rights extended to the Mississippi and beyond, embracing the very territory to which they were now denied admittance, and ordered to vacate where located under previous grants. The Quebec Act was one of the irritants complained of in the Declaration of Independence "for abolishing the free system of English law in a neighboring province establishing therein an arbitrary government and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule."
This was the condition in 1774 on the northern frontier of Virginia at a time when the head of the Ohio Valley was supposed to be part of that province. John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, Governor, held his allegiance due to the crown, but he also was eager to champion the cause of Virginia as against either the Indians or her sister colonies. He was avaricious, energetic, and interested in the frontier land speculation. He had appointed an agent or deputy at Fort Pitt, then deemed a Virginia town, and surveyors who were locating lands in the upper Ohio, who were attacked by Indians and driven out. It was a bitter race war on both sides, rendered more bitter to the Virginians by the very general belief that the Indians were furnished arms, ammunition and clothing from Detroit by the Quebec Government through French traders, now its special pets.
"In May the Virginia House of Burgesses, of which George Washington, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson were members, resolved with a burst of indignation to set aside the first of June when the Boston bill should go into operation as a day of fasting and prayer to implore divine interposition for averting the heavy calamity which threatens the civil rights of America." Governor Dunmore at once dissolved that highly impertinent King insulting body. Meanwhile the race war on the northern and western frontier was growing more and more serious where the heat of patriotic resistance to the tyrannical measures of the mother country mingled with the bitterness of the race war for proprietary rights. And Governor Dunmore in August called out two bodies of militia and volunteers consisting of fifteen hundred each. The north-
