign mer- cenaries, to complete the work of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow-citizens, taken captive on the high seas, to bear arms against their country, to become the execu-
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tioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands. '
He has excited domestick insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merci- less Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistin- guished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time, of attempts, made by their Legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us; we have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here; we have appealed to their native justice and mag- nanimity ; and we have conjured them, by the ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity. We must there- fore acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.
We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are, and . of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connections between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved ; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protec- tion of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
It has been said that this Declaration of Independence was the
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most sublime exhibition that man has ever made to man. The members composing the Congress were, in their intelligence and patriotism, the giants of our race, and the object of that Congress was the protection of our race.
This Declaration of Independence was proclaimed at Philadel- phia on the 8th day of July, 1776, and on the 9th it was read to each brigade of the Continental army. This declaration was received by the people at all points with the greatest enthusiasm.
A part of the policy adopted by the British Ministry for the reduction of the American Colonies was the enlisting of the Indians in the service of the British Government. We have now reached that point where the history of Southwest Virginia is closely connected with the operations of the Indians in behalf of the British Government. Numerous agents of the Royal Govern- ment were sent to the different Indian tribes living along the waters of the western frontiers, and they were so far successful in their efforts to incite the Indian tribes to war, that, by the spring of 1776, the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws and Chickasaws were induced to take up arms in behalf of their British allies. The Cherokee Indians, who were the nearest and most accessible tribe to the white settlers, were more numerous than most of the other Indian tribes, and they were the first to take up arms at the instance of the British agents.
If the British government had any friends among the back- woodsmen of Fincastle county, this action was of such a character as to alienate the affection and respect of every respectable man. In speaking of the success of the British agents in this matter, a distinguished author has said: "Their success and the constant ravages of the Indians maddened the American frontiersmen upon whom the blow fell, and changed their resentment against the British king into a deadly and lasting hatred, which their sons and grandsons inherited.
Indian warfare was of such peculiar atrocity that the employ- ment of Indians as allies forbade any further hope of reconciliation. They saw their homes destroyed, their wives outraged, their chil- dren captured, their friends butchered and tortured wholesale by Indians armed with British weapons, bribed by British gold and obeying the orders of British agents and commanders.""
*Winning of the West, Part II., p. 76.
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About this time Colonel Arthur Campbell, of Fincastle county, in writing of this action of the British Government, in arming the Indian tribes, expressed himself as follows: "This infernal malig- nity of a professed Christian prince was reserved to be exhibited to the world in the reign of George III."
Alexander Cameron, the British agent among the Cherokee Indians, lost no time in calling together the chiefs and warriors of this tribe of Indians, to inform them of the wishes of his govern- ment. When Cameron disclosed to the Indians his plans, they were greatly astonished, and would not, for some time, believe the statement of Cameron, that one part of the white people wished to wage war against their brothers, for a civil war was unknown between Indians speaking the same language, but he finally suc- ceeded in enlisting the Indians by promising them presents in clothing and by telling them that they could plunder and rob the settlers, and by inducing them to believe that all the lands on the western waters would be reserved to them by the British govern- ment as their hunting grounds. This tribe of Indians had been acting for some time in a manner that clearly indicated that they were determined upon hostilities.
In the spring of 1775, Andrew Greer, had gone to the Cherokee towns to purchase furs. While there, he had observed the conduct of two white traders, and was convinced that they intended to do him some injury, if possible. When he started from the Indian towns for his home, he left the main trading path and came up the Nolichucky trace and escaped injury, but, at the same time, two men by the name of Boyd and Doggett, who had been sent to the Indian towns by the Virginia authorities, were met on the trace that Greer had left, at Boyd's creek, by Indians, and were killed by them and their bodies hidden. The Virginia settlement had long been at peace with the Indians, but they were sufficiently acquainted with their character to know, that, having once tasted blood, their disposition was to indulge to excess, and now they knew they must prepare for a long and bloody war with a tribe of Indians that exceeded them in numbers. They at once procecded to put their frontier settlements in a defensive attitude. A fort was built at Watauga, to which was given the name of Fort Lee, the old fort* at Long Island was repaired and called Fort Patrick Henry.
*Fort Robinson.
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Another fort was erected about seven miles east from Long Island. at Amos Eaton's, on the trace leading to Fort Chiswell. A fort was erected shortly before this time at Rve Cove, about fifty miles from the North Fork of Clinch, by a man by the name of Isaac Crismen, who was, afterwards, with two members of his family, murdered by the Indians.
Information of the invasion intended by the Indians was for- warded to the Committee of Safety of Fincastle county by Isaac Thomas, an Indian trader, at the instance of Nancy Ward, a noted Indian woman and a relative of several of the principal chiefs. The frontier settlement, at this day, was in Carter's Valley, the settlers obtaining their supplies from the settlement at Wolf Hill (now Abingdon).
The action of the Virginia Committee of Safety, requiring a test oath of all the citizens of the Commonwealth. had driven many sympathizers of the British Government to this settlement in Car- ter's Valley, where they hoped to escape the consequences of their refusal to subscribe to the oath, but information of their presence was obtained by John Carter, a Virginian, who communicated the information he had obtained to the settlers near Wolf Hill. These settlers were great Whigs, and, upon receiving this information. a number of them assembled and went to Brown's settlement in Car- ter's Valley, and after having assembled the people, John Coulter, a member of the county court of this county, administered to them an oath to be faithful to the common cause. Early in May. the settlers in Carter's Valley and all the families below the North Fork of the Holston. in view of the threatened Indian invasion. left their homes and returned to the settlements. To add to the alarm of the frontier settlers, a letter was delivered at the house of Charles Robertson, on the 18th day of May, 1116. under circum- stances that were exceedingly suspicious; which letter accompanied by the affidavit of Nathan Reed, was as follows: "Wattaga ....... This day. Nathan Reed came before me, one of the justices of Wat- taga, and made oath on the Holy Evangelists of Almighty God. that a stranger came up to Charles Robertson's gate yesterday even- ing-who he was he did not know-and delivered a letter of which this is a true copy. Sworn before me the 19th of May, 1:26. Attest, James Smith. JOHN CARTER."
"Gentlemen :- Some time ago, Mr. Cameron and myself wrote
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you a letter by Mr. Thomas, and enclosed a talk we had with the Indians respecting the purchase which is reported you lately made of them on the rivers Wattaga, Nolichucky. We are since informed that you are under great apprenhension of the Indians doing mis- chief immediately. But it is not the desire of his Majesty to set his friends and allies, the Indians, on his liege subjects : therefore whoever you are, that are willing to join his Majesty's forces as soon as they arrive at the Cherokee nation, by repairing to the King's standard, shall find protection for themselves and their families and be free from all danger whatever; yet, that his Majesty's officers may be certain which of you are willing to take up arms in his Majesty's just right, I have thought fit to recom- mend it to you and every one that is desirous of preventing in- evitable ruin to themselves and families, immediately to subscribe a written paper acknowledging their allegiance to his Majesty
King George, and that they are ready and willing, whenever called on, to appear in arms in defence of the British right in America ; which paper, as soon as it is signed and sent to me safe by hand, should any of the inhabitants be desirous of knowing how they are to be free from every kind of insult and danger, inform them that his Majesty will immediately land an army in West Florida, inarch them through the Creek to the Chickasaw nation, where five hun- dred warriors from each nation are to join them, and then come by Chota. who have promised their assistance, and then to take pos- session of the frontiers of North Carolina and Virginia, at the same time that his Majesty's forces make a diversion on the sea coast of those Provinces. If any of the inhabitants have any beef, cattle, flour, pork or horses to spare, they shall have a good price for them by applying to us, as soon as his Majesty's troops are em- bodied.
I am yours, &c.,
"HENRY STUART."
Henry Stuart was the Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the British Government, and in this capacity he wrote this let- ter. This letter did not accomplish its purpose, and only had the effect of exciting the settlers to more vigorous efforts to resist the plans of the agents of the British crown. On the 8th of June Jar- rett Williams, an Indian trader, returned to the Virginia settle- ment from the Cherokee towns and gave further information as to the intention of the Indians, which information was embodied in
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