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Aug. 26, 2025 18:43-19:24 - CSPAN
40:53
America 250 Revolutionary War FrontierandImmigrant Recruits
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Continuing our live coverage here on C-SPAN, we take you now to an event on the Revolutionary War.
This discussion is part of our America 250 coverage.
They came to America looking for freedom and opportunity, as we have always been told, but there wasn't any land for them in the East.
It had all been taken.
So they would go west on what was called the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road.
Here's a map, and I have a pointer here.
I don't see the red dot.
If you look at the top there where it says Lancaster, there's a road that goes a little bit south and then down through the shaded part of Virginia there.
That's the Shenandoah Valley, or if you go south enough, what they call the Valley of Virginia.
This was the western edge of settled Virginia.
And the immigrants could get land there.
So these were mostly Germans and Scotch-Irish.
Germans in the north part, Scotch-Irish mostly in the south part.
The Forbes Road from the French and Indian War continued west towards Pittsburgh.
And so particularly after 1768, there were settlers out that way as well, mostly Scotch-Irish.
So when the Revolutionary War began, the authorities in Williamsburg began to form regiments.
The first and second regiments were led by Patrick Henry, who was popular but not qualified, and William Wolf Woodford, who was qualified but not popular.
And then late in 1775, after actual violence has begun, the Virginia Convention authorized additional regiments.
The way they were formed is there were elections in the convention for the field officers, not as a group.
And each county in Virginia was assigned either one or two companies to raise.
And then those companies were regimented later.
So we think of regiments as the basic unit, but at the beginning it was the company and then they were put together.
The one exception to that is the 8th Virginia Regiment.
It was contrived or designed as a scheme to get Germans to enlist.
Many of the Germans didn't speak English.
They were not really part of Virginia culture.
They were on the other side of the Blue Ridge.
And there was concern that they might not stand up and enlist.
The Scotch-Irish had the opposite problem.
Everybody knew that they were eager to fight, maybe too eager to fight.
So the 8th Virginia was a combination of Germans and Scotch-Irish from the West.
I believe that the convention wanted German field officers in charge of Scotch-Irish soldiers, and explicitly not the other way around.
Stereotypes die hard, right?
The Germans were orderly and disciplined, and the Scotch-Irish were wild and drunk, right?
So Peter Muhlenberg, who was elected to the Virginia Convention, is appointed the colonel, right?
And it makes perfect sense.
We're not sure that these Germans are going to enlist, but maybe if we make Peter Muhlenberg a colonel, who's German, they will enlist.
So Muhlenberg is by far the most famous person associated with the 8th Virginia Regiment.
I'll just tell you a little bit about him.
He was a German-American, grew up in Pennsylvania.
His father was the leader of the Lutheran Church in America.
When I'll go back here, when it's hard to see the counties here, but when Dunmore County, which is between Woodstock and Strasburg, when Dunmore County was carved out of Frederick County, they also created a new parish for the vestry.
Virginia had a state church at this time.
And by law, they had to have an Anglican priest as the rector of the parish.
But everybody who lived there, I'm overstating it, most of the people who lived there were Lutherans.
Well, they didn't want to tithe to a church that they didn't really belong to or believe in.
And there had been experiments in other places that didn't go so well.
So what they did is James Wood, who was from neighboring Frederick County, he rode up to Pennsylvania to meet with Henry Muhlenberg and said, can we just get a Lutheran pastor and send him to London to get ordained and he can come be our Anglican rector?
And he said, sure, how about my son?
So that's how Peter Muhlenberg came to Virginia.
Theologically, there's not that much difference between Lutherans and Anglicans.
So it actually worked fine.
So Peter Muhlenberg comes to Virginia, and within a couple of years, he's a leader in the community, and not just through his church.
He is chairman of the Committee of Correspondence.
He becomes chairman of the County Committee, which we usually call the Committee of Safety now.
And he was elected to the House of Burgesses, all within three, four years.
So he's there when the Eighth Virginia is conceived.
Maybe it was even his idea, but he insisted that he had no intention of holding a commission or being a military man.
The other field officers were Abraham Bowman, who was a third generation German from a prominent Shenandoah Valley family, and Peter Helfenstein, who actually emigrated himself from Germany as a young man.
Here are a couple of the other officers.
These are staff officers.
The guy on the left is Francis Swain.
He was the adjutant.
He was not particularly competent, but he was Peter Muhlenberg's brother-in-law.
So he got the job.
The guy on the right is Christian Streit, who was the chaplain.
He was also an old friend of Peter Muhlenberg's from Pennsylvania.
Here is a clearer map of the territory that the Eighth Virginia comes from.
And I'm going to quickly run through the counties.
You can see the names of the captains in the top right, if it's large enough for you to see.
I'm not going to run through all their names just for the sake of time.
But if you follow the line that runs between Dunmore and Culpeper counties, you'll see that there's a line that sort of goes all the way up and down the map.
That's the Blue Ridge Mountains.
That's the peak of the Blue Ridge.
Berkeley County, Frederick County, and Dunmore County in the lower valley, even though it's in the north, that's the way the river flows.
They were predominantly German.
Just on the east side of the Blue Ridge is Culpeper County, the only county that was in the Piedmont of Virginia that had a company.
And then you go further down the valley, you have Augusta County.
Now we're in Scotch-Irish territory.
Botetot County did not recruit a company, but Fincastle County did.
And that was one of these gigantic frontier counties.
It included what is now the entire state of Kentucky, southern third of West Virginia, and the tail of southwest Virginia.
And then in the north, you have another giant frontier county, which is actually not a county.
It's a district of Augusta County, the West Augusta District.
So the guys from West Augusta, Fincastle, and Hampshire counties, they are true frontiersmen.
They are subsistence hunters.
They are very good with a rifle.
They have fought Indians.
They're the real deal.
Closer to the east, you have some guys with that sort of experience, but not all of them.
But the Virginia Convention decided, well, these guys are all Western guys, so they're all going to be great with a rifle.
They're going to be expert shots.
So we're going to make the 8th Virginia all rifles.
And they did.
It worked out for some, but not for everybody.
So the most famous episode in the history of the regiment by far is Peter Muhlenberg's farewell sermon.
The story that we've heard is not entirely true, but the essence of it is.
And that picture really tells the story.
There's a picture in the Capitol of him posed pretty much just like that.
The notion is that he gave a sermon with his cloak on, and then he read from Ecclesiastes, which says that there is a time for war and a time for peace.
And then he said, boys, it's time for war.
And he takes off his cloak and he's got his uniform and he says, let's all go fight.
And all the men jumped up and enlisted and they went and beat the Redcoats.
Not quite what happened.
First of all, he was not a continental officer, so he was not wearing that uniform.
Virginia had no continental troops yet.
He was a provincial officer, which means he was probably wearing a hunting shirt.
He definitely was not wearing a wig.
Wigs were not really in fashion then.
They powdered their hair still, but he certainly was not wearing a wig.
And there was no reveal with the cloak.
Everybody knew that he was a colonel.
In fact, the regiment was completely enlisted already.
He just wore the cloak as a matter of propriety.
They probably saw him put it on before the sermon, too.
But he gave the sermon.
I don't have any doubt about that.
Okay, so now they're going to war.
Here is a provincial commission.
Remember, I said they were provincial soldiers at the beginning.
This is Leonard Cooper's commission.
You'll hear more about him later.
He was an ensign from Dunmore County, which is now Shenandoah County.
That's signed by several Virginia notables down on the right there.
And they marched to Suffolk, Virginia, which is down at the bottom left there.
This is the first time the companies met each other.
Suffolk was the rendezvous point.
Why Suffolk?
So if you look at the map there, below Suffolk you see the Great Dismal Swamp, which I said a couple days ago was even greater and more dismal back then.
And then to the north of town, you have the Nansimond River.
So Suffolk is really a choke point between land east of there and land west of there.
Land east of there was dominated by loyalists.
Norfolk dominated the economy.
It was mostly a trading point.
Most people who lived in that area were more recent in the United States, or not the United States yet, in Virginia, and loyal to the Crown.
West of Suffolk was very different.
And their task was to kick the governor, Lord Dunmore, out of Virginia.
He was operating in the James River, raiding coastal plantations, encouraging indentured servants and slaves to flee their masters and join his forces.
And the 8th Virginia was one of the units that was tasked with getting him out of there.
So Suffolk was a chokepoint, as I explained, and then the Elizabeth River has three branches.
Brinkles Ordinary, Great Bridge, and Kemp's Landing controlled the three branches.
And they and others then moved in towards the Elizabeth.
They threatened Dunmore with fire rafts, and he took off.
He went up to Gwen's Island, and then by August, he was out of Virginia.
One of the soldiers, when he got to Suffolk, sat down and wrote a letter home.
One of the most amazing moments as I worked on this project was opening up an email from a woman who said, Hey, I've got a letter from my ancestor.
Maybe someone in this room can tell me I'm wrong, but I believe it is the only letter home to mom and dad from an enlisted Revolutionary War soldier.
This is what it says.
It's in German.
My brother, who was an art historian who was very good with antique German, translated it for me, but he did say first, Gabe, this isn't normal German.
It's sort of pidgin German.
I won't read it just for the sake of time, but here is an image of the actual document.
He deserted about three weeks later.
But they caught him.
Why did he desert?
Well, Major General Charles Lee showed up.
He was tasked with being the commander of the Southern Department, which is Virginia South.
Anyone who's familiar with Charles Lee knows that he was not messing around.
He did not appreciate, let's say, democratic values, and he was not nice.
But he knew what he was doing as far as military stuff goes.
So he shows up.
There was intelligence that Charles Cornwallis and Henry Clinton are going south probably to attack Charleston.
So he's going to go down and protect them.
And he looks around and he says, okay, I need the best equipped, most complete, and best armed regiment to come with me.
And he explicitly says that's the 8th Virginia Regiment.
So he takes them out of the colony and they head south.
Do you remember I said they were provincial soldiers?
Their job was to protect Virginia explicitly.
There were others by now who were continental soldiers from Virginia, but not the 8th yet.
It literally was not their job to do what Lee was telling them to do.
And they resented it.
Many of them had already marched as much as 450 miles from Pittsburgh to get to Suffolk, and now they were marching another 450 miles.
And they were not wearing hiking boots from REI.
So Heinrich Meyer and others began to desert.
And folks at home actually thought it was justified.
But many of them were recaptured, and they did go south to Charleston.
They participated in the Battle of Charleston.
The most famous episode from the battle was at Fort Sullivan or Fort Moultrie, where the British cannonaded a fort built out of soft palmetto wood, double walls filled with sand, and the cannonballs just sort of bounced off of it.
They were not there.
They were on the other end of the island blocking what we would now call an amphibious assault from Long Island at the top.
I won't do the play-by-play here, but they were in the action at the north part of that engagement.
Then when the British sailed away, they won the battle.
When the British sailed away, news arrived of the Declaration of Independence.
Now, you know, we've learned about how the Declaration was announced in Philadelphia.
They went out to the yard at Independence Hall and read it to a few hundred people.
When news arrived on about August 3rd in Charleston, Charles Lee and John Rutledge, the president of South Carolina under their revolutionary constitution, decided that they were going to stage the largest and most intimidating celebration they could muster to shush up the Tories.
So on this map, point one is the Statehouse, point two is the Exchange Building, and point three is where Charleston's Liberty Tree was.
The blue line at the bottom is a 700-man militia line.
So you've got a row of 700 militiamen, and at point one, the clerk, I think, of the Privy Council read the Declaration through one of those conical megaphones.
And then they beat the drums and they marched behind a sword.
So South Carolina had something that was called the sword of state, and it dated all the way back to the beginnings of the colony in 1704.
It was like the sword that you saw in King Charles' coronation.
It was part of the South Carolina regalia.
It symbolized the king's authority.
And at important state events, they would bring it out.
But it was normally sheathed.
After they read the declaration, the sheriff unsheathed the sword, which was not normally done, and dramatically brandished it three times, right?
Because it was a declaration of war.
We don't think of the Declaration of Independence as a declaration of war.
We think of it as a high-minded philosophical document.
It was a declaration of war.
It was certainly a rationalization of war.
So they paraded behind the sword of state to point two.
They read it again, and then the cannons blared.
They now march north with bands playing and supposedly thousands of people, everybody in town marching.
And they go all the way north to the Liberty Tree at point three, where all of the soldiers are lined up, including the 8th Virginia.
And they read it again, and then, Andrew, I can't pronounce it.
It's in feu de joie, where they all fire their guns in sequence, if I pronounce that right.
So fireworks.
The cannons boom again, and then there's a sermon, and everybody cheers.
So it was evidently by far the grandest celebration of the Declaration of Independence in any of the colonies.
That is not the actual Liberty Tree, but I assume that they found the nicest tree that they could find for it.
It dated back to the Stamp Act.
That is a southern live oak of the same species, a particularly nice one for the picture.
I hope you appreciate it.
That is the sword of state.
The tree was cut down by the British in 1780.
Sadly, the sword of state was stolen from the South Carolina capital in 1941 and has not been seen since.
The FBI, according to their website, they're still looking for it.
Then Charles Lee decided: okay, well, Dunmore's been kicked out of Virginia.
The royal governors of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia have all been kicked out.
So let's go to Florida.
Not on vacation.
East Florida was a new British colony, one in the French and Indian War.
And the Tories in the other colonies, when they fled, many of them went to Florida.
So it's now a hotbed of loyalism.
And they have formed something called the East Florida Rangers, and they've been attacking across the border into Georgia.
So Charles Lee says, let's go to St. Augustine, even further from home.
And to induce them, he promises them plunder, which is not something that you see in the Revolutionary War, certainly not from the Continental Army.
But he explicitly tells them, we're going to sack the town and you guys get to keep what we steal.
That's the incentive.
And people are mortified.
Like, you know, the gentlemen of Charleston were mortified by this, but he did it.
Simultaneously, they are falling ill from malaria, which was endemic down there.
150 men remained behind.
The rest of them headed for Florida, but they bogged down in Sunbury, where the rest of them were sick.
William Moultrie said that 15 men a day died at Sunbury.
By December, they are released to go home.
They're supposed to march in tight order, but there's just no way because some of them can barely walk.
So they are put on furlough, find their own way home, and when they get there, they're supposed to report to Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Okay, let's put a pin in all of that.
Do you remember the Suffolk Rendezvous?
Captain Cron didn't make it.
He was late, very late.
He is from the 2nd West Augusta Company from Pittsburgh.
They had 450 miles to march, and they got there more than a month after the regiment had left.
So he and other stragglers from the regiment were attached to the 1st Virginia Regiment and went north.
They were attached to George Washington's Northern Army, and they fought at all of those battles.
Cron himself fell sick, I suspect from smallpox, and he didn't participate, I think, in any of that.
But his men did.
I showed you a picture of Jonathan Clark's diary earlier.
Here's another diary.
This was kept by Sergeant Thomas McCarty.
He keeps a diary for parts of his experience, but he also, remarkably, has a complete list of messes in his notebook, where he lists groups of six people.
I won't say men, because there are wives and a couple of children in these messes.
It's a pretty remarkable document.
He also describes how cold it was on the east bank of the Delaware, and he had no blanket or shoes.
Captain Kirkpatrick, Abraham Kirkpatrick, is William Cron's first lieutenant, so he's now in charge of the Cron's detachment.
And remember, these guys all have rifles.
So he is on the far side, the New Jersey side of the Delaware in the weeks before the Battle of Trenton, skirmishing and harassing the Hessians.
This is not well documented, but here are three veterans who remember it in one way or another.
So that's a foretaste of more rifle action to come.
Remember what I said about the D-word?
You guys are supposed to boo when I say it.
Here is McCarty's diary from the Battle of Trenton.
He says, 26th December 1776, came there about daybreak and beat the damn Hessians.
Thank you.
And took 700 prisoners and the worst day of sleet rain that could be.
Life was hard.
Okay, so then 1777, here is a notice from Captain Abel Westphal from the Hampshire County Company telling everybody that they need to show up in Fredericksburg after their hard trip back from the south.
They try to refill the regiment.
They're unable to.
Recruiting becomes very difficult at this point.
A few thousand people dead from smallpox is a pretty good disincentive to enlisting.
But they were able to top off three companies and they marched east to join Washington.
Peter Muhlenberg at this point writes George Washington a letter saying, these rifles are a pain in the neck.
They're too hard to maintain.
My guys are sleeping in the open.
They're getting rusty.
I want to get rid of them and I want to replace them with muskets.
Now, we're all used to thinking of rifles as the cool weapons, right?
Daniel Morgan's rifles.
Peter Muhlenberg was sick of them.
He wanted to get rid of them.
Washington replies through his aide-de-camp, George Johnston, basically saying, okay, I hear you.
All the guys who are not really good with a rifle, they can have a musket.
But the guys who know how to use the rifles, I want them to keep the rifles.
Many of us know the differences.
A rifle has groovings inside, so it throws good, you know, like a spiral football.
Muskets, it throws a knuckleball, right?
It's far less accurate.
That's why musketeers stand in groups and shoot in one direction from close.
Riflemen have to keep a distance, and it's all about accuracy.
A rifle cannot carry a bayonet, which means that once you've shot your bullet, if you're too close to your enemy, you're toast, right?
So you have to stay back.
Muskets carry rifles.
In fact, many soldiers treated the musket as the primary weapon.
It was more of like a 17th century pike that also shot lead.
So they're used very differently.
At this point, they finally get their Continental commissions.
Here is Lieutenant Matthias Haidt's Continental Commission signed by John Hancock down there.
It's a familiar signature.
Matthias Haidt, by the way, was not a good soldier.
And the day that Washington said that they were going to stop promoting people based on whose turn it was and instead they were going to get promoted on the basis of merit, Matthias Haidt quit.
So it's nice to have his commission though.
They were assigned to Charles Scott's Brigade, which was part of Adam Stevens' division.
James Wood there, the colonel of the 12th Virginia, is the guy who traveled to Pennsylvania looking for a Lutheran pastor who could become an Anglican pastor.
Here is the first muster roll for the United Regiment when they're all together for the first time.
If you look down there, you see it says 343 enlisted guys at the bottom right.
That's about half what it should have been.
Part of the reason that it was low is that Captain James Knox from Fincastle County, that county that is all of Kentucky plus, he was detached to Morgan's Rifles and took some soldiers with him, participated in the Northern Campaign, most importantly the battles plural of Saratoga.
The rest of them participated in what we call the Philadelphia Campaign with these well-known battles.
That mill is Lucin's Mill from Germantown.
It was the primary landmark in the 8th Virginia's experience at Germantown.
Most of us hear about the Chew House.
They were nowhere near there.
Captain Dark from Berkeley County was frequently detached with riflemen.
The riflemen who were not sent with Morgan in Scott's brigade were retained as sort of Scott's own rifle detachment that he could send out for skirmishing.
And Captain Dark, who was in the middle of a promotion controversy, got to play major even though he didn't have the rank yet and led the the riflemen in these battles.
So I'm going to tell you about Germantown.
All kinds of things went at Germantown.
It went wrong at Germantown.
Mike Harris has written an excellent book on it.
There was fog, there was smoke, there was lack of coordination, some people were allegedly drunk.
Henry Knox convinced Washington to try to take out the Chew House, which was foolish.
There are all kinds of things that went wrong.
One thing that we don't hear much about, though, is that Washington had asked Congress to appoint lieutenant generals, and they declined.
Let me tell you why this is important.
The way he moved, particularly from this point forward, his troops, is he had a left wing and a right wing and then a reserve line.
He wanted each of those wings to have a lieutenant general so that the divisions who made up those wings could retain their major generals.
But Congress didn't allow that.
So as they go into battle, Washington has to elevate three major generals to act as lieutenant generals.
The 8th Virginia, which is in Charles Scott's brigade, that's number four here, in Adam Stevens' division and Nathaniel Green's wing.
Green gets pulled from his division.
Peter Muhlenberg, who is now a general, no longer part of the 8th, he gets elevated to command Greene's division.
And Colonel William Russell is elevated from the 9th, that should say the 9th Pennsylvania, is elevated to command Muhlenberg's brigade and so forth, right?
So you've got people commanding at every level who are not used to it.
And then all those other factors are true too.
So they come marching down the Limekin Road.
Their intelligence says that they're going to hit the first British picket at Lucan's Mill, which is bottom right-ish center there.
But they run into one way up at point number one there.
And the British light infantry, they skedaddle, but they fire one of these little grasshopper cannons to alert their compatriots.
So their cover's blown.
They march down.
Greene decides it's time to move from a column into a line.
And while that's happening, Adam Stephen decides, okay, we need to go get those light infantrymen who are running from us.
So he commands the 9th Virginia to go after them.
Go get them, boys.
So they charge off into the fog.
And then he turns to the 8th Virginia, which remember is no longer under the command of Peter Muhlenberg.
And the actual colonel, Abraham Bowman, is off sick or something.
So there's a new lieutenant colonel, and that lieutenant colonel, when he's told to go follow the 9th, refuses.
Don't know why.
Maybe he's a coward.
Don't know.
But he balks.
William Dark, who is now the new major, says, well, then I'll go.
And he takes about a third of the 8th Virginia, follows the 9th.
They all get captured.
Because the line that Greene has formed can't proceed At pace.
They're running into houses and fences.
There's fog, there's smoke, they can't see each other.
They're starting to hear cannon fire from the Chu House, wondering what's going on over there.
So they just end up stumbling in all sorts of different directions.
Captain Dark, his men, and the entire 9th Virginia get captured.
That's zoomed in.
They're captured here on Kelly Hill.
This is an account from Sergeant John Chenoweth of the 8th describing his capture in the battle and his time in prison.
He was eloquent but not particularly literate.
It's pretty amazing to read it if you can navigate the misspelling.
Okay, so after Germantown, I'm going to speed through some stuff.
They go to Valley Forge.
Their enlistments expire.
Most of them had signed up for two years.
So if they don't re-enlist, they go home.
The ones who did re-enlist or new enlistees, they stay.
But the regiment is severely depleted.
So they are combined with two of the other regiments in the brigade, the 4th and the 12th.
It's literally called the 4th, 8th, 12th Regiment.
They fight in that capacity at Monmouth.
They're then camped in North Jersey and New York near West Point.
Some of them participate in Stony Point and Paulus Hook.
That's a picture of Paulus Hook there.
Then those who still remain, and there are not many, enlisted men, march south in 1780 to support Benjamin Lincoln at Charleston, and they are all captured.
That is the end of the line for the 8th Virginia, as far as its sort of, you know, its pedigree goes.
Many of the soldiers continued, and many were at Yorktown.
This is my attempt to show visually the career of the 8th Virginia and its veterans.
I do not expect any of you to make sense of it right now, but if you want to study it later, you're welcome to.
Okay, now in the time I've got left, I want to, I'm going a little bit over, I'm just going to tell you about a couple of the men.
John Stevenson grew up in Berkeley County, moved to near Pittsburgh when it finally became legal to do so.
But when he was a boy, he was friends with Daniel Morgan.
And some of you, if you've read Al Zamboni's biography or you just know generally, they had this club that would meet at the Battletown Tavern in what is now Clark County.
And they would have battles.
They just would get together and have fights.
John Stevenson was part of that.
Daniel Morgan was part of that.
John's brother Hugh Stevenson was part of that.
And others were.
Stevenson up in Pennsylvania was part of the faction that was very eager for Pittsburgh to remain in Virginia and not get ceded to Pennsylvania.
There's some good stories with that, but I don't have time.
This is his hand-etched, or I should say scratched, tombstone from Kentucky.
It was actually stolen in the 70s, I think, or the 80s, and then mysteriously reappeared just a couple years ago.
That's his house in Kentucky.
William Dark, who I mentioned, he was one of the Battletown veterans.
There he is.
He is actually pretty amazing.
He first fought in the French and Indian War.
He raised a company under Virginia's Minute Battalion initiative, which was a bust, but he was one of the early Minutemen.
That company then was converted into his company of the 8th Virginia.
And he continued on.
He was the only officer to survive St. Clair's defeat in 1791 with his reputation improved.
He helped suppress the Whiskey Rebellion.
And to top it off, he got in trouble under the Alien of Sedition Acts under the Adams administration.
So quite a life.
Richard Campbell from Denmark County, he was a deputy sheriff.
He, I won't tell the whole story because I don't have time, but he died at the Battle of Utah Springs, the second most senior officer in the Virginia line to die in combat after Hugh Mercer, unless somebody can prove me wrong.
And that's him there slumped over his horse with Light Horse Harry next to him.
George Slaughter, I think we have a descendant of George Slaughter here tonight, hi Al.
He was from Culpeper County, probably in the famous Culpeper Minutemen, but we can't prove it.
He was, I think, the third most senior captain in the 8th.
Rose to become a major, transferred to the 12th Virginia.
At Valley Forge, he got news that his family, their house had burned down back in Culpeper County, and there was a smallpox outbreak, and he really needed to go home on furlough.
All they were doing was sitting in the snow anyway, because his family needed his help.
And Washington said no, can't go.
Too many guys are on furlough already.
So he got mad, and he said, well, then I quit.
And he went home to take care of his family.
Details of that, we don't know.
But then he wrote a very contrite letter to Washington saying, I'm sorry.
May I come back?
And Washington said no.
So he then led, remember the provincial soldiers?
They're no longer called that.
At this point in the war, if you're a provincial soldier, that means you're a loyalist after the Declaration.
They're now called state troops.
So he goes into the state service and leads state troops, most notably in the West under George Rogers Clark.
He is George Rogers Clark's number two at the Battle of Pequa, for example.
He was the commandant of Fort Nelson, which is now Louisville, Kentucky.
He was one of the original trustees of Louisville.
Sadly, he died penniless and is at rest in an unmarked grave in a cemetery full of unmarked graves.
It's where pioneers who had no money were buried.
Al and I have been working to take care of that.
George is going to get a marker.
That's the cemetery he's in.
That is a family plot that is pretty much destroyed.
The obelisk on the left is in two pieces.
It's a bigger hell than it looks here.
You're sort of standing halfway up the hill here.
That's it.
That's the pine.
It's Halcyon Hill Cemetery.
But there's going to be a sign soon.
James Knox, I don't have time, but he was from Fincastle County.
He was one of the original longhunters into Kentucky.
Here are two people who say that he was in Kentucky, deep into Kentucky, before Daniel Boone.
How you like them apples?
Abraham Kirkpatrick, I'm out of time.
He, just real fast, his father was a Jacobite from Scotland.
After the Battle of Culloden, his father had to get out of Dodge, so to speak.
So they fled to Maryland, where Abraham was born three years later.
When Abraham was 17, he was at a horse race, and a drunk guy came over and started a fight with him.
And Abraham beat the tar out of him.
The drunk guy had the temerity to say, well, this wasn't a fair fight because I was drunk and you were sober, and demanded a rematch.
So they had a rematch, and Kirkpatrick beat the daylights out of him again.
And then news came to Kirkpatrick that, in fact, the guy was dead.
So, like his dad, he had to get out of Dodge.
He fled west.
So this is 1767, a year before the Treaty of Fort Standwicks, meaning that him going to Pittsburgh was against the law.
It was Indian territory and he was not allowed to be there.
But like Dodge City, it was full of people who weren't supposed to be doing anything they were doing.
So he was kind of a ne'er-do-well, but he worked his way up, became a lieutenant under William Cron.
He was engaged in a duel where he shot a fellow officer.
He was caught in a tent with an enlisted man's wife.
The enlisted man shot a gun into the tent and took out Kirkpatrick's eye and part of his eye socket.
There were no consequences for at that point Captain Kirkpatrick, but the soldier was hanged for mutiny.
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