Volume 13 , Issue 16

Battle of Point Pleasant (1774)

In Chapter X, of A History of Highland County, Virginia, by Oren Frederic Morton, we learn a bit about the Battle of Point Pleasant, letters describing it, the Revolution (began half year after the Battle of Point Pleasant), Resolutions by Augusta people, Augusta men in the war and slight outward change under independence.

The temper of the Augusta people appeared in the following instructions, drawn up at Staunton, February 22, 1775, given to their delegates to the House of Burgesses:

"The people of Augusta are impressed with just sentiments of loyalty to his majesty, King George, whose title to the crown of Great Britain rests on no other foundation than the liberty of all his subjects. We have respect for the parent state, which respect is founded on religion, on law, and on the genuine principles of the British constitution. On these principles do we earnestly desire to see harmony and good understanding restored between Great Britain and America. Many of us and our forefathers left our native land and explored this once savage wilderness to enjoy the free exercise of the rights of conscience and of human nature. These rights we are fully resolved with our lives and fortunes inviolably to preserve; nor will we surrender such inestimable blessings, the purchase of toil and danger, to any ministry, to any parliament, or any body of men by whom we are not represented, and in whom we are not represented, and in whose decisions, therefore, we have no voice. We are determined to maintain unimpaired that liberty which is the gift of Heaven to the subjects of Britain's empire, and will most cordially join our countrymen in such measures as may be necessary to secure and perpetuate the ancient, just, and legal rights of this colony and all British subjects."

The Augusta pioneers showed that the frontiersmen of Augusta knew how to use their mother tongue with clearness and force. It was a breathe of conviction that their claims were just and a resolution to defend these claims to the utmost. It also asserted a national difference between America and the British Isles.

There was a memorial from the county committee, presented to the state convention, May 16, 1776, the first expression of the policy of establishing an independent state government and permanent confederation of states which the parliamentary journals of America contain. It reads as follows:

"A representation from the committee of the county of Augusta was presented to the Convention and read, setting forth the present unhappy condition of the country, and from the ministerial measures of revenge now pursuing, representing the necessity of making a confederacy of the United States, the most perfect, independent, and lasting, and of framing an equal, free, and liberal government, that may bear the trial of all future ages."

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