Fort Ligonier: Raising Our Sites

The Pennsylvania Humanities Council (PHC) provided funding through two competitive programs, Raising Our Sites and Visiting Scholars, to research the history of traditionally under- represented people at Fort Ligonier, 1758-1766. A large body of information subsequently, was found, and four research papers were produced by outside scholars. The following is the paper written by Michael N. McConnell, Ph.D. Department of History, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, which was publicly presented at a conference in Jumonville, Pennsylvania.

New Tales from the Wild East:
Fort Ligonier in Perspective
Michael N. McConnell, Ph.D.
Department of History
The University of Alabama at Birmingham

The research project with which we are involved aims to broaden the public's understanding of Fort Ligonier and the complex struggle for the Ohio Valley before the American Revolution. Specifically, we've been asked to offer an interpretation of the people and events at Ligonier and the surrounding area that "stresses the broad spectrum of human experience" in early western Pennsylvania as well as the more familiar military history of the fort. And, to do this in ways that will make the best use of the museum's unique collection of material remains, including well over 100,000 artifacts ranging from ammunition to wagon parts. In effect, what we hope to offer to the museum-and through it, the general public-are new, instructive stories about an old and familiar place.1

Toward that end, what I would like to do in the time remaining is offer an overview of what is still work in progress; to suggest a few of what I take to be central themes emerging from the history of Fort Ligonier. The logical place to start is with that most familiar and dramatic moment in the fort's history: the arrival of General John Forbes's army at what was then called "Loyal Hannon" in the late summer and autumn of 1758.

J. C. Pleydell's plan of the encampment at Fort Ligonier offers some immediate information: the names of regiments; their place in the encampment; the layout of the fortifications themselves. Hidden within this well-known text however, are other things to consider: a complex, mobile society of several thousand people; a society that also marked a dramatic intrusion of British power into the unstable borderlands known then as the "Ohio Country"--Fort Ligonier was, in other words, a manifestation of an imperial frontier.

Consider, in the first place, the size of the army assembled at Ligonier. By early November, 1758, some 4,000 troops were encamped -- not as neatly as Pleydell suggests-around the fort. This made Ligonier the second-largest community in Pennsylvania, after Philadelphia, with its nearly 17,000 people. Lancaster, by comparison, contained only about 2,800 people.2

"Community" is an accurate term to describe this mass of humanity. This was not merely an assembly of fighting men; what we have here is nothing less than what one historian has termed a "walking city."3

Like all armies in the eighteenth century, Forbes's included a large number of people; including contract workers, servants, women and children, slaves, who either depended upon the army or were expected to serve its needs. Moreover, this army included a cross-section of the transatlantic British world. "Composed," said Forbes, "of raw undisciplined troops, Officer & Soldier, newly raised and collected from all parts of the Globe, from the Highlands of Scotland, Germany, etc., to South Carolina...." The army at Ligonier would have presented a cacophony of voices: German, Broad Scots, Gaelic, English, Siouan, Iroquoian, Algonquian.4 In addition, the army consisted of people ranged along the social ladder from highest to lowest. In one of his many dark moments, Forbes complained that his officers were largely "an extream bad Collection of broken Innkeepers, Horse Jockeys, & Indian Traders"--the rank and file being no better. Buried beneath comments like this is a more complex picture. Thanks to the efforts of a number of historians, we now have a better understanding of who these "raw undisciplined" people were.

They included aristocrats like George Washington and William Byrd III, professional soldiers like Henry Bouquet and Forbes's valued engineer Ensign Charles Rhor, and men of means like John Armstrong and Edward Shippen.

These officers presided over common soldiers drawn from the lower rungs of colonial and British society. Montgomery's Highlanders were from the impoverished corners of Scotland, lured into service by promises of pay and bounties. The same inducements brought hundreds of small farmers, sharecroppers, and indentured servants into the ranks of the Royal American Regiment as well as the provincial regiments, men drawn largely from the "lower sort" of colonial society.6

Social distinctions are instructive. They remind us that the men who led and those who followed were drawn in 1758, as in subsequent American wars, from very different classes. They encourage us to look more closely at motives for military service from Washington's desire for distinction to a common soldier's need to simply support himself or a family. Motives certainly ran the gamut from noble to ignoble: Maryland volunteers showed up and agreed to serve without pay-as long as they could collect their colony's bounty on French and Indian scalps.7

Concepts of class may also help explain behavior like that witnessed by Anglican minister Thomas Barton, while at Ray's Town (Bedford) . There, in late August, while Colonel Burd was marching to Loyal Hannon, troops were ordered to move their camps to cleaner ground. In pitching their tents, Barton saw field officers "Contend for Rank with some Warmth" arguing for the best ground on the basis of colonial charters, dates of commission, or when their troops were raised. Such friction over precedence is what we'd expect from status conscious colonial gentlemen-eager to assert their social place among strangers and regular officers more serene in their superiority.8

Something of the character of this army survives in the archaeological record. The great variety of gun parts and ammunition tell us that there was no uniformity here. Men brought what weapons they could; provincial governments provided what were often obsolete and unsafe firearms to their troops.

Perhaps the most evocative class of artifacts from Ligonier are the shoes: literally hundreds of fragments as well as whole footwear. These shoes-many of them worn and patched-speak volumes about a several-hundred-mile trek over what people at the time called the "endless mountains" of the Appalachians.

Then there are other, often less noticed, items: thimbles, needles, pins, fancy buttons, Jews' harps, clay marbles. These take us into another, even less familiar dimension of 18th- century military life: that occupied by soldiers' dependents- wives, children, servants and slaves.

While we might easily ignore these folks, leaders of 18th- century armies couldn't. Commonly labeled "camp followers," these people were a functional part of military life. And, they may well have been quite numerous within the community at Ligonier. The British army routinely allowed rations for as many as six women per company; at some ninety companies in the army, military spouses could hardly be ignored. Certainly the numbers varied beyond this average, but the 1st Virginia regiment at Ray's Town included at least twenty-four women; and soldiers' wives from the Highlanders, Pennsylvania and Delaware troops were ordered to serve at the army's general hospital.9

Thomas Barton tells us that, on August 13, he baptized "a little Girl of 10 Years of Age, the Daughter of a Soldier." Presumably she was a Pennsylvanian, since Barton often traveled with that regiment.10 No matter, children as well as adults followed Forbes's Road to the Forks of the Ohio. The presence of soldiers' families forces us to rethink much that we accept about military life in early America. Why, for example, would dependents follow soldiers: for adventure-or perhaps out of necessity? What kinds of experiences would young children have had in a world where sentries were routinely killed and scalped by the enemy, where the normal dimensions of domestic life were missing?

Even more problematic were those other dependents-the human property of colonial Americans who certainly found themselves following masters into the deep woods of western Pennsylvania. The only clear reference I've been able to find thus far of an African-American with the army comes courtesy of Sir John St. Clair, Forbes's Quartermaster general. In a letter to Bouquet, St. Clair refers to "my Black" and asks the colonel to have the man bring along a candlestick and some sugar.11

Less clear, but suggestive, are returns from the Virginia regiments, many of whose officers were slave-owners. The "servants" cited in these returns may mean just that; they may also include African or African-American slaves.

But we shouldn't be too hasty in assuming that African-Americans appear only as slave labor. We might also find a few of these folks wearing red coats. Free Blacks enlisted in provincial and regular regiments. In fact, the Royal American may have been one place where Black men interested in soldiering might go. The regiment, and especially the battalion led by Henry Bouquet, drew its recruits mainly from the middle colonies, provinces that also had sizable numbers of freedmen-and women. In 1759, the battalion enlisted a number of men to replace its losses from the year before; among them was Henry Wedge who, by accepting his £1, 10s 10p enlistment bonus, embarked on an adventure that led him all the way to Fort Niagara -- before he quit the army by deserting in 1762. The existence of Wedge in 1759 allows us to at least speculate that men like him might have been in the ranks earlier.12

Identifying these people from the written or material records is difficult; they would have worn European-style clothing, would have left little or no writing of their own behind and, as a species of property, slaves would not be taken account of by masters or others. Indeed, African-Americans and slavery were so common throughout the colonies that I seriously doubt if anyone in the army would have given these people a second look-or thought. Nevertheless, common sense forces us to assume that they were also a part, however small, of this richly diverse military society.

We could say more about the army: it's discipline- -which left much to be desired; it's health-which was poor; it's daily routines at places like Ligonier-which included a good deal of deadening routine and backbreaking labor. But, thus far, the picture should be clear: one of a complex, mobile society that can only be fully understood by going beyond familiar military events: Grant's Defeat, the October attack on Ligonier, into other dimensions of everyday life that the army shared in common with the larger world around it: including ethnic diversity, family and class, and work, to name just a few.

Social historians of Early America have recently devoted considerable attention to two parallel processes within the British colonies : the "Americanization" of colonial societies and peoples; and the "Anglicization" of those same societies, especially during the middle decades of the 18th century. And, this comprises a second theme arising from the history of Fort Ligonier.

Like the hundreds of thousands of colonists from Europe and western Africa, British soldiers were also affected by their experiences in the colonies -- they, too, were Americanized. They mingled with a wide array of peoples and cultures-including Indians, both as friends and enemies; they got a taste of the sheer expansiveness of life in a land where resources seemed limitless, where land was cheap, and where the intermixing of peoples was already producing a distinctive way of life. Redcoats also took on some uniquely American characteristics -- men like Henry Wedge was one; fighting side-by-side with native allies another; scalping yet another. In fact, the army-despite the myths surrounding General Braddock -- coped remarkably well with war in the underdeveloped provinces of British America.

Equally important, it seems to me, and less well recognized, is the army's role in further Anglicizing the colonies. The European regulars in Forbes's army: Highland and Lowland Scots, English, Germans, Swiss, were more than just fighting men. They were also agents of change, helping to alter --often in subtle ways --the habits and tastes of colonists and Indians alike.

A consumer revolution -- and the social changes it spawned- were already well underway by the mid-1750s. Colonial elites consciously adopted the styles and tastes of the British aristocrats who were their role models. In predictable fashion, this "refinement of America" as it's been called, found its way down the social ladder to small farmers and petty tradesmen.

The army certainly didn't initiate this transformation of colonial culture represented by Georgian houses, formal dancing, and forks at dinner tables. But it did re-enforce these developments. European officers, and common soldiers, too, offered firsthand information about styles, tastes, and trends. Moreover, the thousands of redcoats who flooded into America after 1755 themselves demanded the refinements they'd left behind in Britain or Ireland.

Elites in Philadelphia enjoyed entertaining officers like Bouquet or St. Clair, hoping to learn from their social example. One Anglican minister could take satisfaction in noting that the city's gentlewomen, while "naturally... much more agreeable and accomplished than the men," were nonetheless "greatly improved" since their association "with the English officers" in their midst.13

More to the point, the army necessarily hauled current British manners and styles with it across the Alleghenies; in the process it carried what has recently been called the "virus" of consumerism into the far corners of the American colonies.14

Visitors to Ligonier are quite literally surrounded by evidence of this: the salt-glazed stoneware, Chinese export porcelain, and creamware -- the latter the first mass-marketed tableware in the British world -- are tangible reflections of Britain's 'empire of goods."15 Provincial soldiers and their wives, the tradesmen and farmers that transported, worked for and fed the army -- all had further opportunities to see just what the latest styles looked like.

But the army's influence didn't end with merely showcasing the luxuries made available by the empire. Soldiers also provided much of the cash and credit that allowed frontier families to acquire the goods they'd seen. Even after Forbes's army disbanded, military garrisons remained in the Ohio Country- at Ligonier until the Spring of 1766. Redcoats-ranging in number from 200-300 at Fort Pitt to the half-companies stationed along Forbes's Road -- needed food, liquor, transport, and tradesmen's skills for which they paid top dollar. Evidence of that survives in the impressive collection of coins at Fort Ligonier. The array of British and Irish halfpennies and farthings are just what we would expect enlisted soldiers and
their suppliers to carry.

The Ohio Country forts served as magnets for the earliest civilian residents of the lands west of the mountains. The deeply-rutted tracks of Forbes's Road recently uncovered at Fort Ligonier bear testimony to the continuing commercial traffic that slowly drew the Ohio County into the orbit of Britain's global economy.

As early as January, 1759, when the French were still a potent threat to the army's tenuous hold over the Forks of the Ohio, Colonel Hugh Mercer could report that "The Country People begin to drop in with Indian Meal" and liquor, drawn by the promise of "hard Cash."l6

"Pittsboro" emerged out of a squalid collection of gin mills and blacksmiths shops attached to the garrison; by the mid-1760s the firm of Baynton, Wharton and Morgan was selling everything from coffee to calicos to all comers, soldier and civilian alike.

The picture is much the same at Fort Ligonier where, in the summer of 1763, Lt. Archibald Blane was able to collect a "militia" of some seventy-odd men, identified by Blane as "the Inhabitants of that Post."17 Some of these people found a good living growing food, hauling it, or driving livestock, for the army.

Finally, the arrival of British troops at Loyal Hannon also marked the opening of another chapter in the ongoing struggle for the future of the Ohio Country. From our vantage point, we can clearly see that Forbes's troops were not entering a "wilderness;" they were invading a country whose native occupants had been working mightily for two decades to ensure their independence from colonies and empires, and who would pursue that goal for decades after 1758.

More than a cockpit of international rivalry, the Ohio Valley was a "borderland:" contested ground that many peoples claimed but that no-one truly controlled.18 Played out here in the 1750s, 1760s, and 1770s was particularly violent episode in the long contest over who would determine the future of eastern North America. Again, from our privileged position at the end of the story, it all seems so neat and inevitable: the British won, the French and Indians lost. But, in reality, the contest-and the contestants -- present a far more complex scenario where uncertainty -- not inevitability -- prevailed.

Take, for example, the events at Fort Ligonier during the Autumn of 1758. Among those encamped were Little Carpenter's Cherokees and Hagler's Catawbas. Among those who attacked the fort in October were Ohio Iroquois, Shawnees, and Delawares from nearby towns like the Kuskuskies (New Castle), Logg's Town (Ambridge) and Shingas's Town (Beaver Falls). So much for the simplicity of the "French and Indian War."

Then, consider that the army had to insist that it's native allies display "The Union Flaggs" and "Yellow Shalloon" cloth given them as recognition symbols so as not to be shot by their British partners.19 And, while Forbes was sending conciliatory messages to those Ohio Indians, he continued to march toward their towns in company with Indians -- known to the locals as "Flatheads" -- who had been inveterate enemies since time out of mind. We may forgive Tamaqua and other Ohio leaders for their lingering distrust of the general and his motives.

But distrust was a commonplace on the borderlands of early America, at places like Ligonier, where it was hard to distinguish friends from enemies and where invaders offered mixed signals of peace and war. Those characteristics of early American frontiers: cooperation and conflict that were less racial than historic and opportunistic; the confusion, distrust, and uncertainty, have often been buried in heroic stories of massacres, battles, and hearty pioneers.

Fort Ligonier offers us an opportunity to recast the story and from the vantage point of the invaded as well as the invaders. We can remind people, first of all, that the "French and Indian War" was not quite so neat as the name implies, nor about colliding racial and ethnic monoliths. Rather, it was a struggle that pitted a variety of interests against each other: Delaware, Iroquois, Cherokee, British, French, Canadian, Pennsylvanian, Virginian; a struggle between land-hungry speculators and land-hungry farmers; between royal officials bent on enlarging an empire and provincial officials bent on enlarging their colonies; between Indians who held the land and Indians and colonists who wished shed to claim it for their own.

Furthermore, we can remind people that, while conflict was certainly an important feature of the cultural landscape west of the mountains, cooperation also occurred, in ways that some might find hard to understand in light of the old narrative of the wild frontier.

Those Cherokees and Catawbas who joined-and subsequently abandoned-Forbes's army did so for reasons entirely their own, rooted in traditional conflicts with Indians north of the Ohio River and by traditional notions of what real war was all about. Crawling across the mountains, led by men uncertain of what lay ahead-and unwilling to trust those who did-was not what these southern warriors were accustomed to and, within the framework of their own cultural values, their abrupt departure makes sense.

Cooperation appeared in another way as well. The Forbes's campaign and the building of Fort Ligonier took place against the earnest -- one might even Say desperate -- negotiation -- by crown and colonies anxious to separate Indians from the French. The result, the famous Treaty of Easton, dramatically altered the course of British-Indian affairs. News of the treaty was s a godsend for Forbes, who could point to the king's commitment to secure natives lands in the west in his own efforts to stand aside and allow his army to come to grips with the French. It worked. But, the government's commitments to Indians west of the Appalachians-an agreement to, in effect, Stand as guarantor and protector of native autonomy- redefined the course of Indian affairs in the west-and the, army's place in imperial policy.

Now, redcoats who had come to drive away the French, would stay to keep natives and land-happy settlers and speculators apart. Indians rightly remained skeptical of the crown's true, motives, skepticism that turned to suspicion, then to alarm when news that the British now claimed sovereignty over the west reached native villages. The resulting conflict, episodic and background of to convince the Ohio Indians ending in stalemate has captured the popular imagination as "Pontiac's War."

What is obscured, however, is a growing convergence of peoples in the Ohio Country-founded more on need and selfish interest than altruism, but nonetheless real. Soldiers depended heavily on venison and corn-as well as geographic knowledge and information on people and places farther west-that only Delawares, Iroquois and Shawnees could provide. Redcoats also took to snowshoes, breachclouts and moccasins, finding these infinitely more suitable to frontier campaigning that their government-issue gear.

Indians, like civilians, profited from selling food to soldiers, carrying their dispatches, and offering information. Many of the same consumer goods that found their way into provincial homesteads also decorated native lodges-or the log- cabins that Ohio Indians began to favor. Travelers on the hard road to Pittsburgh could refresh themselves at Delaware homes with tea, chocolate, and veal, and converse with people whose command of English only improved with more frequent contact with local garrisons and the civilians they attracted.

This convergence of peoples in the Ohio Country did not, of course, forestall the distrust and outright racial hatreds unleashed by two wars between 1754-1764. Indians fell victim to a rising tide of gratuitous violence: thefts, murders, beatings, at the hands of border settlers who made it clear that, for them, the only good Indian was a dead one.

Nevertheless, it is also true that British garrisons at places like Fort Ligonier and Fort Pitt did preside over a remarkably long period of official-if fragile-peace. And, I would add, redcoats contributed to that peace. Their officers Indians continued to cooperate despite lingering suspicions on both sides of the cultural frontier. It is no coincidence that war returned to the Ohio Country after the army withdrew from the region.

Fort Ligonier, and Bedford to the east, were abandoned in early in 1766 as a cost-cutting measure; Fort Pitt's last garrison marched out six years later, bound for Boston and a showdown with American rebels. In the meantime, the number of colonists moving into the west in defiance of proclamations and treaties continued to increase. The result was Dunmore's War and the particularly vicious warfare that marked the American Revolution on the frontier.

These are just a few of the new stories that can be told about Fort Ligonier and its place in early American history. What I've tried to suggest here are the sorts of insight to be gained from rereading familiar texts: documentary and archaeological and from recasting familiar stories by looking at them from different perspectives.

1. Fort Ligonier, PHC grant application.
2. Billy G. Smith, The 'Lower Sort:' Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750-1800 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), 206; James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man' s Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (New York , 1972), 125; Jerome H. Wood, Conestoga Crossroads: Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1730 - 1790 ( Harrisburg, Pa., 1979), 47.
3. J. R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450-1620 (Baltimore, 1985), 159 and chap. 6.
4. Forbes to Fauquier, Nov. 5, 1758, in George Reese, ed., The Official Papers of Francis Fauquier, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, 1758-1768, 3 vols. (Charlottesville, Va., 1980), I, 102.
5. Forbes to Pitt, Sept. 6, 1758, in Alfred Proctor James, ed., The Writings of General John Forbes Relating to His Service in North America (Menasha, Wise., 1938) , 205.
6. Matthew C. Ward, "An Army of Servants," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography CXIX (1995), 75-93; R. S. Stephenson, "Pennsylvania Provincials in the Seven Years' War, " Pennsylvania History 62(1995), 196-212; John Ferling, "Soldiers for Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 94(1986), 307-28.
7. Forbes to Abercromby, Sept. 4, 1758, in James, eds., Writings of Forbes, 200.
8. William A. Hunter, ed. , " Thomas Barton and the Forbes' Expedition," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography XCV(1971), 458.
9 . W. W. Abbot , et . al , eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, V (Charlottesville, Va., 1988), 300, fn 2; Donald H. Kent, et al , eds., The Papers of Henry Bouquet, 6 vols. (Harrisburg, Pa.. 1952-1994), II, 684.
10. Hunter, ed., "Thomas Barton," PMHB XCV(1971), 450; see also 448,452.
11. St. Clair to Bouquet, Aug. 12, 1758, in Kent et. al, eds., Papers of Bouquet, II, 360.
12. Kent, et. al, eds., Papers of Bouquet, IV, 612; V, 605.
13. Andrew Burnaby, Travels Through the Middle Settlements in North America... (Ithaca, NY, 1976 [orig. publ., 1775], 61.
14 . Cary Carson, "The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?," in Carson et al., eds. , Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 546.
15. T. H. Breen, "An Empire of Goods : The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776," Journal of British Studies 25 (1980), 467-99.
16. Mercer to Bouquet, Jan. 29, 1759, in Kent et al., eds., Papers of Bouquet, III, 93; Mercer to Bouquet, Aug. 28, 1759, ibid., 629.
17. Edward G. Williams, "Pay List of the Militia at Fort Ligonier in 1763," Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 46(1963), 257.
18. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History," American Historical Review CIV(1999), 815-816.
19. Denny to Forbes, Jul. 28, 1758, in Forbes Papers, Alderman
Library, Univ. of Va., reel II.