Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

All in all, nearly one million, five hundred thousand acres were blithely
granted away by Virginia in one day in 1749. The Loyal Company and the
other grantees were not required to colonize or to build forts. The Loyal
Company was a coalition of speculators headed by John Lewis of the Shenandoah
Valley clique, Edmund Pendleton, a protege of the Robinsons, and an
Albemarle group, including Peter Jefferson and Dr. Thomas Walker. The
Loyal Company collaborated closely with the Greenbrier Company of John
Robinson's. In the meanwhile, Thomas Lee became acting governor of Virginia
in 1749-50, succeeding Gooch. After Lee's death in late 1750, the
newly appointed governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, had become, not
accidentally, a member of the Ohio Company. Dinwiddie, incidentally, had
gotten his start in the British bureaucracy as a virulent hatchetman for Lord
Carteret, engaged in prosecuting and ousting firm adherents of Walpole from
the royal bureaucracy. Dinwiddie was now a protege of the formidable
Duke of Bedford. Soon the company was expanded to include the Mercers,
Robert Carter, George Washington, and Governor Arthur Dobbs of North
Carolina.
From the time of the grants in 1749, much of Virginia politics may be
explained by the emergence of two powerful factions of speculators in Ohio
land: the Ohio Company clique of the Lees, Washingtons, Carters, Mercers,
and Masons; and the Loyal-Greenbrier Company coalition of the Robinsons,
Pendletons, Jeffersons, et al. As we have indicated, the Ohio Company, with
its British success, its grip on the governorship, and its duty to build a fort
on the forks of the Ohio, was the more alarming speculative group—to the
fur traders and politicians of Pennsylvania, to the Indians of the Ohio Valley,
and, not least of all, to the French.
The French, for their part, reacted to the threat of Anglo-Virginian aggression
in the Ohio Valley with efficiency and dispatch. The French effectively
warned the native Indians that the Ohio Company meant to clear and settle,
and therefore to oust the Indians rather than to trade with them. The
French launched a campaign to oust the English traders from the Ohio Valley,
where they had been permitted to operate freely. A string of forts was
built by the French throughout the region during 1753; Marquis Duquesne,
governor general of New France, used over a thousand men to build a series
of defensive forts in the Ohio Valley, including Forts Presque Isle on Lake
Erie and Le Boeuf and Venango on French Creek.
Governor Dinwiddie, in his turn, reacted to French defensive measures
by desperate appeals to fellow governors and especially to the Crown to take
appropriate offensive action to outweigh the French moves. Finally, in
August 1753, the Crown, under pressure also of the war party at home, took
the fateful decision that was to lead to all-out conflict with France. The
English government threw down the gauntlet of aggression. It instructed all
the American governors to repel a French "invasion" of what was arro-
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