Andrew Lewis (9 October 1720–25 September 1781), Continental army general and member of the Council of State, was born in Ireland, probably in County Donegal, and was the son of John Lewis and Margaret Lynn Lewis. His father fled Ireland about 1729 after he killed a landowner who had attempted to evict his family. He reunited with his wife and children in Pennsylvania, but by September 1737, they were probably residing in the Valley of Virginia, where he and kinsman James Patton speculated in land and recruited emigrants from Ireland. Lewis's father and Patton acquired large tracts of land and quickly became prominent pioneers with connections to powerful political leaders in the East, and his father was appointed to the governor's Council in 1748.
Land Speculator
Andrew Lewis became a captain in the Orange County militia in 1742 and a justice of the peace for Augusta County, which had been formed from Orange County, in 1749. Early accounts indicate that he married Elizabeth Anne Givens in 1749, while baptismal records suggest they may have wed about 1744. They had at least six sons and one daughter. He joined his father in land speculation and was among a group of men who received a grant of 30,000 acres near the Calfpasture River in 1739 and among another group granted 100,000 acres on the Youghiogheny River in 1745. Lewis, as agent and surveyor for the Greenbrier Land Company that his father had organized, laid off about 50,000 acres of western land before the Seven Years' (or French and Indian) War began in 1754, which halted westward expansion and Lewis's surveying.
Seven Years' War
Moved by patriotism and self-interest, Lewis was commissioned as captain in the 1st Virginia Regiment and was twice wounded at Fort Necessity under the command of George Washington in July 1754. He returned to Augusta County, where he assumed command of a troop of militia and constructed Fort Lewis, near the later site of the city of Salem. By the beginning of 1756, Lewis was a colonel of militia and a major in the 1st Virginia Regiment in command of an expedition against the Shawnee. In February, Lewis's poorly provisioned, ill-equipped force of 340 volunteers and rangers, including a Cherokee contingent, reached Sandy Creek, a tributary of the Ohio, but heavy rain, hunger, and rough terrain broke down morale. Naturally reserved and perceived as aloof, Lewis failed to maintain discipline, and despite his warnings many men in the ranks abandoned the campaign. In an inquiry, the House of Burgesses concluded that he had honorably discharged his duties and attributed the failure of the expedition to mutinous officers and volunteers.
In May of that same year, Lewis traveled to Chote, the principal town of the Cherokee on the Tennessee River, to construct a fort for frontier defense in hopes that would break South Carolina's monopoly on trade in the area and increase commercial relations between the Cherokee and Virginia. By August the fort was completed, but an air of intrigue hung over negotiations as the Cherokee equivocated and made demands, and the French intervened. Lewis, fearing for his men's lives and realizing that further diplomacy was useless, departed for Virginia.
In 1758, Lewis was again with the 1st Virginia Regiment when it attempted to capture Fort Duquesne (later Fort Pitt). In September, during a preliminary attack that Lewis opposed as unsound, he was captured and imprisoned at Quebec until November 1759. In April 1760, Lewis sent militia to Halifax County in response to Cherokee attacks there. The following year, with the brevet rank of colonel, he took part in a campaign against the Cherokee.
Frontier Defense
Lewis was in the field again during Pontiac's War of 1763, when an alliance of Indian nations swept from the northwest into Virginia and raided along the Greenbrier and Jackson Rivers and near present-day Lexington. Appointed county lieutenant in command of the Augusta militia, Lewis was charged with protecting frontier settlements as far south as the North Carolina border. In the autumn of 1768, Lewis traveled to New York, where he worked with Thomas Walker, an influential burgess who had been his father's partner in the Loyal Land Company, in preparations for what became the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in which the Six Nations surrendered claims west of Virginia, thus extending the colony's boundary to the Ohio River.
About 1769, Lewis moved to Richfield, his new home on a 2,000-acre plantation by the Roanoke River that included land on which Salem was later established. There, enslaved men and women tended his crops and livestock while he traded with eastern merchants. Among the first justices of the peace for Botetourt County, which had been formed from Augusta in 1769, Lewis was appointed county lieutenant in 1770. He was elected to represent the county in the House of Delegates in 1771 and reelected in 1775. He served on the Committees of Propositions and Grievances, on Religion, and of Public Claims.
In October 1773, Lewis visited Point Pleasant, at the confluence of the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers, that was part of 5,000 acres of land he owned in the area. Shawnee, provoked by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix and the loss of hunting grounds south of the Ohio River, fought encroaching settlers in the region. Frontiersmen retaliated early in 1774, slaughtering a group of Mingo men and women. Enraged, Mingo and Shawnee war parties launched raids in the Pittsburgh region and into Hampshire, Augusta, and Fincastle Counties in Virginia. In July, Governor John Murray, earl of Dunmore, led an expedition of militia to engage the raiding parties north of the Ohio River and ordered Lewis to mobilize the militia south of the river and coordinate an offensive. Lewis's three sons and his brother and fellow burgess, Colonel Charles Lewis, also participated.
On 10 October 1774, Lewis's command at Point Pleasant learned of the presence of Indians, and he sent detachments to drive off what he surmised was a large scouting party. It was in fact an army comprised of Shawnee and Mingo warriors plus allies from other tribes, a total of perhaps 700 or 800 men. Led by Shawnee Chief Cornstalk, they had crossed the Ohio to attack Lewis before he could unite with Dunmore. They drove the Virginians back, but Lewis skillfully deployed his troops and fed reserves into his wavering lines. By sunset Cornstalk's warriors had abandoned the battlefield. Of the 900 militiamen engaged, 75 were killed, including Charles Lewis, and 140 wounded. Several days later, Dunmore and Cornstalk signed the Treaty of Camp Charlotte, in which the Shawnee relinquished their claim to the lands south of the Ohio River.
Revolutionary War
Lewis was present in May 1774, when Dunmore dissolved the General Assembly after the House of Burgesses called for a show of solidarity with Boston following the closing of the harbor by Parliament. Reelected a burgess, Lewis was in attendance when the second Revolutionary Convention met in Richmond and where, on 23 March 1775, Patrick Henry declared that war had begun. Lewis served on a committee along with Henry, George Washington, and other leaders, to organize the defense of the colony. In April, Dunmore transferred powder from the Williamsburg magazine to a British warship, on which he took refuge following a public outcry. Given the task of preventing further looting at the Governor's Palace, Lewis took charge of the volunteers and militiamen who converged on the capital and facilitated communications between the burgesses and Dunmore until the governor withdrew to Norfolk.
Lewis was probably elected to but did not attend the third convention in the summer of 1775. At the fourth convention, of which he was a member, in January 1776, he was offered a place in a regiment that Patrick Henry was commanding, but he declined because he refused to be subordinate to a man who had never seen active military service. Lewis may have been angling for a higher commission, which arrived on 1 March 1776. Congress appointed him a brigadier general in the Continental army. Lewis initially focused on recruiting men, building fortifications at strategic locations, and furnishing soldiers with clothing, arms, and equipment. He also commanded the force that summer that faced Dunmore and his small fleet and detachment of soldiers at Gwynn's Island, in Mathews County. Having placed batteries on the mainland near the island, on 9 July Lewis ordered his guns to fire on the British vessels and on the island earthworks. The warships were thrown into confusion, Dunmore's artillery proved ineffective, and by evening his demoralized troops, suffering from smallpox, prepared to evacuate. The next day, Lewis's troops occupied the island, where they found a ghastly scene of dead and diseased bodies, as well as materials needed for Virginia's war effort.
Lewis commanded Continental army units in Williamsburg and sent new recruits to Washington's army that by December 1776 was retreating across New Jersey. Lewis twice asked the president of Congress for permission to join Washington's army but was refused. Early in 1777, Congress promoted several men to major general, but Lewis was not among that number, which included an officer previously junior to him in rank. Washington urged him to ignore the slight and remain in service, but Lewis resigned effective 15 April. He declared that nothing "can lessen a Man or take more from his Usefulness, than setting Persons over him, whom he had a right to Command."
Lewis remained active in military affairs in Virginia. In 1778, he met with Delaware leaders at Fort Pitt to negotiate a treaty to allow American troops to cross tribal land and advance on the British at Fort Detroit. The Americans did not attack and instead troops withdrew the following year from the Illinois Country to the Ohio where a defensive line was planned. In July 1779, the governor's Council of State ordered Lewis and others to advise on Virginia's role in this strategic undertaking. They proposed building a chain of posts from the Powell Valley in southwestern Virginia north to the mouth of the Guyandotte River. Lewis won election to the House of Delegates in the spring of 1780, but resigned after the assembly elected him to the Council of State on 24 May. His tenure was marked by turmoil. In January 1781, he and other council members fled when British general Benedict Arnold marched on Richmond. The council reconvened several days later, but Lewis did not rejoin it until 6 February 1781. Arnold's columns again threatened Richmond, and when General Charles Cornwallis neared the capital in May, the Council and the General Assembly left the city to avoid British cavalry.
Lewis reunited with the Council in mid-June in Staunton and attended meetings until 13 September after the Council had returned to Richmond early in July. In ill-health, Andrew Lewis departed for home but stopped in Bedford County, where he died of a fever on 25 September 1781. He was buried at Richfield beside the body of his son Charles and later reinterred in East Hill Cemetery in Salem. Lewis's estate included twenty enslaved persons, livestock, silver, household furnishings, books, a mahogany desk, and about 30,000 acres of land in Virginia and Kentucky. His papers were later destroyed and Richfield, sold out of the family, burned.
Remembered, though not widely, for his triumphs over Cornstalk and Dunmore, Lewis remains overshadowed by his celebrated contemporaries. The General Assembly named the town of Lewisburg in Greenbrier County for him in 1782, and in the nineteenth century erected a conjectural buckskin-clad likeness (sometimes mistaken for Meriwether Lewis) on the base of the George Washington monument at the Capitol in Richmond. He is memorialized in the Valley of Virginia, where Fort Lewis Mountain overlooks his statue in Salem, and at the Point Pleasant battlefield. In 2001, Interstate Route 81 through Rockbridge, Botetourt, and Roanoke Counties was named in his honor, and in 2010 a bust representing his likeness was installed in the House of Delegates.
Sources Consulted:
Patricia Givens Johnson, General Andrew Lewis of Roanoke and Greenbrier (1980); Irvin Frazier, comp., The Family of John Lewis, Pioneer (1985); Lewis letters in Draper Manuscripts, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wis. (including death date in letter from S. H. Lewis to Lyman C. Draper, 17 Dec. 1844, quoting letter from Col. William Preston to Thomas Lewis, 29 Sept. 1781, with "news of the death of your worthy brother Genl. Lewis. He departed this life last Tuesday evening" [i.e. 25 Sept. 1781], Virginia Papers 8ZZ6) and Papers of the Continental Congress, Record Group 360, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. (including quotation in resignation letter from Lewis to John Hancock, 21 Mar. 1777 in M247, Roll 178, item 159, 276–277); Lewis letters printed in Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg, eds., Documentary History of Dunmore's War, 1774 (1905), W. W. Abbot et al., eds., Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series (1983–1995), Philander D. Chase et al., eds., Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series (1985– ), esp. vols. 3, 16, and 19; numerous references in William J. Van Schreeven, Robert L. Scribner, and Brent Tarter, eds., Revolutionary Virginia, the Road to Independence: A Documentary Record (1973–1983), and Henry R. McIlwaine, Wilmer L. Hall, and Benjamin J. Hillman, eds., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia (1925–1966), esp. vols. 4, 5, and 6; election to Council in Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1780), 21; Otis K. Rice, "The Sandy Creek Expedition of 1756," West Virginia History 13 (1951): 5–19; Glenn F. Williams, Dunmore's War: The Last Conflict of America's Colonial Era (2017); Robert L. Scribner, "Nemesis at Gwynn's Island," Virginia Cavalcade (Spring 1953): 41–47; Alicia Petska, "The Famous Virginian You May Not Know," Richmond Times Dispatch, Discover Richmond, Feb./Mar. 2017, 40–45; will and estate inventory in Botetourt Co. Wills and Administrations, A:141–145, 153–154.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Donald W. Gunter.
How to cite this page:
Donald W. Gunter, "Andrew Lewis (1720–1781)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Lewis_Andrew, accessed [today's date]).
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