John Connolly

Background

John Connolly was born about 1743 at Wright's Ferry, York County, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of Susanna Howard and her third husband, Dr. John Connolly, who died in 1747.

Education

Educated in Lancaster and apprenticed to a physician in Philadelphia, Connolly did not complete his medical studies.

Career

After army service in Martinique and as medical officer in Indian campaigns, 1762-64, he became associated with his uncle, George Croghan. From 1767 to 1770 he was in Kaskaskia, where he learned Indian languages and engaged, unsuccessfully, in business. He returned to Pittsburgh, practised medicine, and acquired 340 acres of land nearby. After another trip west in 1772 he ordered a survey of 2, 000 acres at the falls of the Ohio, and in 1773 he received from Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, a grant of this tract.

Connolly supported Dunmore in claiming for Virginia the territory around Fort Pitt; he may also have been Dunmore's agent in land speculation. Dunmore commissioned him militia captain and commandant of Fort Pitt and made him a justice for the "District of West Augusta, " which included present western Pennsylvania, then in dispute between Pennsylvania and Virginia.

In January 1774, when Connolly attempted to organize the western Pennsylvania settlers in a Virginia militia, he was arrested by Pennsylvania authorities and ordered to appear before the Westmoreland County court. He did so, with some two hundred militiamen, denied the court's jurisdiction, and later arrested three Pennsylvania justices. When, at the outbreak of Dunmore's War, settlers began to flee east across the Monongahela, Connolly sent militia to Wheeling to build Fort Fincastle. His halting of the Pennsylvania trade, which supplied the Indians, and his imposition of the Virginia fur tax in Pittsburgh almost precipitated civil war there between Pennsylvania traders and Virginia speculators; meanwhile the rival courts engaged in opera bouffe arrests and jail deliveries.

With the end of Dunmore's War and the threat of American revolution, Connolly turned his attention to winning Indian support for England, and in July 1775 he made a treaty with the Iroquois and the Delawares. Connolly then left Pittsburgh and in August managed to reach Dunmore's ship off Portsmouth. Here the two planned a western campaign by British and Indians under Connolly to capture Fort Pitt, enlist frontiersmen, sweep down the Potomac to join Dunmore at Alexandria, and thus divide the colonies. In Boston, Connolly secured Gage's consent to the plan. Prevented by Arnold's invasion from going west through Canada, he returned to Virginia, was commissioned lieutenant-colonel and started west. Information from John Gibson of Pittsburgh and gossip in Boston had aroused suspicion; Connolly was arrested in November near Hagerstown and in January 1776 was sent to Philadelphia for imprisonment. There, with occasional paroles in custody of his step-brother Gen. James Ewing, he remained until exchanged in 1780. His revival, in New York, of the scheme to capture Pittsburgh perturbed Washington and Clark in 1781. His efforts failed, however, as did his health, undermined by imprisonment. He joined Cornwallis in Yorktown, was captured, imprisoned again in Philadelphia, and released in March 1782 to go to England. In 1783 he published his Narrative. In 1788, after a winter in Quebec, Connolly went to Detroit as lieutenant-governor and there began an intrigue for Kentucky independence which led him to Louisville, ostensibly on private business but supplied with funds by Lord Dorchester, governor of Canada. His offers of British troops and equipment to help open the Mississippi, at the price of Kentucky's allegiance to Britain, were unsuccessful. Connolly returned to Canada in December and settled east of the Detroit River near Alexander McKee and other Pittsburgh Tories. At McKee's death in 1799 Connolly succeeded him as deputy superintendent of Indian affairs, but the appointment was canceled in June 1800.

Connolly then removed to Montreal, where he lived on his pension and died after a long illness.

Naturally, Connolly's own book interprets his actions favorably; his enemies excoriated them. Somewhere between these extremes lies the truth.

Achievements

• He is best known for a plan he concocted with Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore to raise a regiment of loyalists and Indians in Canada called the Loyal Foresters and lead them to Virginia to help Dunmore put down the rebellion. In the early 1770s Connolly was the leading figure at the Forks of the Ohio in present-day Western Pennsylvania in Virginia's claims to the region surrounding Pittsburgh.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Narrative of the Transactions, Imprisonment, and Sufferings of John Connolly, an American Loyalist, and Lieutenant-colonel in His Majesty's Service

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

Personality

Although he was often devious and sometimes self-seeking, he was consistently loyal to his convictions. He was a man of ability.

Before the Revolution, Washington characterized him as "a very sensible, intelligent man"; Patrick Henry commended him; David McClure deplored his "deistical tenets" but considered him "a man of bright parts, and an amiable disposition. " Nicholas Cresswell, however, described him, as commandant at Fort Pitt, as "a haughty, imperious man. "

Connections

In 1767 he married Susanna Semple of Pittsburgh, by whom he had one child. His second wife, Margaret, widow of Samuel Wellington of Delaware, with their son born in 1781, presumably accompanied him.

Father:

John Connolly

Mother:

Susanna Howard

Spouse:

Susanna Semple

Spouse:

Margaret Wellington

Step-brother:

James Ewing

Uncle:

George Croghan