Arthur St. Clair: The Invisible Patriot

Copyright © 2014 R.W. Dick Phillips.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-3780-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-3782-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-3781-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014912495

iUniverse rev. date:   08/28/2014

Table of Contents

Part One

France, England, Scotland, and Canada

One Heritage and the Early Years

Two St. Clair’s Legendary Scottish Ancestors.

Three St. Clair, the Knights Templar, and the Freemasons

Part Two

The Americanization of Arthur

Four The Fighting Scot, an American Hero

Five Arthur, Phoebe, and Family

Six Pennsylvania’s Americanization of Arthur

Seven Honor, Duty, and Country

Eight The Decision

Part Three

The Revolutionary War

Nine Surviving 1776

Ten A Washington Man

Eleven The Untold Story of the New Jersey Victories

Twelve Courage at Ticonderoga

Thirteen The Making of a Statesman

Part Four

After the War

Fourteen Our Eighth President, before the Constitution

Fifteen Westward through Wheeling

Sixteen Cincinnati, Headquarters and Home

Seventeen An Elephant in a Life

Eighteen Building Ohio, First State of the Northwest Territory

Nineteen An American Founding Father

Part Five

He Gave All He Had

Twenty A Resolute Federalist

Twenty-One Forty Years of American Patriotism at a Glance

Twenty-Two He Deserved Better

Twenty-Three St. Clair Descendants

Twenty-Four Not Invisible to All

Epilogue

Bibliography

To Mary…

.my dear wife and partner, thanks for all you do.

You make the world more beautiful.

Thanks to Mary, Patti and Rich,

for your ideas and encouragement.

Thanks also to Michael, Patricia, and Timothy

for your support. Remember, there’s usually

a story behind every story.

Preface

During the six months before December of 1776, Commanding General, George Washington had retreated from nine consecutive battles with the British in New Jersey and had lost ninety percent of his army. Brigadier General, Arthur St. Clair answered the call with fresh troops, took over the leadership of a brigade and suggested the strategies of stealth which enabled Washington’s army to win the next three battles over the British in just nine days after Christmas in 1776. This drove the British out of New Jersey and avoided what could have been the end of the American Revolution.

St. Clair walked with the giants of the American Revolution…Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Greene, Lafayette and others. And yet, for more than two centuries, history has been reluctant to mention that St. Clair…

Became one of Washington’s most trusted of only 30 major generals.

• Built four armies for Washington

• Was the military strategist who helped Washington defeat the British in 1776-77.

• Was President when the U.S. Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance were drafted.

• Was America’s first and last foreign-born President.

St. Clair was also the patriot who…

• Stopped the Virginia governor from annexing what is now Pittsburgh (1774)

• Protected Pennsylvania settlers from Indian attacks incited by the British (1764-69).

• Assisted Governor Penn with development of Bedford and Westmoreland Counties (1764-74).

• Renounced his allegiance to Great Britain to become a Colonel in the Continental Army (1774).

• Established judicial system for six states of the Northwest Territory.

• Named Cincinnati and made it his headquarters for 15 years.

• Established Ohio’s first nine counties and their county seats.

Arthur St. Clair is sometimes remembered as an unfortunate victim of circumstance, but he was so much more. He was an American patriot who always tried to do the right thing, regardless of the political consequences or personal agendas of lawmakers. He was courageous and his innovative military strategies helped Washington become known worldwide as the greatest military strategist of the time.

This book’s objective is to tell the real story of this unrecognized American patriot and Founding Father and provide fresh perspectives about some major events that happened during America’s exhausting eight-years of labor which gave birth to a new nation.

It is also to examine unreported and mis-reported information about the experiences of this patriot, Arthur St. Clair, who gave forty years of his life to America’s cause and its development and yet has remained virtually invisible.

No storyteller wants to learn that the reported facts upon which his or her published story was based, were false. Therefore, this historical commentary suggests some plausible theories as to what really did happen at critical periods during the last quarter of the 18th Century and why they were presented to the media, and hence the public, as they were.

Unlike those who have devoted their lives to studying the multifaceted subject of history, I have become somewhat knowledgeable about what happened before, during and after the revolutionary period. I do not profess to be anything more than that, and offer an extensive bibliography to support my findings.

For more than 30 years, I have been fortunate to represent clients to the national print and broadcast media. Many of these clients were unappreciated or misunderstood. This experience has given me a unique perspective. It taught me to question things and to seek facts to support stories. With St. Clair, the question was how one could have both given and achieved so much for his country and yet been so ignored and even maligned. While answers soon began to appear in the form of negative references to, or omissions of St. Clair’s role in history, I was still left to speculate why.

So how did I get involved in all this? Years ago, as head of the PR Division for a downtown Cleveland ad agency, St. Clair Avenue was one block from my office, but I had no idea that years later, I would be writing national magazine articles about this great patriot, Arthur St. Clair. The articles and speaking engagements which followed eventually led to this book, the producing of which has received much encouragement from St. Clair’s descendants.

After a quarter century in Phoenix, my wife and I moved back to Ohio to be nearer our family. As a writer/storyteller, I became interested in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century patriots of the Ohio Valley, which led to the study of the Revolution.

In addition to Arthur St. Clair, other noted historical subjects I’ve written about were: Henry Clay, arguably America’s greatest speaker of the House of Representatives; Benjamin Levy, the brave Quaker abolitionist and editor of antislavery publications, Moses Shepherd, who built the last leg of the historic National Highway into Wheeling and Ebenezer Zane, founder of Wheeling, patriarch of the famous Zane family and who, long with his brothers, built the National Highway through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

Most reader interest has come from the over-fifty audience, which surprises some editors, until they realize that this audience reads most of the newspapers still in existence today. Reader response has not only supported this, but also prompted scores of speaking invitations.

What became a five-year journey with St. Clair began slowly. He was the namesake of our new home city of St. Clairsville, Ohio as well as the communities of Upper St. Clair and St. Clairsville, Pennsylvania.

First inquiries didn’t produce much about this long-forgotten governor of the Northwest Territory. If anyone remembered anything about St. Clair at all, it was usually negative.

This piqued my interest. As St. Clair’s story unfolded and I began to publish articles about him, the St. Clair/Sinclair descendants from around North America and Great Britain began to show interest. Three in particular—Don Lee Sinclair, from Indianapolis, James Robb St. Clair, from Philadelphia and Niven Sinclair in London—have been steady sources of information and encouragement throughout this project. The interest from the Scottish Freemasons and the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Sons of the American Revolution and the Clan’s Sinclair USA and Canada also generated enthusiasm for this project. The enthusiasm from St. Clair’s descendants is understandable since very little had been written about him in the last two centuries.

Discovering a story that has been languishing for so long can be exciting, especially when evidence leads one to suspect that a great injustice has been done for many years. Whatever journalistic objectivity I had brought to this effort began to vanish in a sea of investigative effort and advocacy.

This book may help you realize, perhaps for the first time, that Arthur St. Clair was one of the few experienced generals whom Washington could trust. Also little known is that St. Clair’s military strategies helped Washington during those early critical years of the war. They were fellow patriots and trusted confidants for almost twenty-five years. Not that you might have easily discovered that in most of the history books written in the past two and a half centuries.

Although it is estimated that one-thousand books have been written about Washington, few mention St. Clair’s name positively, if at all. Also, since the first book written about St. Clair in 1882, this is only the second book written about him in the past 132 years; the last was in 1944.

When this story sparked interest from the Ohio Historical Society in recognizing St. Clair, the Rotary Club of St. Clairsville agreed to sponsor the society’s first-ever Ohio monument plaque to recognize the positive contributions of Arthur St. Clair to Ohio and America. The City of St. Clairsville helped arrange a plaque dedication ceremony in front of the Belmont County Courthouse. Celebrated also was the fact that, two centuries earlier, Governor St. Clair had established Belmont County and named St. Clairsville its county seat. The plaque now silently tells the story of the city’s namesake to young and old, residents and visitors alike.

I hope you enjoy reading about Arthur St. Clair’s life of service to his adopted country. Perhaps you will also discover why he has been such an invisible patriot and conclude, as I did, that he deserved so much better from the nation he loved. R.W.D.P.

Acknowledgments

Throughout this project I have been grateful for the encouragement, counsel, and support of Don Lee Sinclair, Indiana Commissioner of Clan Sinclair USA; James Robb St. Clair, historian and St. Clair, descendant, founder of the Arts Society of Philadelphia, and former cultural program director for the City of Philadelphia; Niven Sinclair, London entrepreneur and Sinclair historian; Shirley G.M. Iscrupe, Westmoreland County author/historian and Pennsylvania Room Archivist, Ligonier Valley Library. Also Andy Verhoff, coordinator of the Ohio’s monument plaque program and author Fred J. Milligan, legal counsel for the Ohio Historical Society. Thanks also to so many at the Library of Congress and also Robert Sinclair Kelly of Cincinnati; our cover artist and to Rich Phillips for his on-going technical support; also, thanks also for the encouragement of past president Richard Greenlee and professors David Castle and Dave Brooks; and Dean Emeritus Bob Bauvinaser of Ohio University; Appreciation also to Dr. John Mattox, curator, Underground Railroad Museum; Ward L. Ginn, author/ historian, Clan Sinclair (USA), Pat Medert, Ross County Historical Society; director Shirley Prentice and researcher Preston Tedrich of the St. Clairsville Library. Thanks also to Sean Duffy, director, Ohio County Library of Wheeling and to the Rotary Club of St. Clairsville, especially Mark Macri, John S. Marshall, Jim Bartsch, John Sambuco, Rev. Wayne Ickes and David Trouten; also to attorney/author-historian, Daniel Frizzi Jr., Ginny Favede, Belmont County Commissioner and also the City of St. Clairsville’s mayor, Bob Vincenzo and directors Dennis Bigler and Kevin Barr; Kathy Kaluger and Nancy Edgar; Judy Jenewine, past president, Belmont County Historical Society; Eugene Doc Householder, Director, the Belmont County Tourism Council and Judy Branczio, Jefferson County Historical Society.

A special thanks to artist Robert Sinclair Kelly of Cincinnati, who created the painting on the cover and Don Lee Sinclair of Indianapolis, who commissioned the work for use in this book. The original painting is on display at the St. Clair/Sinclair library at Noss Head, Scotland.

Author’s Note

Although Washington’s experience grew exponentially throughout his career, he did not start out that way. His early years of the Revolution were shaky at best. He was not a good military strategist, had retreated from nine battles and was on the verge of being fired by Congress when he met St. Clair, whose strategies helped win the three New Jersey battles and take the momentum of the war from the British.

Early historians tend to overlook the fact that Washington needed St. Clair’s help and that the great man was struggling at the start. To reinforce this perspective, historians have both ignored St. Clair’s contributions and the fact that the two were there for each other throughout the war.

Washington’s greatness as the father of our country stands alone. But I suggest that the telling of how he overcame his own shortcomings to go on to greatness makes a far better story. After all, isn’t that the American story; the overcoming of adversity to succeed? Perhaps a better question is, why punish St. Clair?

Unlike so many historical works of the past 200-plus years, this book has not overlooked the mistakes and personal agendas of the powerful in history and how St. Clair’s achievements were often inconvenient truths for them and thus were either mis-reported or ignored altogether.

It was the negative impact of constant political infighting during St. Clair’s last ten years as governor that eventually ended his career. He wanted Ohio to become a Federalist state to ensure that the Northwest Ordinance article prohibiting slavery would not be overturned by the Ohio state legislature. However, St. Clair was removed from office in 1802 by President Jefferson to clear the way for his Democratic-Republican party’s control of the Ohio Legislature, the new state of Ohio and its office of Governor in 1803. St. Clair’s concerns were not unwarranted; Jefferson’s newly-elected party came within one vote of overturning the Ordinance’s provision against slavery. Fortunately, it followed that the remaining states to be established from the Northwest Territory were also founded as free states.

This book is dedicated to the descendants of the Arthur and Phoebe St. Clair family throughout North America and Europe, particularly those in Pennsylvania and Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota with an interest in the early beginnings of their states in which Arthur St. Clair played a key development role.

Of course any such dedication should also include the earliest St. Clair/Sinclair ancestors in Norway, France, Scotland and England who gave birth to this family.

Introduction

De Mortuis nil nisi bonum disendum est which, when translated from the Latin, reads of the dead, nothing but good is to be said but, in many cases, the good can be hidden for personal or political reasons.

This maxim has never been truer than in the case of Major General Arthur St. Clair whose life swung from high military command to being court-marshalled, from being Governor of the Northwest Territory to living in a log house and, finally, dying a lonely death on a country roadside with only his faithful pony by his side.

This was truly a bitter end for a patriot who had even served in Congress and as its President. In consequence of this injustice, I was delighted to learn that Dick Phillips had decided to set the record straight by telling the real story of one of George Washington’s closest allies. Dick has left no stone unturned. No calumny has been too bloody to voice. St. Clair was a valiant soldier who stood tall and yet, because of the political agenda and intrigues of his fellow men, he was maligned. Political expediency over-rides everything. Even worse, he was never repaid for the money he had advanced to pay the wages of Washington’s army-an army which, it could be said, was instrumental in preparing the ground on which the United States of America was built and upon which Washington became the first President authorized by the U.S. Constitution.

Dick Phillips’ book informs, inspires and warns in equal measure. Here is a book which deserves to be in the Library of Congress and in every other public library, in every school and on every American bookshelf, because it spells out the real history of the years which led to the creation of the greatest democracy in the world.

It is said that there is no victory without sacrifice, but one man paid too heavy a price. Although a comrade of George Washington, Major General St. Clair died unsung. Dick’s book redresses that imbalance because it opens up political windows that have been closed for far too long and which allows Major General Arthur St. Clair to assume his rightful and honored place in American history. Bravo, Dick!

Niven Sinclair, Founder, Niven Ltd. London (Ret.)

Scottish/Sinclair Historian

Part One

France, England, Scotland, and Canada

All that remains of Castle Girnigoe, circa 1475, the ancestral home of the St. Clair/Sinclair’s.

The first Earl of Caithness, William St. Clair, assigned his son William the task of building the Castle Girnigoe, which became the family stronghold on the northern coast of Scotland. William brought stone masons from the family seat at Rosslyn in Midlothian County. All local stone was used so that the walls of the castle looked like an extension of the cliff face.

Chapter One

Heritage and the Early Years

This story is about a great patriot who gave all he had to America’s fight for freedom and democracy. It is also an updated account of an important eighteenth and nineteenth-century Scottish family in world history, which traces its heritage back over one thousand years to the Saint Clair’s of France, which became the St. Clair’s and the Sinclair’s of Scotland, England, and America.

The St. Clair French-Norman ancestry in Scotland was the result of the Norman conquest of France and the British Isles, which included Scotland, in the eleventh century by William the Conqueror. William, son of the Comte de Saint Clair of France, a close relative of William the Conqueror, settled in Scotland in 1066. William became the acknowledged patriarch of all the Saint Clair’s in the kingdom.

There is disagreement on the date of Arthur St. Clair’s birth; it was either March 23 or April 3 in 1734, 1736, or 1737. However, it’s most often reported that he was born in Thurso, Caithness, Scotland, on March 23, 1734.

Arthur St. Clair’s own Scottish lineage traces back nine generations to the joining of two noble Scottish families, the Saint Clair’s and the Sutherlands, through the marriage of John Earl Caithness Sinclair and Elizabeth Sutherland in 1500. In 1533 they had their only son, George Earl, who, during the forty-nine years before he was laid to rest in Rosslyn Chapel, fathered seven children. After seven generations, this lineage produced Arthur St. Clair. The Sinclair’s built and often defended Girnigoe Castle in Caithness County and both Rosslyn Castle and Rosslyn Chapel in Midlothian County.

Research indicated that all St. Clair’s and Sinclair’s are descended from the original Saint Clair’s who came to Scotland from the Bass-Normandy Region of France. The English often derived the St. Clair name into Sinkler. The names St. Clair and Sinclair were derived from Saint Clair and the French-Norman area from which they came, Saint-Clair-sur-L’Elle. Both Scottish family strongholds began in the Orkney Isles of North Scotland, in Caithness, the northernmost county in Scotland. ¹

We should note here that studies of this family are ongoing and that theories under study reach back to AD 600. Eight years ago, Steve Sinclair, of New Jersey, and Stan Sinclair, of Tennessee, cofounded a St. Clair/Sinclair DNA research effort that has attracted a team of researchers worldwide. According to Steve Sinclair, before Ellis Island, there were six major points of immigration through which St. Clairs and Sinclairs passed into North America: Pennsylvania/Philadelphia, New Hampshire/Boston/New York, Halifax/Quebec, New Jersey, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Said Steve Sinclair:

Arthur St. Clair was fortunate in that he had been able to make a choice to come to North America. Of course, as a British officer, he earned his passage to North America by fighting the French and Indians in Canada for five years. Others fled Scotland because of its wars or famine, selling themselves as indentured servants for many years to pay for their passage. Still others convicted of crimes in Scotland often saw their prison sentence take the form of indefinite servitude to plantation owners in North America. ²

Perhaps because of his ancestry, and the fact that he was tall and raised as a gentleman, Arthur St. Clair is said to have carried himself with an aristocratic bearing, not unlike George Washington. Some even say that young Arthur was born wealthy. It does not appear that this is true. There are many lines of Sinclair’s and St. Clair’s who came from an aristocratic history, but not all were wealthy. It is generally held that Arthur St. Clair was of old aristocratic Saint Clair descent, specifically the Sinclair’s of Lybster and Scotscalder both of whom used the spelling, St. Clair.

Arthur’s father, William, was the youngest of his family. Traditionally, even if there was family wealth, there was never much left for the youngest. So William led a modest, uneventful life as a merchant in a small town. He died at an early age, and young Arthur’s education and upbringing were guided closely by his mother, Margaret. She placed great value on their family heritage. She managed their meager income and took charge of Arthur’s education. She took great pains to prepare him for the study of medicine at the University of Edinburgh and to develop in him what she perceived to be the best qualities of his noted ancestry.

After university, young Arthur was indentured to the celebrated doctor William Hunter, one of London’s first surgeons. Arthur was well on his way to a fulfilling medical practice when two things happened. First, his mother died in the winter of 1756–57. Second, the Duke of Cumberland was recruiting troops and seeking officer material from men in the professions and the universities. The French and Indians were threatening British colonial policies in Canada and would soon be doing the same in America, and they needed to be stopped.

Perhaps his decision on the military was prompted by his historic warrior genes, dating back to his St. Clair and Sinclair ancestors. In any case, Arthur decided on a career in the British military. He bought out the remainder of his indenture from Dr. Hunter, which he combined with a small inheritance after his mother’s death. With this and the influence of a family friend, he obtained an ensign’s rank in the Royal American Regiment of Foot, known as the Sixteenth Regiment. While unknown to him at the time, with that decision, he was also destined to become the patriarch of one of the largest St. Clair/Sinclair clans in America.

In 1758, St. Clair sailed with Admiral Edward Boscawen’s fleet headed to North America. He was under the command of Major General Jeffery Amherst, who was charged with leading one of the last campaigns of the Seven Years’ War against the French and Indians at Louisbourg, Nova Scotia. Ironically, St. Clair’s great Scottish ancestor Prince Henry Sinclair had first set foot on Nova Scotia 360 years earlier. Louisbourg was taken from the French, and it’s said that St. Clair distinguished himself in battle, demonstrating his courage almost immediately. On at least one occasion, young Arthur was said to have picked up his unit’s fallen battle flag and led his unit up a hill in the face of fire. General Amherst was called to England, and St. Clair