"Re-Fighting the Battle of Point Pleasant" Topic

"The Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774 has been the subject of a long-running debate in West Virginia history. Was Point Pleasant the first battle of the American Revolution?

The Battle of Point Pleasant was the culmination of Lord Dunmore's War. In response to increased violence between settlers and Native Americans in western Virginia in 1774, Virginia Governor John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, tried to impose peace on the Ohio Valley. Lord Dunmore created two armies, personally leading seventeen hundred men from the north, while Andrew Lewis directed eight hundred troops through the Kanawha Valley. Shawnee chief Keigh-tugh-qua, or Cornstalk, elected to strike the southern regiment before it united with Dunmore's force. On October 10 Cornstalk's force of approximately twelve hundred men attacked Lewis's troops at the confluence of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers at present-day Point Pleasant. The battle resulted in significant losses on both sides and forced the Shawnee to retreat to protect their settlements in the Scioto Valley of present-day Ohio. As a condition of the subsequent Treaty of Camp Charlotte, Native Americans relinquished property and hunting claims on land south of the Ohio River. Consequently, the Battle of Point Pleasant eliminated Native Americans as a threat on the frontier for the first three years of the Revolutionary War and cleared the way for more rapid settlement of the region.2

Efforts to commemorate the battle began as early as 1848. However, it was a Point Pleasant newspaper editor and publisher who led the most ambitious campaign fifty years later. In 1899 Livia Nye Simpson Poffenbarger began a crusade in the State Gazette to have Point Pleasant officially designated the "first battle of the American Revolution," despite most historical interpretations which pointed to the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775. In 1901 Poffenbarger organized the Colonel Charles Lewis Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), which lobbied the state to acquire the battlefield site. The following year, the site was dedicated as Tu-Endie-Wei Park. Poffenbarger's efforts resulted in an act passed by Congress on February 17, 1908, entitled, "A Bill to aid in the erection of a monument or memorial at Point Pleasant to commemorate the Battle of the Revolution fought at that point between the Colonial troops and Indians, October tenth, seventeen hundred and seventy-four." The bill appropriated ten thousand dollars to supplement funding for a monument at Tu-Endie-Wei. The eighty-four-foot granite obelisk was dedicated in 1909 and still stands in the park, which became Point Pleasant Battle Monument State Park in 1956…"
More here
link

Amicalement
Armand

Lets see if I understand the above statement. The first battle in the war for American independence from British rule was fought by troops organised by the British royal governor of Virginia, to protect the inhabitants of Virginia from Native Americans?

You have grasped the essence, yes.

During the 19th century there was a movement co-opting American history by New Englanders. You have the myth of Plymouth pushing aside the earlier colonization of Virginia. You have the rise of the myth of the First Thanksgiving, which wasn't the first in the Americas or even first in the English colonies, and wasn't very religious. You have the myth of New England as a bastion of religious freedom when it was mostly the freedom to be a Puritan. In the 17th century there were a number of English colonies which allowed greater religious freedom than Massachusetts.

After a while you start seeing push back against this trend. Point Pleasant as the first battle of the American Revolution is part of this push back. A British governor leading a contingent of Virginia raised militia against Indians who were acting solely in their own interests and not as allies of the British government hardly fits in the American Revolution narrative.

Point Pleasant is important to understand why the AWI broke out. At the same time as the British government is attempting to tax its North American colonies to cover the cost of their protection, the British forces are being concentrated in eastern cities where they are no help against the greatest threat to those colonies. As a result the colonies are required to provide for their own defense. (If you want to look at it from the Native American point of view, the colonists are having to carry out their land grabs solely on their own, without the assistance of British forces.)

Thanks Bill N!.

Amicalement
ARmand