Role: Continental Army Brigadier General

When hostilities began in April 1775, Fort Pitt was in British hands — but British control of the western frontier was already nominal. Virginia militia forces and Pennsylvania interests had long contested authority over the fort and the surrounding territory. By mid-1775, Continental and Virginia forces effectively took control of the installation, beginning its transformation from a British garrison into the Continental Army's western headquarters. The transition was not accompanied by fighting — the British garrison was small and the political situation made resistance futile. But the assumption of control had immediate strategic consequences. Fort Pitt became the supply and communications hub for the entire western frontier, the point through which men, arms, and provisions moved toward the Ohio Valley and beyond. Virginia's claims to the territory around Pittsburgh complicated the Continental command structure throughout the war, with Virginia militia and Continental forces sometimes operating in the same area under unclear authority. The fort that the Continentals inherited was formidable: a five-sided structure with earthworks bastions, capable of housing hundreds of men, situated on the one piece of ground that could not be bypassed by any force moving into the Ohio Valley. Its value was obvious and its maintenance was consistently difficult — supply lines from Philadelphia and Carlisle were long, and the competing demands of the eastern theater meant western requests were routinely underfulfilled.

Role: Continental Army Brigadier General

# Hand's "Squaw Campaign" and Its Diplomatic Consequences By the winter of 1778, the western frontier of the American Revolution had become a theater of immense strategic anxiety. Fort Pitt, situated at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers at present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, served as the young nation's primary military outpost in the Ohio Country — a vast and contested region where the outcome of the war depended not only on armies but on alliances. The British, operating from bases in Detroit and along the Great Lakes, had been cultivating relationships with Native nations, supplying them with arms and trade goods and encouraging raids against American frontier settlements. In response, the Continental Congress and the Continental Army sought to hold the loyalty — or at least the neutrality — of the powerful Delaware nation and other Indigenous peoples of the Ohio Valley. This delicate diplomatic work, carried out in part by George Morgan, the Continental Indian Agent stationed at Fort Pitt, required patience, consistency, and above all a demonstration that the Americans could be trusted. It was precisely this trust that Brigadier General Edward Hand's ill-fated expedition would shatter. Hand, an Irish-born Continental Army officer who had served at Long Island and White Plains before being assigned to command Fort Pitt, grew increasingly frustrated through the autumn and winter of 1777-1778 by reports of British-allied raids and the movement of supplies from Detroit to Native towns sympathetic to the Crown. He conceived a plan for a winter strike: a rapid expedition northward toward the Cuyahoga River, where British supply caches were reportedly stored, with the secondary objective of attacking Native settlements allied with the British. The plan was ambitious, but it depended on speed, reliable intelligence, and disciplined troops — none of which Hand ultimately had at his disposal. The expedition launched in February 1778 and almost immediately fell apart. Harsh winter weather slowed movement, supply problems plagued the column, and the intelligence guiding the force proved confused and unreliable. The troops — largely frontier militia rather than disciplined Continental regulars — never came close to the Cuyahoga or any British installation. What they encountered instead was a small, vulnerable camp of Delaware people: women, children, and elderly men, all non-combatants with no meaningful connection to the British war effort. The militia killed several of these people and captured others, then turned back with nothing else to show for the expedition. The soldiers themselves recognized the disgrace. The expedition quickly earned the derisive name the "Squaw Campaign," a label that reflected not pride but humiliation — an acknowledgment among the participants themselves that they had failed to accomplish any military objective and had instead killed defenseless people. Hand's reputation suffered, and he was eventually reassigned from Fort Pitt, though he continued to serve in the Continental Army in other capacities for the remainder of the war. The military failure, however, was far less consequential than the diplomatic catastrophe the expedition created. The Delaware nation in early 1778 was deeply divided. Some leaders favored neutrality in the conflict between the British and the Americans. Others, under pressure from the British and from neighboring nations already aligned with the Crown, argued for joining the war against the American settlers who had been encroaching on their lands for decades. George Morgan and other American agents had been working painstakingly to keep the Delaware from joining the British alliance, using diplomacy, trade, and promises of respect for Delaware sovereignty. Hand's expedition undermined all of this work in a single stroke. Delaware leaders who had counseled patience and accommodation with the Americans now faced an enraged populace demanding to know why they should trust a people who had just murdered their families. The Treaty of Fort Pitt, signed in September 1778, represented the United States' attempt to repair the damage. It was a landmark document — the first formal treaty between the United States and a Native nation — and it contained remarkably ambitious language, including provisions that some historians have interpreted as hinting at future Delaware statehood within the American union. Yet the treaty's promise was undermined from the outset by the very violence that had necessitated it. Many Delaware leaders regarded the agreement with justified skepticism, and the goodwill it was meant to restore had already been deeply eroded. The "Squaw Campaign" thus stands as a stark illustration of how a single act of frontier violence could ripple outward, destabilizing alliances, empowering hardliners on all sides, and reshaping the political landscape of the Revolutionary War's western theater in ways that no battlefield victory could easily undo.

Role: Continental Army Brigadier General

**The McIntosh Expedition and the Founding of Fort Laurens, 1778–1779** By the autumn of 1778, the American war effort in the western frontier had already suffered a string of frustrations. Brigadier General Edward Hand, who had commanded the Continental Army's Western Department from Fort Pitt in Pittsburgh, had struggled mightily to project American power into the Ohio Country. His most notable offensive, a failed winter expedition in early 1778 that soldiers derisively nicknamed the "Squaw Campaign," had accomplished little beyond alienating potential Native allies and embarrassing the Continental cause. Hand's inability to curb British-allied raids from the west or mount a credible threat against the British garrison at Fort Detroit led to his replacement. Into this difficult command stepped Brigadier General Lachlan McIntosh, a Scottish-born Georgian with a combative reputation and instructions from General George Washington himself to attempt what Hand could not: an overland march toward Detroit, the linchpin of British power in the interior. McIntosh arrived at Fort Pitt with ambitious orders but soon discovered the familiar gap between strategic vision and frontier reality. Washington and the Continental Congress wanted Detroit neutralized, believing that its capture would sever British ties to the Native nations whose raids terrorized settlers across western Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky. The governments of Virginia and Pennsylvania were expected to furnish militia, provisions, and supplies to supplement the modest Continental force at Fort Pitt. Those promises, however, went largely unfulfilled. Recruiting lagged, supplies arrived sporadically, and the logistical challenges of sustaining an army deep in the wilderness proved immense. Nevertheless, in October 1778, McIntosh marched west from Fort Pitt with approximately 1,200 men — a mix of Continental regulars and militia — determined to push as far toward Detroit as circumstances allowed. The expedition moved down the Ohio River and established Fort McIntosh at the mouth of the Beaver River, roughly thirty miles northwest of Pittsburgh. This post served as an intermediate base and a demonstration of American intent in the region. McIntosh then pressed deeper into the Ohio Country, entering territory contested among the Lenape (Delaware), Wyandot, and other Native nations whose loyalties were divided or leaning toward the British. On the banks of the Tuscarawas River, in what is now eastern Ohio, McIntosh ordered the construction of Fort Laurens, naming it in honor of Henry Laurens, then president of the Continental Congress. It became the only American fort ever built in the present state of Ohio during the Revolutionary War — and almost immediately, it became a symbol of overreach. Fort Laurens was dangerously isolated. Situated roughly 150 miles from Fort Pitt, the post could not be reliably resupplied over rough and contested terrain. Its small garrison found itself surrounded by Native groups increasingly hostile to the American presence, many of whom were receiving encouragement and material support from the British at Detroit. By winter, McIntosh's grand offensive had stalled entirely. Without the additional troops and provisions promised by state governments, there was no possibility of continuing the march toward Detroit. McIntosh withdrew the bulk of his force back to Fort Pitt, leaving a garrison at Fort Laurens to hold the position through the brutal winter of 1778–1779. What followed was a harrowing ordeal. The garrison endured siege conditions, with British-allied warriors surrounding the fort and cutting off supply routes. Cold, starvation, and constant harassment took a severe toll. Several soldiers were killed in skirmishes outside the walls, and morale collapsed. Relief expeditions from Fort Pitt arrived only intermittently and with great difficulty. By the spring of 1779, it was clear that Fort Laurens served no strategic purpose commensurate with the cost of maintaining it. In August 1779, the Continental Army abandoned the post entirely. The failure of the McIntosh Expedition carried consequences that echoed through the remainder of the war. Detroit stayed firmly in British hands, and from it the British continued to coordinate devastating raids across the American frontier. The episode laid bare a fundamental weakness of the Continental war effort in the west: Washington could envision bold offensive campaigns, and Congress could authorize them, but the decentralized American system could not reliably concentrate the men, money, and materiel needed to execute them hundreds of miles from the eastern seaboard. McIntosh himself was eventually reassigned, his reputation diminished by the campaign's failure, though the shortcomings owed far more to systemic resource constraints than to personal incompetence. Fort Laurens, briefly garrisoned and quickly forgotten, endures in historical memory as a testament to both American ambition and the harsh limits the Revolution imposed on those who fought it at the empire's edge.