Westsylvania was a proposed state of the United States located in what is now West Virginia, southwestern Pennsylvania, and small parts of Kentucky, Maryland, and Virginia. First proposed early in the American Revolution, Westsylvania would have been the fourteenth state in the newly formed United States, had it been recognized.
 |
In the years before the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), jurisdiction of the region west of the Allegheny Mountains around Pittsburgh and along the Ohio River had been disputed between the British colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania. The Mason-Dixon line, which officially established the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland, would have also settled the Virginia-Pennsylvania boundary dispute, but the surveying of the final miles of the Mason-Dixon line was abandoned in 1767 and would not be completed until 1784. In the early 1770s it was therefore unclear whether Pittsburgh and environs were in Pennsylvania or Virginia. [1] Both colonies proceeded as if they had the better claim to the area. Virginia administered the region as the District of West Augusta, while in Pennsylvania it was considered a part of Westmoreland County.
Complicating this border dispute were the vast land claims of the Ohio Company of Virginia and the Indiana Land Company along the Ohio River. The two companies combined forces in 1769 to create the Grand Ohio Company with the intention of creating a colony known as Vandalia, which would have had similar borders to Westsylvania had it been recognized. The outbreak of the American Revolutionary War effectively brought an end to the efforts to establish Vandalia.
Many settlers in the region believed that the governments of Virginia and Pennsylvania were too far removed from the west and were apathetic to western concerns. Inspired by the ideals of the American Revolution, in the summer of 1776 settlers in the region proclaimed their independence from Pennsylvania and Virginia by petitioning the Second Continental Congress to recognize Westsylvania as the fourteenth state. [2] In "The Memorial of the Inhabitants of the Country, West of the Allegheny Mountains," the petitioners reviewed the dispute between Pennsylvania and Virginia, which they believed would "in all Probability terminate in a Civil War". They also informed the Congress that "Land Jobbers" were facilitating unlawful encroachment on Indian land, which would produce "a bloody, ruinous & destructive War with the Indians...." Hoping to create order out of this chaos, the petitioners therefore asked that:
the Said Country be constituted declared & acknowledged a separate, distinct, and independent Province & Government by the Title and under the name of — 'the Province & Government of Westsylvania,' be empowered and enabled to form such Laws & Regulations & such a System of Polity & Government as is best adapted & most agreeable to the peculiar Necessities, local Circumstances & Situation thereof & its inhabitants invested with every other power, Right, Privilege & Immunity, vested, or to be vested in the other American Colonies, be considered as a Sister Colony & the fourteenth Province of the American Confederacy.... [3]
States with western land claims were reluctant to recognize the independence of frontier regions, however, and so Congress chose to ignore the petition. In an apparent effort to strengthen its political control of the area, in November 1776 Virginia reorganized the District of West Augusta into three counties: Ohio County, Monongalia County, and Yohogania County. [4] Pennsylvania and Virginia finally settled the boundary dispute in 1780. [5]
Settlement of the boundary dispute sparked a renewal of the Westsylvania movement among Virginians who were outraged to find themselves now living in Pennsylvania. Contributing to this separatist sentiment were those frontiersmen who believed that the national government was not doing enough to protect them from Native American attacks on the western frontier in the final years of the Revolutionary War. In 1782, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a Pittsburgh lawyer and strong supporter of the national government, convinced the Pennsylvania Assembly to declare that agitation for a separate state was treason. [6] This made promotion of Westsylvania subject to the death penalty. [7] Pennsylvania also sent secret agents, such as the Reverend James Finley, to work against the Westsylvania movement. [7] According to historian Jack Sosin, "Finley's efforts, the threat that the settlers' land might be sold, and the cool reaction to the proposed new state by Congress finally quieted the Westerners." [7]
For similar contemporary movements, see:
The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was issued by King George III on 7 October 1763. It followed the Treaty of Paris (1763), which formally ended the Seven Years' War and transferred French territory in North America to Great Britain. The Proclamation forbade all settlements west of a line drawn along the Appalachian Mountains, which was delineated as an Indian Reserve. Exclusion from the vast region of Trans-Appalachia created discontent between Britain and colonial land speculators and potential settlers. The proclamation and access to western lands was one of the first significant areas of dispute between Britain and the colonies and would become a contributing factor leading to the American Revolution. The 1763 proclamation line is situated similar to the Eastern Continental Divide, extending from Georgia to the divide's northern terminus near the middle of the northern border of Pennsylvania, where it intersects the northeasterly St. Lawrence Divide, and extends further through New England.
The Transylvania Colony, also referred to as the Transylvania Purchase, was a short-lived, extra-legal colony founded in early 1775 by North Carolina land speculator Richard Henderson, who formed and controlled the Transylvania Company. Henderson and his investors had reached an agreement to purchase a vast tract of Cherokee lands west of the southern and central Appalachian Mountains through the acceptance of the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals with most leading Cherokee chieftains then controlling these lands. In exchange for the land the tribes received goods worth, according to the estimates of some scholars, about 10,000 British pounds. To further complicate matters, this early American frontier land was also claimed by both the Virginia Colony and Province of North Carolina.
The Ohio Country, was a name used before 1787 for a region of North America west of the Appalachian Mountains, north of the upper Ohio and Allegheny rivers, and extending to Lake Erie. The area roughly encompassed present-day northwestern West Virginia, Western Pennsylvania, most of Ohio, and a wedge of southeastern Indiana.
Lord Dunmore's War, also known as Dunmore's War, was a brief conflict in fall 1774 between the British Colony of Virginia and the Shawnee and Mingo in the transappalachian region of the colony south of the Ohio River. The governor of Virginia during the conflict was John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, who in May, 1774, asked the House of Burgesses to declare a state of war with the Mingo and Shawnee and call out the Virginia militia.
The history of Pennsylvania stems back thousands of years when the first indigenous peoples occupied the area of what is now Pennsylvania. In 1681, Pennsylvania became an English colony when William Penn received a royal deed from King Charles II of England. Although European activity in the region precedes that date. The area was home to the Lenape, Susquehannocks, Iroquois, Erie, Shawnee, Arandiqiouia, and other American Indian tribes. Most of these tribes were driven off or reduced to remnants as a result of diseases, such as smallpox.
The Ohio Company, formally known as the Ohio Company of Virginia, was a land speculation company organized for the settlement by Virginians of the Ohio Country and to trade with the Native Americans. The company had a land grant from Britain and a treaty with Indians, but France also claimed the area, and the conflict helped provoke the outbreak of the French and Indian War.
The Treaty of Fort Stanwix was a treaty signed between representatives from the Iroquois and Great Britain in 1768 at Fort Stanwix. It was negotiated between Sir William Johnson, his deputy George Croghan, and representatives of the Iroquois.
The state cessions are those areas of the United States that the separate states ceded to the federal government in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The cession of these lands, which for the most part lay between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, was key to establishing a harmonious union among the former British colonies.
William Crawford was an American military officer and surveyor who worked as a land agent for George Washington. Crawford fought in the French and Indian War and the American Revolutionary War. He was tortured and burned at the stake by American Indians during the Crawford expedition in retaliation for the Gnadenhutten massacre, which saw 96 Christian Munsee massacred by the Pennsylvania Militia on March 8, 1782.
George Croghan was an Irish-born fur trader in the Ohio Country of North America who became a key early figure in the region. In 1746 he was appointed to the Onondaga Council, the governing body of the Iroquois, and remained so until he was banished from the frontier in 1777 during the American Revolutionary War. Emigrating from Ireland to Pennsylvania in 1741, he had become an important trader by going to the villages of Indigenous Peoples, learning their languages and customs, and working on the frontier where previously mostly French had been trading. During and after King George's War of the 1740s, he helped negotiate new treaties and alliances for the British with Native Americans.
The western theater of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) was the area of conflict west of the Appalachian Mountains, the region which became the Northwest Territory of the United States as well as what would become the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Spanish Louisiana. The western war was fought between American Indians with their British allies in Detroit, and American settlers south and east of the Ohio River, and also the Spanish as allies of the latter.
Fort Pitt was a fort built by British forces between 1759 and 1761 during the French and Indian War at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, where the Ohio River is formed in western Pennsylvania. It was near the site of Fort Duquesne, a French colonial fort built in 1754 as tensions increased between Great Britain and France in both Europe and North America. The French destroyed Fort Duquesne in 1758 when they retreated under British attack.
William Irvine was an Irish-American physician, soldier, and statesman from Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He practiced medicine as a ship's surgeon for the Royal Navy before he sympathized with the American Revolution and fought against the British during the American Revolutionary War. As tensions escalated between the American colonies and the British government during the 1770s, Irvine sympathized and allied himself with the revolutionary cause. He subsequently served as a brigadier general in the American Revolutionary War and served in the western theater. After the war he served in the Continental Congress, and later played an active role in ending the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania. He also served one term in Congress representing Pennsylvania, and was also active in the state's other public affairs.
Yohogania County was created by the new state of Virginia in 1776, in an area long disputed between Virginia and Pennsylvania. The county ceased to exist after the border dispute between the two states was resolved in the 1780s. Thus, it is sometimes referred to as a "lost county," although 1.5 million people live within the territory it once claimed, which encompasses two entire counties and parts of four others in two states.
Hugh Henry Brackenridge was an American writer, lawyer, judge, and justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
Charlotina was the suggested name for a popularly proposed British crown colony which was to be established in America following the end of the Seven Years' War, in which Great Britain had acquired a large portion of New France in 1763. However, the proposal was met with little official enthusiasm, as the British government's Royal Proclamation of 1763 forbade the creation of new colonies in the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys. Had such a colony been founded, it would have included the region lying west of the Maumee and Wabash rivers; north of the Ohio River; east of the upper Mississippi River; and south of the Great Lakes. These boundaries would include portions of modern-day Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, and the entirety of Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Charlotina would have included modern-day cities such as Chicago, Milwaukee, Toledo, Detroit, Fort Wayne, and parts of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
John Neville was an American military officer, land speculator, and local official who served in the French and Indian War, Lord Dunmore's War and the American Revolutionary War. As an early federal tax collector he became a central figure in the Whiskey Rebellion.
"Indian Reserve" is a historical term for the largely uncolonized land in North America that was claimed by France, ceded to Great Britain through the Treaty of Paris (1763) at the end of the Seven Years' War—also known as the French and Indian War—and set aside for the First Nations in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The British government had contemplated establishing an Indian barrier state in a portion of the reserve west of the Appalachian Mountains, bounded by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and the Great Lakes. British officials aspired to establish such a state even after the region was assigned to the United States in the Treaty of Paris (1783) ending the American Revolutionary War, but abandoned their efforts in 1814 after losing military control of the region during the War of 1812.
Vandalia was the name in the late 1700s of a proposed British colony in North America. The colony would have been located south of the Ohio River, primarily in what are now West Virginia and northeastern Kentucky.
Thomas Gaddis (1742–1834) was a militia officer in the American Revolutionary War. He was born December 28, 1742, in Winchester, Frederick County, Virginia and married Hannah Rice in 1764; the same year he built Fort Gaddis, a refuge from the Indians, located on the Catawba Trail. In fact, Pennsylvania and Virginia had conflicting claims in the area Gaddis settled. Though he maintained his loyalty to Virginia, Gaddis also protected his investment by recording his patent with Pennsylvania authorities. By 1773, both states created new geo-political boundaries in recognition of increased white settlement. Pennsylvania formed Westmoreland County out of the larger Bedford County, and Virginia established the District of West Augusta. In 1776, West Augusta was further divided into three counties: Ohio, Yohogania, and Monongalia, where Gaddis and his family resided.