1763: BOUQUET’S VICTORY
What little news arrived in the summer of 1763 at Fort Pitt, at the western edge of the Pennsylvania wilderness, was all bad.
The Ottawa chief Pontiac had British troops and settlers at Fort Detroit under siege. His successes in the Great Lakes area had encouraged a loose alliance of Delaware, Shawnee and Seneca warriors to attack and destroy British outposts in northwestern Pennsylvania at Fort Presque Isle, Fort LeBoeuf and Fort Venango. The few survivors of those attacks fled south to Fort Pitt, the keystone to British control of southwestern Pennsylvania and the Ohio valley.
Why were the Indians angry? Despite the promises made to them five years earlier in the Treaty of Easton that the British would not establish permanent settlements west of the Alleghenies, the Indians saw land-hungry farmers continuing to flood into the area.
The brick-by-brick construction of Fort Pitt into the largest outpost on the frontier was another sure sign that the British weren’t going away anytime soon. Just outside the fort, the town of Pittsburgh was developing into what historian David Dixon, of Slippery Rock University, has described as a “substantial community of traders, merchants, tavern keepers, prostitutes, speculators and laborers.” Both the fort and the town were threatened with extinction after Native American warriors surrounded the settlement.
At the other end of the state, Colonel Henry Bouquet, a veteran of frontier fighting, was given the task of organizing a relief expedition. But as he moved farther and farther westward in the summer of 1763, he found that the Indians were aware of his every move.
“The Indians had better intelligence, and no sooner were they informed of the march of our Army, than they broke up the siege of Fort Pitt,” wrote an anonymous “lover of his country” in 1765. The “lover” was identified a century later as William Smith, the first provost of the College of Philadelphia, now the University of Pennsylvania. A partial copy of his work—An Historical Account of the Expedition against the Ohio Indians, in the year 1764—is in the archives of the Senator John Heinz History Center.
Dr. Smith’s language, full of references to “savages” and “barbarians,” reflects colonial-era attitudes.
Colonel Bouquet’s relief column was near Bushy Run in Westmoreland County, about twenty-five miles from Fort Pitt, when it was attacked by a Native American force on August 5, 1763. The first day’s battle was a draw.
“At the first dawn of light [the next day] the savages began to declare themselves, all about the camp, at the distance of about 500 yards,” Dr. Smith wrote. “And by shouting and yelling in the most horrid manner, quite round that extensive circumference, endeavoured to strike terror by an ostentation of their numbers, and their ferocity.
“[Colonel Bouquet’s soldiers] saw before them the most melancholy prospect of crumbling away by degrees, and entirely perishing without revenge or honour, in the midst of those dreadful deserts.”
Their commander realized that he needed to trick the Indians into thinking he was retreating.
For that purpose he contrived the following stratagem….Col. Bouquet gave directions that two companies of his troops, who had been posted in the most advanced situations, should fall within the circle; the troops on the right and left immediately opened their files, and filled up the vacant space, that they might seem to cover their retreat. Another company of light infantry, with one of grenadiers, were ordered to “lie in ambuscade,” to support the two first companies of grenadiers, who moved on the feigned retreat, and were intended to begin the real attack. The dispositions were well made, and the plan executed without the least confusion.
The savages gave in entirely into the snare….The barbarians mistook those motions for a retreat, abandoned the woods which covered them, hurried headlong on, and advancing with the most daring intrepidity galled the English troops with their heavy fire.
A statue of British Colonel Henry Bouquet is on display at Bushy Run Battlefield museum. Bouquet’s victory lifted the 1763 siege of Fort Pitt. Courtesy Peter Diana of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Within minutes, however, the Indians found themselves outgunned and began to retreat. Dr. Smith reports that they soon disappeared into the woods.
After their loss at Bushy Run, the Native Americans also gave up their siege of Fort Pitt. That opened the way for Colonel Bouquet to use the outpost as headquarters for his successful campaign the following year against the tribes in the Ohio country. The Indians agreed to a peace treaty that called for the return of several hundred white captives they had taken prisoner during the French and Indian War and what came to be known as Pontiac’s war.
1763: FORT PITT SURVIVES FLOOD, SIEGE
Captain Simeon Ecuyer, the Swiss-born commander of Fort Pitt, may have thought he had overcome the worst of his problems in March 1763.
Death and destruction caused by natural forces, however, soon would be followed by man-made mayhem.
Three days of heavy rain began March 6. The next day, as the “river continued to swell,” he had soldiers remove provisions and ammunition from the ground floor of all buildings within the fort. “Worked all day closing the drains, preparing everything against inundation as best I could,” Ecuyer wrote his commander, British colonel Henry Bouquet, in an after-the-event letter dated March 11. By 10:00 p.m. the rising Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers turned the land on which the fort stood into an island, he wrote.
By 4:00 a.m. the next morning, March 8, the interior of the outpost was covered with six inches of water. That afternoon he “detached two officers and thirty men to [occupy] the upper town with fifteen days’ provision for all the garrison.” The “upper town” referred to the small commercial settlement built on higher ground along the Monongahela River. It began a few hundred yards upstream from the fort.
At midnight, Ecuyer ordered all available boats and barges be brought into the fort in case the fort had to be evacuated by water. Since wagon access had been cut off by the rising rivers, his plan was to load artillery, arms and other supplies into watercraft and float them out. Fort Pitt would be abandoned until the floodwater receded.
“But happily on the 9th, at 8 o’clock in the morning, the water was at its greatest height and at midday it fell two inches,” he wrote. “All the provisions and ammunition are saved and in good condition.” Physical damage was minor.
“The shop of the blacksmith entirely gone,” he wrote. “The little wood gathered for the construction of [new] boats has followed several houses of the lower town [into the Ohio]. All the fences of the garden carried off by the ice.” While no lives were lost at Fort Pitt, the flooding claimed at least two victims nearby. “Thomson the tanner, and Shepherd the carpenter, are drowned, the first at Turtle Creek and the other at Two Mile Run,” he wrote.
Less than two months later, Ecuyer had much more to worry about than lost fences. “Yesterday evening the Indians massacred the two men we had at the sawmill,” he wrote to Bouquet on May 3. “They scalped them and left a head breaker or Tomahawk, which signifies I believe a declaration of war.”
He was right. No sooner had the French and Indian War ended than Pontiac’s rebellion began. Native Americans had returned to the warpath as land-hungry farmers from eastern Pennsylvania and Virginia continued to cross the Allegheny mountains to settle in what was known as the Ohio country. Delaware, Shawnee and Seneca warriors concluded that the British government was not going to keep its promise that the area around Pittsburgh would be left to them.
Ecuyer’s letters to Bouquet and a 1763 journal kept by Captain William Trent, another officer at Fort Pitt, described the violence of the next few months. Both documents are included in Fort Pitt and Letters from the Frontier, a book published in 1892 by J.R. Weldin &Co. Its editor was Mary Carson Darlington.
Once the Indians began their siege in late June, anyone venturing outside of the walls of Fort Pitt was in danger. “About 5 o’clock one James Thompson, who it was supposed [had] gone after a horse, was killed and scalped in sight of
the fort,” Trent wrote in his journal on June 22. Two days later, two chiefs, Turtle’s Heart and Mamaltee, offered safe conduct to the garrison if soldiers and civilians agreed to leave immediately. Ecuyer replied “that we could defend it against all the Indians in the woods,” Trent wrote.
Trent’s journal also describes an early attempt at biological warfare against their Native American foes. “Out of our regard for them, we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital,” he wrote. “I hope it will have the desired effect.” There is no evidence that this early attempt at using disease germs as weapons was effective.
The Indians did not withdraw from around Fort Pitt until late August after a relief expedition, commanded by Bouquet, defeated them in the two-day battle of Bushy Run. The Pennsylvania frontier, however, remained a dangerous place. On October 19, a highlander guarding cattle was shot and killed along the banks of the Monongahela. “There were but two or three Indians,” Trent wrote in his journal. “They scalped him.”
1794: THE WHISKEY REBELLION FAILS; HUGH HENRY BRACKENRIDGE SURVIVES
By August 1794, western Pennsylvania’s whiskey rebels had their own flags, their own army and their own martyr: Captain James McFarlane.
A veteran of the Revolutionary War, Captain McFarlane had become a leader of what was an increasingly violent opposition to a federal excise tax on whiskey. He had been shot to death a few weeks earlier outside the home of tax collector John Neville. Angry frontiersmen then burned Neville’s house on Bower Hill in what is now Scott Township in Allegheny County.
As many as seven thousand armed men mustered at Braddock’s Field, about eight miles east of what is now downtown Pittsburgh, on August 1–2, 1794, for what a state historical marker at the site calls “the high tide of the Whiskey Rebellion.” Rather than French, British or Native American enemies, it was probably that ad-hoc army that represented the greatest threat to the still small settlement at the Forks of the Ohio.
The rebels viewed Fort Pitt, and the cluster of houses, taverns and businesses nearby known as Pittsburgh, as a stronghold of support for the federal revenue agents—like John Neville—who licensed stills and collected the whiskey tax. Led by David Bradford, a Washington County lawyer turned general, the rebels marched to Pittsburgh’s Point. Once there, they couldn’t decide whether to burn down Pittsburgh or simply intimidate its residents into disavowing their loyalty to the federal government in Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital. Lobbied by a teacher-turned-chaplain-turned-lawyer named Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Bradford and his army chose the less violent course. It was a wise decision.
Pittsburgh residents offered the rebels free whiskey, food and boat rides across the Monongahela River. Brackenridge then ordered all the ferryboats to return to the Pittsburgh side, according to author William Hogeland’s 2006 history The Whiskey Rebellion. The week after the rebels’ march on Pittsburgh, President George Washington declared martial law and began calling up state militias. He assembled and personally led a thirteen-thousand-man army as far west as Bedford. Facing overwhelming force, the rebellion collapsed, with Bradford escaping down the Ohio River to Spanish territory.
Brackenridge, who had tried to keep a foot in both the rebel and federal camps, managed to convince Alexander Hamilton that he had not committed treason. Hamilton had been given command of the American army that occupied Pittsburgh after Washington returned to Philadelphia.
While he avoided prison or a rope, Brackenridge couldn’t escape public censure from his neighbors on both sides of the rebellion.
Isaac Craig was the son-in-law of John Neville, whose home had been burned by rebels. In the October 11, 1794 edition of the Pittsburgh Gazette, Craig disputed Brackenridge’s claim that he had saved Craig from banishment when the rebels briefly took control of Pittsburgh. Craig called on the rebel leader, David Bradford, to identify the “scoundrel” who had lied about Craig’s role. Bradford fingered Brackenridge. “I must inform you that Mr. Brackenridge has either a very treacherous memory, or a strong disposition to assert falsehoods if he asserted as you state,” Bradford wrote in reply. “The first day at Braddock’s Field Mr. Brackenridge told me the people of Pittsburgh were well pleased, that the country were [sic] about to banish the persons whose names had been mentioned….He added that they ought to go further—that little Craig ought to be punished, for he was one of the damned junto.”
Hugh Henry Brackenridge avoided both the anger of the whiskey rebels and Alexander Hamilton, who came to Pittsburgh to put down the revolt. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.
Brackenridge recognized his position was perilous, but he went on the offense. In that same issue of the Pittsburgh Gazette, he informed voters in Washington and Allegheny Counties that he was still a candidate for Congress. To withdraw, he wrote, “would imply a fear of submitting my conduct to investigation….I may at present have less popularity than I had, but the time will come when I shall be considered as having deserved well of the country, in all the delicate conjunctures in which we have been situated.”
He was, however, unable to win elective office for himself after 1794. Still, he was not without political influence. Brackenridge later campaigned for Thomas McKean in his successful race for governor, and Governor McKean then appointed him to the state supreme court.
1863: As LEE MOVES NORTH, PITTSBURGH DIGS IN
Pittsburgh appeared to be a logical target when General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia invaded Pennsylvania in June 1863. The city of more than fifty thousand was a rail hub, site of a cannon foundry and home to hundreds of factories and warehouses. The federal government’s Allegheny Arsenal was nearby in what was then the separate borough of Lawrenceville.
“Pittsburgh is not only a point where an immense store of supplies to our army could be cut off or destroyed, but [it] would offer abundant means of subsistence and most needed articles to the famished rebels, so long cut off from the requisites of comfort and civilization,” an anonymous author calling himself Soldier warned in the June 20 edition of the Pittsburgh Gazette.
Federal officials, business owners and local residents worked together for the next three weeks to make sure the Confederates wouldn’t get near any of those supplies without a struggle. That same day’s edition of the Gazette listed Pittsburgh companies that had released more than sixty-eight hundred of their workers to dig fortifications on Mount Washington, Squirrel Hill and more than two dozen other locations around the city.
Not everybody was sharing the load, however. An executive committee, formed to oversee the region’s defense, announced it would seek to pull the liquor licenses of “drinking houses, saloons and restaurants” that had remained open despite orders from the local military commander, Major General William Brooks, to close. The committee also requested that retail stores shut their doors “until the fortifications and rifle-pits, required for the defense of this city, be completed.”
This bronze casting of Robert E. Lee is by sculptor Michael Kraus. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in 1863 sent Pittsburgh into a panic. Courtesy Tony Tye of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Residents grew more nervous as the Confederates occupied more Pennsylvania towns. The Gazette’s headlines on June 25 told of “15,000 Rebels in the Cumberland Valley,” “Chambersburg Taken and Gutted” and “The Enemy Moving Toward Harrisburg!” The same newspaper reported that “a party of men, with a martial band, started up Liberty street, for the purpose of compelling certain shop keepers to close up their stores….The crowd visited a number of stores nearby, all of which were soon afterwards closed.” Another “committee went around among the butchers in the Diamond [in Allegheny City in what is now Pittsburgh’s North Side]…to ascertain what they would do by way of furnishing men or going to work themselves upon the entrenchments.
“To the credit of the butchers, let it be said, that every man save two either agreed to go or to pay for the employment of others.” The Gazette went on to name names of shirkers. “
The two niggards who informed the committee that they would neither go themselves nor pay for employing others were John Mussler and Fred Werner.”
Work on the ring of fortifications around the city continued through the first days of July, even as residents read first reports that Lee’s army was battling Union forces near the small town of Gettysburg. As the Independence Day weekend approached, Major General Brooks had ordered bars and saloons to close on Friday and Saturday, July 3 and 4. His proclamation, published in the July 3 Gazette, banned both “the selling or giving away” of alcohol. “The carrying of beer, ale or any kind of liquor to the working parties also is forbidden.”
“The Fourth passed off very quietly and pleasantly in this vicinity,” the Gazette reported on Monday, July 6. “There was a very general response to the call to work upon the fortifications, and thousands were thus employed.” Plans for the city’s defense, however, soon were overtaken by what the Gazette referred to as the “GLORIOUS VICTORY” in the “Great Battle near Gettysburg.” Lee’s army was forced to retreat south of the Potomac River, and the danger to Pennsylvania had passed.
As it wound down its affairs, the city’s executive committee passed a resolution to halt all paid labor on the redoubts, forts and trenches. Members also offered a tribute to those who labored on the defenses: “Whereas, During the last three weeks many skilled workmen and mechanics, suspending their usual avocations, have devoted their time and labor to the construction of the fortifications around the city, either without compensation or at a rate of daily pay far below their ordinary earnings…this committee acknowledges the services of these patriotic fellow citizens who have thus nobly sacrificed their individual advantage for the public benefit.”
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