Robert Dinwiddie

Robert Dinwiddie

Robert Dinwiddie (* 1693 ; † July 27, 1770 in Clifton , England ) was a British colonial administrator who served as Lieutenant Governor from 1751 to 1758. H. served as deputy governor of the Virginia Colony . Since his nominal superiors - until July 1756 Governor Willem van Keppel, 2nd Earl of Albemarle , then Governor John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun - did not reside in the colony for most of their tenure, Dinwiddie was the actual chief executive in Virginia.

Career

As such, he played a crucial role in the run-up to the French and Indian War , that partial conflict of the Seven Years' War that England and France fought over their respective colonies in North America . It was in the interests of Virginia and the remaining 12 British colonies for Dinwiddie to prevent the French from expanding their possessions from Canada into the Ohio Valley. For the British settlement of the areas west of the Allegheny Mountains the Ohio Company had already been founded, in which Dinwiddie owned shares.

In response to news of the construction of French bases - Fort Presque Isle near Lake Erie and Fort Le Boeuf - he sent a mission of only eight men under the young George Washington in the winter of 1753-54 to ask the French to retreat. Even before their rejection of his demand became known, Dinwiddie put a small force of the Virginia militia on the march in January 1754 to build Fort Prince George at the confluence of Allegheny and Monongahela . The French drove the Virginians from there on April 17th and built a stronger fortress on the same site, Fort Duquesne , from which today's Pittsburgh was to emerge. As a result, George Washington attacked the French at Jumonville with fresh militia troops on May 29, killing a French officer. The outnumbered French now drove all Virginia troops out of the Ohio Valley. The sequence of military conflicts was irrevocably set in motion.

Dinwiddie now did everything to win the remaining colonies and the motherland to fight against the French. His endeavors were successful when England sent General Edward Braddock to Virginia with two regular regiments. The war ended with the Peace of Paris in 1763 , in which France had to give up most of its possessions in North America.

Dinwiddie had already left Virginia by this point. Not least because of the war, his term of office was marked by permanent financial disputes with the legislature of the colony, the House of Burgesses . In January 1758 he returned to England and lived in Clifton near Bristol until his death .

literature

swell

• Robert A. Brock (ed.): The Official Records of Robert Dinwiddie, Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony of Virginia, 1751-1758 , 2 volumes, Richmond, 1883-1884. (Digital copies at the Internet Archive: Volume I , Volume II )
• Louis Knott Koontz (ed.): Robert Dinwiddie Correspondence, Illustrative of His Career in American Colonial Government and Westward Expansion. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951. (microfilm)

Secondary literature

• John Richard Alden: Robert Dinwiddie: Servant of the Crown . University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville 1973. [= Williamsburg in America series 9]
• Louis Knott Koontz: Robert Dinwiddie: His Career in American Colonial Government and Westward Expansion . The Arthur H. Clark Company, Glendale, CA, 1941.