Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

pressure the government for the subsidy of a huge land grant at the
forks of the Ohio River. To form the Ohio Company, Lee gathered around
him a significant group. Many of them were residents and neighbors of
the Fairfax fief, including George Fairfax and the Washington family, especially
Lawrence and Augustine Washington. Marylanders among the organizers
included the frontier trader Thomas Cresap. Lee and eleven
others formed the Ohio Company in 1747, and quickly petitioned the governor
and Council for a grant of two hundred thousand acres of land
near the forks of the Ohio River. But Governor Gooch was not enthusiastic
about the aggressiveness of the land grants, and the powerful Speaker John
Robinson, himself a rival land speculator and a determined opponent of
the company, was able to secure rejection of the Ohio Company request.
Undaunted, Lee and the others went over the Virginia governor's head
to appeal the decision to the Crown. To petition and put pressure on London,
Lee secured the services of a prominent Quaker merchant, John Hanbury.
In the spring of 1749, not long after Lee had assumed the post of
president of the Council, the Crown directed Virginia to grant the two
hundred thousand acres. In the summer, the governor and Council made the
grant, conditioned on a hundred families' settling there within seven years
and on the company's building a fort near the forks. As soon as the conditions
were met, the company would take up an adjoining three hundred
thousand acres on the same terms. Quitrent payments to the Crown were
waived for ten years, and after that would only have to be made for land
actually under cultivation.
The conditions of the Ohio Company grant had two fateful consequences:
one, the fact of official British sanction alerted the French to the likelihood
of dangerous encroachment on their territory; and two, a direct aggressive
challenge was thereby laid down to the French. It was, clearly, high time
for the French to act.
By the time the grant to the Ohio Company was made, Lee had converted
the company all the more into a personal fief. George Fairfax and others had
dropped out, while friends and relatives such as Richard Lee, Philip Ludwell
Lee, and George Mason were added, as was the powerful Duke of Bedford in
reward for his services in securing the grant. The outgoing Governor
Gooch, for his part, tried to offset the exclusive privilege of the grant by
handing out huge chunks of Ohio territory on the same day to several other
groups of land speculators. John Tayloe secured a renewal of the onehundred-thousand-acre
Patton grant; Bernard Moore and others received
one hundred thousand acres on the New River; Peyton Randolph and others
four hundred thousand acres on the New; William Winston, Jr., fifty thousand
acres east of the Ohio River; and the Loyal Company received the
staggering total of eight hundred thousand acres along the southern Virginia
frontier.
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