Background
Michael Cresap was born on June 29, 1742, in Allegany County, Maryland, United States. He was the son of Colonel Thomas Cresap.
Michael Cresap was born on June 29, 1742, in Allegany County, Maryland, United States. He was the son of Colonel Thomas Cresap.
Cresap set up as a trader near his father’s stockaded house and trading-post at Oldtown. He began in the spring of 1774 to clear land in the neighborhood of Wheeling on the Ohio, but before he had made much progress, the activities of the border were halted by the Indian war sometimes called Cresap’s War but described more critically as Dunmore’s War. The war was actually brought to an outbreak by the Yellow Creek Massacre on April 30, 1774, an ugly incident which is supposed to have been effected by one Daniel Greathouse. The fatalities included certain members of the family of Tahgahjute or Logan, a Mingo warrior then on friendly terms with the white people.
Under a Virginia commission, Cresap took part as a captain in the campaign that resulted in the white man’s victory at Point Pleasant on October 10, 1774, and it was at the treaty following this battle that John Gibson, fresh from an interview with Logan, read that warrior’s message accusing Cresap of the murder of his family. Illness prevented Cresap from resuming his land-clearing operations, but he was well enough in the following year to accept a Maryland commission to raise a company of riflemen for the Continental Army, and volunteers from the Ohio and Western Maryland made his recruiting a short task. This company set out from Frederick, Maryland, on July 18, 1775, and twenty-two days later, the first southern troops on the scene, joined Washington before Boston, having marched the intervening 550 miles at the rate of twenty-five miles a day.
Ill for weeks before leaving and exhausted by the march, Cresap gave up his command two months later and on his journey homeward died in New York on October 18, 1775. Cresap’s memory has been kept alive by an unusual set of circumstances. Logan’s speech, with its pitiable conclusion, “Who is there to mourn for Logan ? not one!” was printed in the Virginia Gazette for February 4, 1775. Then in 1782 Jefferson printed the “morsel of eloquence” in his Notes on Virginia, and in the brief introduction referred to Cresap as “a man infamous for the many murders he had committed on those much injured people”.
When assailed for the assertion by his political opponent Luther Martin, who chanced to be also the son- in-law of Cresap, Jefferson modified his statements somewhat, but brought forward in the 1800 edition of the Notes on Virginia much assiduously collected evidence to prove Cresap’s guilt. Unhappily for his case in modern eyes, he suppressed evidence to the contrary known to be in his possession, notably the letter in which George Rogers Clark exonerated Cresap from the specific charge of the Yellow Creek Massacre. The testimony, in general, points to Cresap’s innocence in the Logan matter, and shows him to have been no more brutal in his dealings with the Indians than the normal actor in a scene in which men went day and night in fear of an appalling death. Perhaps the final judgment should be that Cresap, whose interest as a settler of new lands would have impelled him to keep peace with the Indians, was forced to act in defense of his land and of the people who made him their leader, and that in performing this duty he was caught in a snarl of intercolonial politics that has not yet been unraveled.
Cresap was married to Mary Whitehead of Philadelphia.
