In 1798, more than forty years after his first campaign in the Ohio Country, George Washington recalled that “the burthen of obtaining the Grants for 200,000 acres of land under Governor Dinwiddie’s Proclamation of 1754” had largely fallen upon him. A newly acquired 1772 manuscript patent, commonly referred to as the Savage Grant, is one of the more substantial surviving records of that effort. The document preserves the names of men connected directly to Washington’s first military command. It also opens onto a larger story of his long struggle with western land administration and an imperial government that often proved slow and difficult in securing the rewards promised for military service.
That story began in February 1754, when Virginia lieutenant governor Robert Dinwiddie promised 200,000 acres of western land to officers and soldiers willing to serve in Virginia’s expedition to the Ohio Country. Among them was John Savage, commissioned a lieutenant on March 9, 1754. He served under Washington at Fort Necessity, was promoted to captain the following year, and went on to command a company in the Virginia Regiment. Washington’s Virginia force numbered about 293 officers and men and was reinforced by roughly 100 British regulars from South Carolina. In the fighting on July 3, his command suffered more than 100 casualties. The Savage Grant names sixty-one claimants connected to Washington’s 1754 Virginia Regiment. Many can be identified in surviving Fort Necessity rosters, including men recorded as killed or wounded during the campaign. These were the men, or their representatives, for whom the promised bounty lands were still due nearly two decades later.
Land patent to John Savage and others for 28,627 acres in Fincastle County, Virginia, 1772 December 15. (section.)
The road to this patent stretched from Dinwiddie’s 1754 proclamation through nearly two decades of claims and surveys. On October 2, 1770, John Savage came to Mount Vernon to enter his claim to a share of the promised 200,000 acres. William Crawford subsequently surveyed the lands, including the 28,627-acre tract represented by this patent, and in 1772 the Virginia Council ordered it patented in the names of Savage and other veterans. Savage, whose service as a subaltern officer entitled him to 6,000 acres, received 3,428 acres in this first distribution. Four sergeants received 600 acres each, four corporals 500 acres each, and fifty-two private soldiers 400 acres each. Their claims totaled 28,628 acres—one acre more than the survey. Washington noted simply: “One acre short.”
Today, portions of the Savage Grant lie within four counties of West Virginia. The patent itself preserves that western landscape in the language of an eighteenth-century survey. Its long “metes-and-bounds” description begins at “a small Elm marked G.W.” and follows natural landmarks around the enormous tract. Read closely, the survey becomes almost a catalogue of the American landscape: elm, beech, black gum, sugar tree, hickory, sycamore, poplar, and oak mark the boundaries of the tract. Trees, creeks, ridges, and rocks gave legal shape to property on the western frontier before fences and modern maps.
The administrative problems built into the grant persisted for decades. Virginia had required the 200,000 acres to be taken in a limited number of surveys, forcing many veterans into shared patents rather than allowing each claimant to receive a separately surveyed tract. That arrangement increased the expense of surveying and patenting the lands and left dozens of owners with undivided interests that still had to be legally partitioned. Washington had objected to this system as early as 1771, arguing that it imposed unnecessary costs and made the veterans’ bounty harder to realize. In 1798, Edward Graham wrote to Washington that some owners still did not know where their shares lay and that competing claims threatened “disputes, litigations & inconveniences.” Washington replied that the restriction on the number of surveys had caused so many claimants to be “jumbled together in the same Patent.” Once the patents secured the land, he withdrew from administering the individual divisions, leaving that work to the patentees themselves. The problem remained unresolved when the imperial crisis became open war in 1775 and Washington assumed command of the Continental Army. The man who had borne much of the original “burthen” of obtaining the veterans’ grants now turned to a far larger struggle over the rights of Americans and the authority of government.
The Savage Grant therefore connects the beginning of Washington’s military career with the Revolution that transformed it. Nearly twenty years after Fort Necessity, the veterans of his first command were still seeking the reward promised for their service, while Washington was still working to convert that promise into legally secured land. Their experience gave concrete form to a question that would soon stand at the heart of the Revolution: what does a just government owe the people it governs? In the Fairfax Resolves of 1774, adopted by a meeting chaired by Washington, Virginians asserted that the people should be governed only by laws to which they had consented through their representatives and defended their established constitutional rights. Two years later, the Declaration of Independence grounded legitimate government in the protection of rights and the consent of the governed. Seen in that larger history, the Savage Grant is not simply a record of western land. It is a record of service and public obligation, and of the expectation that government should honor its promises to those who served it. That expectation would take on new meaning in the Revolution.
Thomas G. Lannon
Library Director