Illinois Campaign - Background

Background

The Illinois country was a vaguely defined region which included much of the present U.S. states of Indiana and Illinois. The area had been a part of the Louisiana district of New France until the end of the French and Indian War/Seven Years' War, when France ceded sovereignty of the region to the British in 1763 Treaty of Paris. In the Quebec Act of 1774, the British made the Illinois country a part of the newly expanded Province of Quebec.

In 1778, the population of the Illinois country consisted of about 1,000 people of European descent, mostly French-speaking, and about 600 African-American slaves. Thousands of American Indians lived in villages concentrated along the Mississippi, Illinois, and Wabash Rivers. The British military presence was sparse: most of the troops had been withdrawn in 1776 to cut back on expenses. Philippe-François de Rastel de Rocheblave, a French-born soldier and official, was hired by the British to be the local commandant. Stationed at Kaskaskia, Rocheblave reported to Hamilton at Detroit, and frequently complained that he lacked the money, resources, and troops needed to administer the region.

When the American Revolutionary War began in 1775, the Ohio River marked the border between the Illinois country and Kentucky, an area recently settled by American colonists. The British had originally sought to keep American Indians out of the war, but in 1777 Lieutenant Governor Hamilton received instructions to recruit and arm Indian war parties to raid the Kentucky settlements, opening a western front in the war with the rebel colonists. "From 1777 on," wrote historian Bernard Sheehan, "the line of western settlements was under almost constant assault by white-led raiding parties that had originated at Detroit."

In 1777, George Rogers Clark was a 24 year-old major in the Kentucky County, Virginia, militia. Clark believed that he could end the raids on Kentucky by capturing the British posts in the Illinois country and then moving against Detroit. In April 1777, Clark sent two spies into the Illinois country. They returned after two months and reported that the fort at Kaskaskia was unguarded, that the French-speaking residents were not greatly attached to the British, and that no one expected an attack from Kentucky. Clark wrote a letter to Governor Patrick Henry of Virginia in which he outlined a plan to capture Kaskaskia.