Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh in the Revolutionary War was not a battlefield in any conventional sense. No major engagement between Continental and British regulars took place at the Forks of the Ohio. What happened there was something more sustained and in some respects more consequential: for eight years, Fort Pitt served as the linchpin of the entire American western strategy, the supply base from which Continental forces reached into the Ohio Valley, and the one fixed point that kept the western frontier from collapsing entirely.

The geography explains everything. Where the Allegheny River comes down from the northeast and the Monongahela comes up from the southwest, they meet to form the Ohio, which flows nearly a thousand miles to the Mississippi. Whoever controlled that confluence controlled the practical gateway to the interior of a continent. The French had understood this in 1754, which is why they built Fort Duquesne on the exact spot. The British understood it when General Forbes destroyed Fort Duquesne in 1758 and immediately built a larger fort on the same ground and named it for William Pitt. Constructed as the second largest British fort on the colonial frontier, Fort Pitt measured about 18 acres . It was a classic star-shaped fort with 5 bastions projecting at the corners . The Americans understood it when they took over the fort in 1775 and turned it into the westernmost anchor of the Continental supply system.

The transition from British to American hands was not straightforward. By 1772 the fort was no longer needed for the purpose for which it was originally built, and flood damages from over the years had left it in deplorable condition. To save money and to help strengthen Native American relations, the British decommissioned Fort Pitt in 1772, selling the garrison, its buildings, and its materials to private citizens Alexander Ross and William Thompson.

At that time, the Pittsburgh area was claimed by the colonies of both Virginia and Pennsylvania, which struggled for power over the region. After Virginians took control of Fort Pitt, they called it Fort Dunmore, in honour of Virginia's Governor Lord Dunmore. The dispute between the two colonies over jurisdiction — which would persist well into the war years — complicated military command at the Forks from the start.

The first Continental commander at Fort Pitt was Brigadier General Edward Hand, an Irish-born physician and former British Army surgeon's mate who had served at Fort Pitt during his time with the 18th Royal Irish Regiment. On April 1, 1777, Hand was rewarded for his really exceptional services by promotion to the rank of brigadier general, and soon thereafter General Washington further displayed his appreciation and confidence by assigning General Hand, then 33 years old, to the Pittsburg post, to defend the western border. It was on Sunday, June 1, 1777, that General Hand arrived at Fort Pitt and took over the property from Captain Neville. Hand found himself with almost nothing to work with. Lacking a substantial formation of regular troops (although he had a few companies of the 13th Virginia Regiment of the Continental Line), Hand essentially took charge of the militias.

To make matters worse, the Virginia and Pennsylvania militia units disliked working with each other because of the disagreement over which colony owned the district of West Augusta where Fort Pitt was located.

In February 1778, Hand attempted an offensive — an expedition into the Ohio country to capture a small British magazine on the Cuyahoga River near Lake Erie, which could be used to supply Native American nations who had allied with the British, such as the Wyandot and the Shawnee. The campaign was a disaster. Snow, rain, and swollen streams stopped the force short of its objective, and failing to distinguish among Native American groups, the unruly militiamen under Hand's command attacked the neutral Lenape village of Kuskusky, killing the mother, brother, and a child of Chief Hopocan, known as Captain Pipe.

The expedition became derisively known as the Squaw Campaign. The fallout was severe. From the American perspective it was an extraordinarily disappointing effort given the size of the force Hand and his militia allies had raised and the likely damage it did to American-Delaware relations. In fact, it may have accelerated the internal split of the Delaware tribe between pro-war and pro-peace factions. Shortly after, in March 1778, three men with close ties to the British and American Indians left Pittsburgh, defecting to the British and Indian side. They were Simon Girty, an interpreter who had guided the "squaw campaign", Matthew Elliot, a local trader, and Alexander McKee, an agent for the British Indian Department. All three would prove to be valuable British operatives in the war.

In August, 1778, General Lachlan McIntosh replaced General Hand as commander of the Western Department.

One of the most consequential events of the war at the Forks of the Ohio had nothing to do with musket fire. On September 17, 1778, the Treaty of Fort Pitt was signed — the first formal treaty between the new United States of America and any Native American groups, in this case the Lenape, called the Delaware by white settlers.

The newly formed United States Continental Congress dispatched a treaty commission to the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers to negotiate America's first treaty of peace with an American Indian tribe.

The negotiations were conducted on the Lenape side by Koquethaqechton, known as White Eyes, Hopocan, known as Captain Pipe, and John Kill Buck, and Andrew Lewis and Thomas Lewis for the fledgling United States.

The treaty gave the United States permission to travel through the Lenape territory and called upon the Lenape to afford American troops whatever aid they might require in their war against Great Britain, including participation of Lenape warriors. Most remarkably, the treaty extended membership to "any other tribes who have been friends to the interest of the United States, to join the present confederation, and to form a state whereof the Delaware nation shall be the head, and have a representation in Congress." That provision — the creation of a potential fourteenth state headed by the Lenape — was never fulfilled. The lead Lenape negotiator, White Eyes, was murdered by a white militiaman in November 1778.

A Lenape delegation visited Philadelphia in 1779 to explain its dissatisfaction to the Continental Congress, but nothing changed, and the peaceful relations between the United States and the Lenape Nation collapsed and the tribe soon joined the British in the war against the American revolutionaries. The treaty's failure stands as one of the starkest examples of the gap between American diplomatic promises and frontier realities during the Revolution.

Fort Pitt's role as a supply depot defined its wartime function. George Rogers Clark's legendary 1778–1779 campaign, which secured American claims to the Illinois country by capturing Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes, was organized and partly supplied through Pittsburgh. George Rogers Clark was commissioned a Lieutenant Colonel of the Illinois regiment of the Virginia State Forces with a plan to capture British held villages in the Illinois country and strike at Detroit. Clark organized