A cunning colonel, perilous march and British missteps: How Illinois helped shape the outcome of the American Revolution

Before Chicago emerged as the state’s powerhouse, another metro area hundreds of miles away in southern Illinois played a key role in the American Revolution.

Nestled along the Mississippi River not far from St. Louis, Kaskaskia was populated by Indigenous peoples and French traders for much of the 18th century, until the end of the French and Indian War put it under British rule.

Enter ambitious Virginian George Rogers Clark and a band of frontiersmen who took the settlement in the name of the new republic on July 4, 1778, catapulting the region into a world-changing conflict.

As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, historian Tom Emery notes that Illinois “didn’t have the big, main battles like Bunker Hill and Yorktown, and didn’t have the big, main generals like George Washington — but we have a story to tell.”

“Illinois played a pivotal role in the western theater,” Emery said. “Whoever controlled the areas between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, that was going to shape the outcome of the Revolution.”

Westward bound

The end of the French and Indian War resulted in Great Britain gaining large swaths of North America and intensified a land grab by wealthy developers and colonists, inflaming Indigenous residents. To keep the peace, the British issued mandates like the Proclamation of 1763 and Quebec Act in 1774 banning settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains.

Such laws were “one of the reasons we get the American Revolution,” Encyclopedia of Chicago co-editor Ann Keating explained.

Colonists “really want to move into the west, to go across the Appalachian Mountains and come into the Illinois Country and Ohio Country, and take up this land that had been Indigenous land. And, they wanted to farm and they wanted to create something completely different,” said Keating, a retired history professor at North Central College in Naperville.

“When the war starts, it’s all on the East Coast for the most part, but there is this sense that if this war is going to be successful for the Americans, they want to claim this land in the west. And that’s how George Rogers Clark gets here.”

A master psychologist

“Clark was willful, determined, headstrong, and street-smart. He didn’t have a lot of education but was a master psychologist. He knew how to read people beautifully,” noted Emery, author of “Illinois in the Revolutionary War.”

Born in Virginia, Clark worked as a surveyor and moved to Kentucky where he became a lieutenant colonel in the local militia responding to raids by Native Americans supported by Great Britain.

In late 1777, Rogers convinced Virginia Gov. Patrick Henry to approve an expedition to take British-held posts at Kaskaskia and Cahokia in Illinois and Vincennes in Indiana.

Clark and his militia headed down the Ohio River, and crossed into present-day Illinois near Fort Massac.

Along the way, they acquired a guide who ostensibly knew the territory but later “appeared confused, and we soon discovered that he was totally lost,” Clark’s memoirs state.

“Clark refreshed his memory by threatening to kill him,” Emery said.

Arriving in Kaskaskia, Clark’s troops made a show of force running through the town and threatening the terrified inhabitants. He then shifted to a conciliatory approach, informing residents of America’s recent alliance with France.

“In a few minutes, the scene was changed from an almost mortal dejection, to that of joy in the extreme,” Clark wrote.

Similarly easy victories followed in Cahokia and Fort Sackville in Vincennes, after which Clark worked to secure allies among Native Americans in the region.

‘Water up to their armpits’

The successes galvanized British Lt. Gov. Henry Hamilton, who was based at Fort Detroit, to recapture Vincennes on Dec. 17, 1778.

Clark regrouped with a force of 170 men and headed to Indiana across flooded terrain.

“It was a 19-day march, an awful lot of it through standing water,” Emery recounted. Food and dry shelter was scarce and “at some point, they were marching in water up to their armpits.”

When the contingent reached Fort Sackville they realized the British had left it undermanned, and laid siege. Hamilton surrendered on Feb. 25, 1779.

“That’s a little battle with huge significance,” Emery said, explaining that subsequently about 270,000 squares miles of the country fell under American control.

Clark was recognized as a hero but never recovered the thousands of dollars he personally spent on the campaign and died impoverished at age 65.

His younger brother, William Clark, made history with Meriwether Lewis on their expedition across America to the Pacific Ocean in the early 1800s.

Not just ‘taxes and liberty’

For Native Americans, the Illinois saga “reminds us that the American Revolution was never only an East Coast story about taxes and liberty,” Northwestern University Associate Professor of history Douglas Kiel said.

“It was also a fight over who would control Native homelands west of the Appalachians.”

The Declaration of Independence specifically addressed the Quebec Act, which prohibited western settlement by colonists, he noted. “In other words, one of the Revolution’s grievances was that Britain had protected Indigenous homelands from American expansion.

“That makes the Declaration’s next move even more revealing: it described Native people as ‘merciless Indian Savages,’ erasing the fact that Illinois Native leaders were making careful diplomatic choices in a war forced onto their homelands,” said Kiel, a citizen of the Oneida Nation.

“The tragedy is that the United States benefited from Native diplomacy, then made peace in 1783 without Native nations at the table. In Illinois, the birth of the United States and the dispossession of Indigenous nations were part of the same revolutionary moment.”