The Ohio Company: How Virginia’s Gentry Tried to Colonize the West

[00:00:01]In the middle decades of the 18th century, the destiny of the North American continent hinged on the actions of a few great men, chief among them one of the greatest of the Lees.

[00:00:12]Two great European empires, the maritime empire of Great Britain and the great military monarchy of Bourbon France, looked upon the vast, fertile interior of North America, the Ohio River Valley, is the key to colonial supremacy, the next great prize to be obtained.

[00:00:29]The Bourbon monarchies, ministers, and Paris, the Ohio River was the vital corridor connecting their northern provinces in New France, their southern sugar colonies at the mouth of the Mississippi and in the Caribbean.

[00:00:43]If the French crown could encircle the English coastal settlements by constructing a chain of permanent stone forts from Lake Erie to New Orleans, the British colonies would be forever confined to a narrow, suffocating strip of increasingly exhausted soil between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean.

[00:01:03]The British knew this, and knew of the threat. Yet, the primary challenge to this French imperial encirclement of His Majesty's possessions in North America came not from the ministry in London, nor from the Royal Army, but from a small, tightly-knit collection of elite Virginia planters, the cream of the Virginia gentry.

[00:01:24]At the center of this corporate vanguard, the leader of the movement to take Ohio for Albion, stood the master of Stratford Hall, Thomas Lee.

[00:01:34]Thomas Lee was a figure of singular, expansive imagination, a man who recognized, before almost any of his Tidewater and Northern Net contemporaries, that the true future of English-speaking civilization in North America lay beyond the blue crests of the Allegheny Ridges.

[00:01:51]By organizing the Ohio Company of Virginia, Lee sought to fuse the financial and territorial ambitions of his dynasty with the expansionist ambitions of the British Crown, engineering a massive, transmontane land grant that would secure the West for Virginia planters, much as Spotswood's Knights of the Golden, Horseshoe had a generation earlier, as we covered in our episode on that hard-drinking escapade.

[00:02:19]In this episode, we will explore the history of the Ohio Company of Virginia through the lens of the Lee family.

[00:02:26]We will trace how Thomas Lee laid the legal and diplomatic groundwork for Western penetration through the Landmark Treaty of Lancaster in 1744.

[00:02:36]We will show how the old planter oligarchy of the James River Basin, led by Speaker John Robinson, attempted to paralyze Thomas Lee's Western schemes.

[00:02:46]And we'll chart the explosive sequence of events in the wilderness that started the French and Indian War and turned the corporate property dispute into a global conflagration.

[00:02:58]Then, finally, we'll observe how Richard Henry Lee, along with a few of his friends and contemporaries, inherited the transmontane mantle, waging a decades-long war against British land jobbers and rival speculation syndicates, a struggle that directly fueled the radicalization of the Virginia gentry and ultimately led to the cession of the Northwest Territory to the new United States.

[00:03:24]So two things before we begin with getting into the episode proper.

[00:03:28]One, yes, this is a break from the history of the individual members of the Lee family of Virginia.

[00:03:33]We'll get back to that in the next episode with Francis Lightfoot Lee.

[00:03:37]What happened was I found another work on him that I wanted to finish before doing the episode on him just to make sure it's as high quality as possible.

[00:03:45]And also I read a great book on the Ohio Company of Virginia recently while doing my background research.

[00:03:51]It's called The Ohio Company of Virginia, It's Inner History by Alfred James and wanted to do a show on this fascinating subject anyway.

[00:03:59]And then second, just a show note, I'm going to try and keep this one more of a narrative rather than interspersing quotes from the books I have read on it.

[00:04:08]I have been adding those quotes in to show I'm not just making things up and to accentuate certain points.

[00:04:13]But since this is kind of a different episode anyway about a different subject than the series that has been going on, though it is deeply connected to the Lee family, I thought I might as well do otherwise here. So you could see the difference.

[00:04:25]I haven't done this in a while with just doing the narrative instead of adding in the block quotes.

[00:04:30]And that way you can decide whether you think the quotes add support that's worth breaking up the narrative a bit for or not.

[00:04:36]Please just let me know in a comment whether you prefer it with or without all the quotes in it. Now, thanks, and let's get back to it.

[00:04:43]To comprehend why the Ohio Company of Virginia was founded, one must first look at the unique background and thus perspective of Thomas Lee.

[00:04:53]Born in 1690 as the fifth son of Richard Lee II, Thomas was a man who entered maturity with next to no inherited land or capital, as we covered in our episode on his great life.

[00:05:05]Because of the sort of effective primogeniture that operated amongst the Virginia gentry, the vast Lee estates in Westmoreland and Gloucester had passed to his elder brother, leaving Thomas to carve out his own fortune through boldness.

[00:05:20]But fortune favors the bold, and at the age of 23, Thomas Lee secured an appointment as the resident manager of the famed Northern Neck Proprietary for Lady Fairfax, a position that required him to survey millions of acres of wild, unpatented forest between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers.

[00:05:40]This early exposure to the wilderness didn't just help Thomas earn a fortune.

[00:05:44]It also really altered his geographical orientation.

[00:05:48]While most Tidewater Grandes sat upon their riverfront verandas and looked eastward across the Atlantic towards London, Thomas Lee turned his face toward the west, toward the wilderness, toward the frontier.

[00:06:01]He looked at the royal charter granted to Virginia by King James I in 1609, which defined the colony's boundaries as extending, quote, from sea to sea, west and northwest, end quote.

[00:06:14]To Thomas Lee, these words were not just illegal fiction stemming from the frivolity of the Stuarts.

[00:06:20]They were the reality. They were Virginia's reality. He maintained that Virginia's territorial jurisdiction, or at least what it could be, stretched uninterrupted across the mountains to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, then commonly called the South Sea, and he viewed any French pressure and presence in that interior with unremitting hostility.

[00:06:43]Hostility rooted perhaps in pro-British, pro-colonial feeling, but also certainly in his personal territorial ambitions.

[00:06:50]As he bluntly informed the Lords of Trade in London, who helped govern the Virginia colony, the French are intruders into this America.

[00:07:00]However, claiming the West on the parchment of Royal Grant was a fundamentally different matter than securing it on the ground.

[00:07:09]The vast territory beyond the Blue Ridge was inhabited and controlled by the powerful Native American nations of the Six Nations Confederacy, commonly known as the Iroquois, which is what I'll be referring to them as in this episode.

[00:07:21]The Iroquois claimed the entire Ohio Valley by right of conquest and tradition, and their, warriors routinely traveled along the eastern slopes of the mountains, clashing with English settlers who were beginning to squat upon the frontier as they went beyond the mountains.

[00:07:40]Recognizing the colony required a clear legal, extinguishment of Iroquois claims before any real colonization could begin, the colonial governments of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania organized a great treaty conference at Lancaster, Pennsylvania in the summer of 1744.

[00:08:01]Thomas Lee was appointed as the senior commissioner representing the colony of Virginia, serving alongside Colonel William Beverley.

[00:08:09]For nearly two weeks in late June and early July 1744, Lee conducted negotiations inside the courthouse at Lancaster.

[00:08:18]He deployed every tool of 18th century frontier diplomacy, applying the Indians with speeches, with wool cloth, with guns, and of course with wampum, the beads Indians used as currency, something which we covered in our episodes on Lewis and Clark.

[00:08:34]Those beads were of critical importance to those two Virginians as well.

[00:08:38]In any case, Thomas Lee's maneuver at Lancaster was brilliant, was calculated, and it was effective.

[00:08:45]While the Iroquois delegates believed that they were merely recognizing Virginia's right to settle the lands east of the Allegheny Ridge, Lee drafted the final deed of session to state that the Six Nations relinquished all claims to any land within the Kingdom of Virginia as far as it then extended or would be extended in the future, which is to say all the way to the Pacific.

[00:09:10]By obtaining the signatures of the Iroquois Chiefs on July 2nd, 1744, in exchange for about 400 pounds sterling, which in those days was a large sum, in currency and goods, Thomas Lee had secured the legal deed that Virginia used to justify its claim to the entire Ohio River Basin.

[00:09:32]So, upon his victorious return to Stratford Hall, Thomas Lee didn't relax, inclined to sloth, no, always an accumulator and a man of action, and guided by his wisdom and ability to look well into the future, to become and be such, to become this great man, this wealthy man, he recognized that the Treaty of Lancaster was still just a piece of paper.

[00:09:55]That was until it was backed by actual physical occupation, and that occupation had to happen relatively rapidly.

[00:10:03]Pennsylvania fur traders were already crossing the mountains and establishing lucrative trade networks with the local tribes, and Frenchmen were pouring in as well.

[00:10:11]There were engineers potentially situating forts to protect their fur trappers and Indian traders, and there were a lot of those French traders and trappers.

[00:10:19]Action was needed on behalf of Virginia, and it was needed fast.

[00:10:23]So to preempt both Pennsylvania and France, at least when it came to the more fertile and agriculturally important parts of the valley, Thomas Lee took the step of organizing a private joint stock corporation designed to colonize the West.

[00:10:38]In the late months of 1747 and the early spring of 1748, Lee gathered together a select group of wealthy, influential neighbors, particularly fellow planters from the northern Neck and nearby northern Virginia in Maryland.

[00:10:54]He recruited Lawrence Washington and his younger brother Augustine Washington of Mount Vernon, George Mason of Gunston Hall, and several prominent Maryland figures, including James Wardrop and Nathaniel Chapman.

[00:11:08]Also importantly, Lee recognized that securing capital for this venture and political leverage in Great Britain would require a powerful London partner.

[00:11:19]So he brought in John Harbury, a very, very wealthy Quaker merchant in London who possessed extensive connections with the Board of Trade and the King's Privy Council.

[00:11:29]This would make lobbying them far easier.

[00:11:32]Together, this syndicate organized themselves as the Ohio Company of Virginia.

[00:11:38]The company's objective was quite large in scale, though overshadowed by a much larger scheme later on, but this one was large enough.

[00:11:46]They petitioned the Crown for a grant of 500,000 acres of fertile land situated in the Ohio River Basin, specifically focusing on the strategic and trade-important region that surrounded the forks of the Ohio, which can essentially be thought of as the site of present-day Pittsburgh.

[00:12:05]To fulfill the expected terms of the grant, the Ohio company pledged to construct a fortified outpost on the river, import 4,000 pounds sterling worth of manufactured goods from London to establish an Indian trade, and to seat at least 100 families upon the land within seven years.

[00:12:24]So this would be corporation-delivered mercantilism and empire-building, not entirely unlike that which happened in Sarawak some centuries on, or about a century on, actually, as we covered in the White Rajah's episodes.

[00:12:38]In any case, back to Thomas Lee in Virginia. Under this plan, the company would reap vast profits by selling land to incoming settlers and monopolizing the pelt trade, the fur trade, along with things related to it, while the British Empire would acquire, really a fortified human barrier of settlement against French aggression, which was relevant and necessary to them because it was much the same thing that the Tidewater Colony in the Chesapeake had originally been meant as when Britain built its first New World bulwark against Spanish power back in the, Tudor days and then early Stuart days, as we covered in our episode on John Smith.

[00:13:19]So it was an exciting plan. It was a big plan. They had some reasons to expect success with it, but Thomas Lee's bold transmontane scheme encountered immediate and very fierce resistance.

[00:13:31]Not from the French, not even from the Iroquois, rather from the political arena in Williamsburg.

[00:13:39]So 18th century Virginia was far from a unified political entity, even at the top amongst those topping people and FFV families that we've covered in a past episode.

[00:13:50]Virginia in this period was fractured in some ways, and it was divided by geography, family alliances, and economic rivalries.

[00:13:57]And so one of the big splits was between the Northern Neck and then the lower Tidewater.

[00:14:01]The great planter families of the Northern Neck and its environs, the Lees, the Washingtons, the Masons, operated as one distinct geographic political power block.

[00:14:12]They were frequently viewed with jealousy as they were kind of the new men and increasingly wealthy with their new, more fertile soil, and they were viewed by jealousy by the dominant James River faction, which was an entrenched oligarchy centered around Williamsburg and the southern rivers of Virginia.

[00:14:30]That James River faction was the old money amongst old money, as much at the top of the pyramid as anyone in Virginia.

[00:14:38]At the head of the James River oligarchy stood John Robinson.

[00:14:42]Robinson was the speaker of the House of Burgesses and the treasurer of the colony, a dual concentration of public office that made him the most formidable Native politician in Virginia for much of his life.

[00:14:54]And we've covered him in both of our episodes on Richard Henry Lee, particularly the second one involving Lee in Washington, as Richard Henry was the one who exposed his major corruption after the end of his life and kind of at the end of his life.

[00:15:07]So he was very powerful. He combined the treasurer and speaker positions.

[00:15:12]But this was earlier in Robinson's life, by a couple of decades, actually.

[00:15:15]And so Robinson was working with his allies, including powerful men like Edmund Pendleton, the Randolph family, which was one of the more important first families of Virginia, and Dr. Thomas Walker.

[00:15:28]This collection learned of Thomas Lee's petition for half a million acres on the Ohio, and they reacted with alarm, recognizing that if the northern neck planters, with whom they were constantly feuding politically, gained control over the Ohio River Valley, then they would establish a real economic monopoly over the western land market and strip these James River Grandes of their speculatory prospects.

[00:15:55]As more and more land was ever needed to grow tobacco because it exhausted the soil, as we covered in our episode on it, That was a big problem for them. So to counter Thomas Lee's initiative, John Robinson and his associates rapidly organized a competing syndicate known as the Loyal Land Company.

[00:16:13]Operating through their influence inside the Governor's Council in Williamsburg, the Loyal Land Company, secured a rival grant of 800,000 acres situated to the south of the Ohio Company's claims, encompassing much of what's now southwestern Virginia and eastern Kentucky.

[00:16:33]Simultaneously, the James River faction used its influence over Virginia's aging, lieutenant governor, Sir William Gooch, to stall and obstruct the Ohio Company's land petitions, particularly as they got into London.

[00:16:47]Governor Gooch, who was cautious by nature and wanted to preserve political harmony, he was an old man after all, among the Tidewater gentry, the Virginia gentry generally, hesitated to endorse the Ohio company's half a million acre request, and he offered vague excuses regarding the danger of provoking a military retaliation from the French, as if the Virginians ever cared really much about that.

[00:17:14]Recognizing that his petitions were being suffocated by the executive branch and its offices at Williamsburg, Thomas Lee decided to embark upon an end run around the governor.

[00:17:27]Bypassing Governor Gooch, Lee instructed the London share owner, John Hanbury, to take the Ohio Company's petition directly to the steps of the throne.

[00:17:38]So Hanbury leveraged his standing within British mercantile circles and presented a petition to the Lord's Commissioners for Trade and Plantations.

[00:17:49]He framed the Ohio Company of Virginia not as a money-grubbing land speculation scheme that was being engaged in by rapacious new men, which would have been the unfriendly way to describe it, but as a, vital instrument of British colonial strategy that would expand King George's dominions into the North American continent, and ensure that it wasn't strangled in the cradle by the French.

[00:18:14]Leaning into Lee's general argument, Hanbury told the somewhat skeptical Board of Trade that unless the Crown granted the land to Thomas Lee's syndicate, the French would solidify their hold on the Ohio River, and British trade in North America would be systematically destroyed.

[00:18:29]So holding out the carrot as well as the stick, he argued that the Ohio Company of Virginia would be, if given this large block of land, promoting British trade and settlement along the frontier at no real cost to the Crown.

[00:18:42]Undeveloped Western lands that the British didn't really even own.

[00:18:47]Hadn't settled, at least, was of no cost to the Crown. It could just give those away. So why not? Why not take this chance on the company?

[00:18:54]Surprisingly, that argument and strategy was completely successful, or more or less successful.

[00:19:00]On March 16, 1749, the King's Privy Council issued a binding royal instruction directly to Lieutenant Governor Gooch, in which he was commanded to issue an initial grant of 200,000 acres to the Ohio Company without requiring any down payment for quit rents for a period of 10 years, with a promise of an additional 300,000 acres once the initial conditions of settlement, fortification, and trade were fulfilled.

[00:19:27]So Gooch and the Robinson faction had been outmaneuvered, the governor had to execute the royal mandate, and the Ohio Company formally secured its foothold in the West, but only under conditions.

[00:19:40]It was, on its own volition, put under binding terms about the settlement of families and the construction of a fort in storehouses, a burden and a risk voluntarily assumed by the company promoters in 1747, probably to make the scheme more amenable to the Board of Trade and other authorities.

[00:20:01]And so these conditions had been imposed by themselves. They weren't imposed upon them, excuse me, by their opponents in Virginia or by imperial officials in London.

[00:20:11]But these terms were still to prove onerous and something of a problem for the company.

[00:20:16]Now it had to settle the West and trade with the Indians on its own resources, which was just as difficult a task, if not more so, than getting a skeptical king to agree to a huge land grant.

[00:20:27]Difficult as that may have seemed, the Ohio Company of Virginia did have wind in its sales.

[00:20:32]It had gotten the initial grant, had a great many great planters on its side, had the resources necessary for the Indian trade and settlement, as it has raised capital from the stockholders, that's why it sold the shares, and perhaps most importantly, Governor Gooch was gone, and Thomas Lee had been made acting governor of Virginia.

[00:20:50]He wasn't corrupt, but he would help the company if he could.

[00:20:55]It was his baby, after all, and settling the West was his dream.

[00:20:59]So, angry as the French, the Pennsylvanians, and the more southern Tidewater Barons would be about the whole enterprise, there was peace, even with the French, and so the scheme could go forward. There was hope it would succeed.

[00:21:12]If there was a time that these landed men of northern Virginia could settle the West with the Scots-Irish and German settlers that they wanted to import to beat 100 families that they settled there, it was now.

[00:21:24]In the middle of July 1749, the Ohio Company of Virginia was well organized, its finances were in good shape, and it had, after two years delay, finally received the Western lands on terms that were suggested by itself.

[00:21:37]So it had an opportunity for success.

[00:21:40]But right around this moment of what could and should have in triumph, the founder of the enterprise was removed from the scene.

[00:21:48]Thomas Lee, recently elevated to president of the King's Council and acting governor of Virginia, died at Stratford Hall in November 1750.

[00:21:57]Lawrence Washington had to take over and do his best to keep the ball moving, though he soon died too, and things petered out for a bit.

[00:22:04]The self-sought, but restricting terms of the grant, the complications of foreign affairs, namely war that was soon to come, and the intricacies of imperial and colonial claims were destined to ruin the plans of the Ohio Company.

[00:22:18]Thomas Lee had really been the mainspring of it, and it was very troubled after he left and had trouble doing what perhaps he would have been able to push through because he was this bold visionary and very successful man who had achieved much in his life.

[00:22:33]So, in his last will and testament, Thomas Lee structured the disposal of his Ohio company stock, trying to preserve his family's power within the corporation, ability to influence it, because he wanted to keep his surname connected to the fate of the West, and the expansion upon the frontier.

[00:22:50]And the Lee family, it should be noted, had been involved in doing exactly that in Virginia since the 1740s. Just check out my episode on Richard Lee I.

[00:22:58]He settled the frontier, not the established area. At that time, the frontier was in a very different place. Anyway, Thomas Lee bequeathed one complete share, and as a side note, each holder of capital in the company had received two shares initially, and each share was alienable.

[00:23:14]So this one full share went to his eldest son, Philip Ludwell Lee, who inherited Stratford Hall.

[00:23:20]The second share he ordered to be held jointly with the profits, if there were any, divided equally among three of his middle sons, Thomas Ludwell Lee, Richard Henry Lee, and Francis Lightfoot Lee.

[00:23:33]We covered the Lee brothers of Stratford Hall in an episode on them.

[00:23:36]If you want an insight into their relationship and why these three were chosen to jointly hold a share, the short answer is that they were of age where they could do so responsibly and they got along.

[00:23:47]Philip didn't get along well with his brothers.

[00:23:50]So though these young men were still in their adolescence or early 20s, they did inherit a stake in the Western wilderness and were now legally and financially bound to defend their father's transmontane vision against both rival domestic oligarchs and foreign empires.

[00:24:07]But following the death of Thomas Lee, the leadership of the Ohio Company passed to Lawrence, Washington.

[00:24:13]And upon Lawrence's death in 1752, leadership went to a revolving committee of directors that included George Mason and Philip Ludwell Lee.

[00:24:25]The main problem facing the company at this point was the physical exploration and mapping of their vast wilderness grant.

[00:24:33]So they tried to accomplish this at first, and to do so they hired Christopher Gist, a legendary Maryland frontiersman, surveyor, woodsman.

[00:24:41]Beginning in late 1750 and 1752, Gist undertook two really heroic reconnaissance expeditions across the Allegheny Mountains. I might do an episode on him in the future.

[00:24:52]Traveling through regions that were virtually unknown to Englishmen, Gist mapped the course of the Ohio River down to the falls of the Ohio at present-day Louisville, identifying choice agricultural lands, establishing friendly relations with local Shawnee and Delaware chiefs, and searching for the best sites for future settlements.

[00:25:13]Simultaneously, the Ohio company began constructing physical infrastructure to link the Potomac with the western waters.

[00:25:21]At Wills Creek, the present site of Cumberland, Maryland, they erected a substantial fortified log storehouse, filling it with London trade goods imported at a cost of 2,000 pounds sterling, half of the burden they had assumed in exchange for the grant.

[00:25:39]Those trade goods were actually eventually sold at a profit margin of close to 50%, as was the next shipment, which also was of 2,000 pounds and thus hit the threshold they'd agreed to.

[00:25:49]They ordered a third shipment, also for 2,000 pounds sterling, from England of trade goods.

[00:25:56]Those languished somewhat for reasons outside of the company's control, but the trading operation of the Ohio company was generally profitable over time.

[00:26:05]To support its trading operation, under the direction of Gist and a Delaware Indian chief named Nemecolin, the company hacked out a rough wagon road across 80 miles of mountain wilderness from Wills Creek to the Redstone Creek opening on the Monagahela River.

[00:26:22]This Ohio company road became actually the first commercial highway connecting the Atlantic watershed with the Mississippi Basin.

[00:26:30]Building roads back then was very difficult, so this was quite the achievement.

[00:26:34]In 1751, the Ohio Company's political position inside Virginia, so this is when Lawrence Washington's running the show, was actually strengthened a little bit.

[00:26:42]Robert Dinwiddie arrived in Williamsburg to assume his duties as the colony's new lieutenant governor.

[00:26:48]Dinwiddie was himself a shareholder in the Ohio Company, having purchased a stock interest while residing in London back before he became the lieutenant governor.

[00:26:58]Dinwiddie viewed the success of the Ohio Company, Virginia, as essentially identical in terms of interest with the imperial strategic interests of Great Britain.

[00:27:09]And thus, he saw the company as something to be aided rather than stimmied or derided.

[00:27:14]And he placed the full weight of the colonial government behind the company's operations, authorizing the construction of public forts to protect private property.

[00:27:23]Particularly the company's storehouses, and rejecting rival petitions from the James River Faction, so the table had turned on them.

[00:27:33]This aggressive Virginian advance into the interior, did not escape the attention of the French court. The governor-general of New France, the Marquis Duquesne, recognized that the Ohio Company's road and storehouses represented a threat to the French empire, particularly if it kept pushing west.

[00:27:53]So in the spring of 1753, Duquesne dispatched a French military expedition of over 2,000 regular troops and native allies to occupy the Ohio Valley.

[00:28:04]The French forces marched south from Lake Erie, constructing a sequence of timber forts in the wilderness.

[00:28:12]Fort Presque Isle, Fort Leboeuf, Fort Vinango, sorry, I can't pronounce foreign names generally. I do apologize. Did my best there.

[00:28:24]The point of those forts was to drive out Ohio company fur traders and seize company property.

[00:28:31]Hopefully there's no more names like that. Governor Dinwiddie, committed to the mission of imperial expansion, reacted with immediate vigor.

[00:28:39]In October 1753, he selected a 21-year-old major in the Virginia Militia, who was also a surveyor for the Ohio Company, to carry an ultimatum to French commanders.

[00:28:51]Yes, that young officer was George Washington. Accompanied by Christopher Gist as his guide, Washington journeyed through snow and ice to Fort Leboeuf, delivering Dinwiddie's letter demanding that the French immediately evacuate British soil.

[00:29:06]The French commander politely but firmly rejected this ultimatum, informing Washington that the Ohio country belonged to the King of France and that his orders were to arrest every English subject found within the valley.

[00:29:20]So the geopolitical chess match was heating up.

[00:29:24]We'll cover Washington's escapades involving this in the future, but suffice it to say that he made it all the way back to Williamsburg after some exciting misadventures.

[00:29:33]And in January of 1754, Governor Dinwiddie decided that time had expired in terms of peace and it was time to take strong action.

[00:29:44]He ordered the Ohio Company to immediately dispatch a workforce of carpenters and militiamen under Captain William Trent to the forks of the Ohio to construct a stockade fort.

[00:29:55]In February 1754, Trent's men began erecting Fort Prince George at the confluence of Allegheny and Monagahela Rivers.

[00:30:03]But in April, before the walls could be completed, a huge French force of about a thousand men with 18 artillery pieces descended the river in flotillas of canoes and were ready for a fight.

[00:30:15]They overwhelmed this tiny garrison, forced Trent's men to surrender, leveled Fort Prince George to the ground and constructed a massive, formidable fortress, which they named Fort Duquesne.

[00:30:27]Yes, that Fort Duquesne, the one of French and Indian War fame, or perhaps infamy, the Fort Duquesne at which General Braddock died.

[00:30:37]Or he and hundreds of his men died trying to capture young Washington was there.

[00:30:43]It's a key point in Washington's life and in Virginia military culture, as we covered in the episode on that.

[00:30:49]The Ohio Company of Virginia had built the original version of Fort Duquesne, and then lost it in a near-entirely forgotten fight.

[00:30:57]So it was now time for George Washington to begin the First World War, as we covered in our episode on the Virginia Gentry and Prelude Revolution, when George Washington led a relief column of Virginia troops back towards the forts.

[00:31:11]He collided with a French detachment under Joseph-Claude de Jomanville in May 1754.

[00:31:18]The skirmish at Juminville Glen and Washington's subsequent surrender at Fort Necessity in July of 1754.

[00:31:26]Ignited the French and Indian War, a conflict that rapidly spread across the globe as the Seven Years' War and eventually led to Britain's victory, though it also led to Britain betraying Frederick the Great of Prussia in 1763, or at least that's how Frederick saw it, which was something that Arthur Lee later tried and failed to capitalize on, as we covered in our episode on his life.

[00:31:46]For the Ohio company, in any case, this global war was a catastrophic, paralyzing disaster.

[00:31:53]The French and their Native American allies burned the company's storehouses, particularly the ones at Wills Creek and Monagahela.

[00:32:00]They destroyed Christopher Gist's frontier settlement. They killed or captured company fur traders.

[00:32:06]All private surveying and settlement ground to a halt because the frontier was a horrible, blood-soaked battleground.

[00:32:12]And so the vast capital invested by Thomas Lee and his partners appeared to have evaporated in the smoke of Fort Necessity, or at least so it initially seemed.

[00:32:22]But when the Treaty of Paris concluded the Seven Years' War in 1763, France was expelled from North America and ceded all of its claims east of the Mississippi River to Great Britain.

[00:32:33]To the surviving members of the Ohio Company, including Philip Ludwell Lee and his younger brothers, the British victory seemed to signal the imminent fulfillment of their father's vision, just not in a way that benefited holders of, Ohio Company, Virginia Stock.

[00:32:51]The French forts were in British hands, Fort Duquesne had been rebuilt as Fort Pitt, and the Ohio country was open to English settlement, or it should have been.

[00:33:03]The British victory introduced a new, very unexpected obstacle.

[00:33:08]Terrified by the outbreak of Pontiac's Rebellion in 1763, which was a coordinated native uprising that leveled British outposts across the frontier, King George III's ministry issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763.

[00:33:23]To pacify the tribes, the crown drew a boundary line across the crest of the Allegheny Mountains, forbidding any colonial governors from granting land or issuing surveying warrants west of that line, and ordering all white settlers to evacuate the transmontane interior. year.

[00:33:40]So overnight, the Ohio Company's 500,000-acre grant, was frozen in a state of imperial limbo in Virginia, which had sacrificed a great deal in the war, was cut off from the lands it had suffered, bled, and fought to open, and which it believed under its charter were, rightfully its. It thought it owned those lands.

[00:34:04]Meanwhile, there was a new threat to the Ohio Company emerging from the corridors of power in London and Philadelphia.

[00:34:11]In the late 1760s, a powerful syndicate of northern merchants, British politicians, and influential land jobbers organized what became known as the Grand Ohio Company, also called the Walpole Company or the Vandalia Scheme.

[00:34:26]This syndicate was spearheaded by Samuel Wharton of Philadelphia, Thomas Walpole, a prominent London banker, and Benjamin Franklin.

[00:34:37]Whereas the Ohio Company of Virginia had won its grants on its merits, the Grand Ohio Company used breathtakingly corrupt lobbying to try and push its scheme through.

[00:34:49]Bypassing the colonial government of Virginia entirely, they petitioned the British ministry to grant them 20 million acres of land west of the Alleghenies and to create an entirely new, independent royal colony called Vandalia.

[00:35:05]The proposed boundaries of this scheme swallowed up the entire upper Ohio Valley, completely encompassing the 500,000 acres that had been granted to the Ohio Company and stripping Virginia of her 1609 charter rights.

[00:35:21]To make matters worse, the Ohio Company of Virginia's London agent, George Mercer, who had been sent to England to defend Virginia's claims, was bribed and co-opted by the Walpole Syndicate.

[00:35:34]Without receiving any authorization to do so from the directors of the company in Virginia, Mercer signed an agreement in May of 1770, merging the Ohio Company into the Grand Ohio Company, accepting a meager 220th share in Vandalia in exchange for surrendering the independent Virginian Grant.

[00:35:54]This act of betrayal, or at least poor corporate decision-making, absolutely infuriated the Ohio Company of Virginia shareholders, who wanted to be enriched with rather than participants in some ridiculous scheme concocted by Yankee merchants and corrupt British officials.

[00:36:11]When news of George Mercer's unauthorized surrender of their claims reached Virginia, the Lee family and other shareholders absolutely exploded in rage.

[00:36:20]Richard Henry Lee and George Mason in particular spearheaded a campaign to repudiate Mercer's deal and destroy the Vandalia scheme to Richard Henry Lee and George Mason.

[00:36:31]Mason must become a leader of the Ohio company as the years were on.

[00:36:34]The Vandalia scheme wasn't just an unfair business maneuver.

[00:36:38]Rather, they saw it as the sort of corrupt, tyrannical assault by British ministers and speculators on the fundamental constitutional rights of Virginia that were later to lead to war.

[00:36:50]And they were already upset about this because of the Stamp Act and the related legislation that caused so much unrest in the colonies.

[00:36:58]So they fought back. In a series of blistering speeches delivered in the House of Burgesses and then sent as dispatches to London, Richard Henry Lee denounced the Vandali promoters as corrupt land jobbers who were attempting to rob Virginia of her ancient charter domain.

[00:37:13]Lee argued that the king's ministers possessed no constitutional authority to arbitrarily carve new colonies out of Virginia's chartered territory or to void legal grants issued under the crown's own seal.

[00:37:25]This years-long battle over western lands played an indispensable and frequently overlooked role in radicalizing the Virginia gentry, particularly men like Richard Henry Lee, who, as we covered in our episode on him, were already thinking about revolution.

[00:37:41]So when they realized that the British crown was entirely willing to trample Virginia's charter rights and strip local planters of their landed property just to enrich well-connected court favorites in London, their loyalty to the empire dissolved.

[00:37:56]The fight for the Ohio Company's grant fed directly into this ideological river that culminated in the Declaration of Independence.

[00:38:05]As the imperial crisis deepened into open war in 1775, the shareholders of the Ohio Company, at this point a few Lees, Mason, others, and particularly Robert Carter of Nominee Hall, he was a hugely successful planter and had bought up a large number of shares.

[00:38:22]They, and a smattering of others, made yet another attempt to salvage this Western investment and all the capital they'd poured into this enterprise.

[00:38:29]Recognizing that British authority was collapsing and that the Vandalia scheme was effectively dead, the company resolved to shift its focus further west into the rich bluegrass region of Kentucky.

[00:38:43]Even if the Indian trading operation was effectively dead, they could at least hoover up some of Kentucky's rich soil and make a profit that way.

[00:38:50]So, in the spring of 1775, the directors commissioned Hancock Lee, a skilled surveyor and a cousin of Richard Henry Lee, to lead an armed expedition into Kentucky to locate and survey 200,000 acres on behalf of the Ohio Company.

[00:39:06]Hancock Lee cleared the wilderness along the Kentucky River, surveying large tracts of fertile land and establishing a fortified settlement, which he named Lee's Town, the very first Anglo-American settlement established on the north side of the Kentucky River.

[00:39:21]For a brief moment, it appeared that Finally, the Ohio Company of Virginia shareholders had succeeded in getting themselves Western lands.

[00:39:29]It took a generation of effort, but they thought they had established a new Western domain in Kentucky.

[00:39:36]As was usual, the step before success turned into a pitfall for the company and things fell apart.

[00:39:41]In fact, the ultimate demise of the Ohio Company happened more or less at this point, though it dragged on for a bit.

[00:39:48]And it happened because of the revolutionary state government that the Lees and their Ohio Company compatriots helped create.

[00:39:55]Following the Declaration of Independence, the new Commonwealth of Virginia, which desperately needed any revenue possible to finance the Revolutionary War.

[00:40:04]Enacted a series of sweeping land laws in 1779 to regulate Western claims.

[00:40:09]And under these new statutes, the Virginia Assembly mandated that all land surveys must be executed by officially commissioned county surveyors holding credentials from the College of William & Mary.

[00:40:22]Because Hancock Lee had operated under an older informal commission system rather than as a newly sworn county officer, the Virginia Court of Commissioners and the Assembly invalidated Hancock Lee's Kentucky surveys, which had been carried out at great cost to the company and its dwindling capital and dwindling interest.

[00:40:42]So the Assembly declared the Ohio Company's Kentucky claims null and void and opened the land to individual settlement warrants.

[00:40:50]After more than 30 years of lobbying, exploring, fort building, litigation, most of the private claims of the Ohio company evaporated.

[00:41:00]Not all the claims, a smattering of small holdings bought here and there by it to round out its expected large holdings to seize strategic geography or to provide for Indian trading, those existed and they were used to repay shareholders and debts.

[00:41:14]Similarly, the Indian trade had been successful, and there were a number of debts stemming from it that could be called in to repay shareholders as the company wound down.

[00:41:22]So while no great fortunes were made by the company, little money actually appears to have been lost, which originally was a myth. They lost a lot of money in this enterprise, but that doesn't appear to have been true.

[00:41:33]And that should be expected to be the case, because the Virginia planters involved in this were generally good with money after all.

[00:41:40]A few of the rakes who just lost everything were involved with the scheme. So.

[00:41:45]It also hadn't made much money, if any. They just didn't lose that much.

[00:41:50]The big block of Western lands was never granted to shareholders.

[00:41:54]And the only real winner in terms of land was George Mason, who managed to accumulate around 65,000 acres of Kentucky land as the Ohio company wound down its affairs, collecting some land in exchange for handling the substantial costs of winding things down, buying others using surveying that was tangentially involved with the company.

[00:42:15]He was not corrupt and doesn't appear to have been corrupt in this, but it did work out for him.

[00:42:21]The other investors, all of whom were far less involved by this point, neither lost nor gained much and probably would have done much better to just avoid the scheme and buy farmland outright with the original capital raised for the project.

[00:42:34]But from the perspective of continental history and from American history, Thomas Lee's Western vision was achieved, and the whole thing was something of a victory.

[00:42:43]Over 1781 to 1784, when the fledgling United States was locked in a crisis, over ratification of the Articles of Confederation, actually, with land-limited states refusing to join the Union unless Virginia surrendered its vast transmontane charter claims, it was Richard Henry Lee who led the movement inside the Virginia legislature to cede the entire Northwest Territory, which Virginia thought it owned, to the federal government.

[00:43:10]He recognized, Richard Henry did, that sacrificing these land claims that were connected to his family and Virginia's long-lasting territory and claims, that was the price required to cement the American Union, which was a bigger prize than any financial reward from owning some farms out west.

[00:43:28]And by transferring the vast domain that was north of the Ohio River to the national government, which agreed to recognize past grants made by Virginia to settlers of those western lands, Lee helped create the National Public Domain, which was the territory that would be organized under the Northwest Ordinance, and he had a hand in organizing all that, and eventually created the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin.

[00:43:52]So the company that Thomas Lee founded in 1747 had started the spark that broke the French Empire in North America, and then later started the conflagration that broke the British as well.

[00:44:03]It had trained a young George Washington and frontier exploration and logistics, carved the first big road over the Alleghenies, and established the legal precedents for Western expansion, or at least Thomas Lee did in 1744.

[00:44:17]Though the Lee family and others failed to gain much in terms of financial rewards from those lands over the mountains, they did succeed in realizing the public-spirited part of the dream of Thomas Lee, securing an English-speaking Republican empire extending across the American continent.

[00:44:33]As Alfred James puts it in his The Ohio Company in Inner History, quote, In several senses, The Ohio Company was not a failure.

[00:44:42]In one respect, it was a notable success.

[00:44:44]Its place in history is beyond Covell.

[00:44:47]Its story is important in the history of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and of what is now West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio.

[00:44:55]It is, in essential part, the larger history of Anglo-French rivalry and struggle in North America.

[00:45:00]It fits into the picture and pageantry set forth by Francis Parkman.

[00:45:05]The Ohio Company was highly important politically, not only at Williamsburg, Annapolis, and Philadelphia, but also at Quebec in New France, as well as London and Paris in the Old World.

[00:45:16]The gentlemen of the Ohio Company, in the devotion of time and money to exploration, trade, and settlement, won an imperishable place in American and modern world history. End quote.

[00:45:26]Thank you for listening. make sure to like, subscribe, and comment on this video in addition to sharing it around.

[00:45:32]That is, after all, how we grow, how we keep this project going.

[00:45:36]So thank you again, and I'll see you again next time. Bye.