Robert Dinwiddie, born at Glasgow before October…
November 1753 CE
Joining the British colonial service in 1727, Dinwiddie had been appointed collector of the customs for Bermuda.
Following an appointment as surveyor general of customs in southern American ports, Dinwiddie became Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, and will be featured as such in William Makepeace Thackeray’s nineteenth-century historical novel The Virginians: A Tale of the Last Century.
Dinwiddie, as deputy for absentee governor John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun, is the de facto head of the colony wants to limit French expansion in Ohio Country, an area claimed by the Virginia Colony and in which the Ohio Company, of which he is a stockholder, has made preliminary surveys and some small settlements.
Dinwiddie learns in 1753 that the French have built Fort Presque Isle near Lake Erie and Fort Le Boeuf, which he sees as threatening Virginia's interests in the Ohio Valley.
In fact, he considers Winchester, Virginia, to be "exposed to the enemy"; Cumberland, Maryland, is only to be fortified the next year.
Dinwiddie sends an eight-man expedition under twenty-one-year-old George Washington, a major in the state militia, with a written demand that the French leave the disputed territory.
Washington makes the journey in midwinter of 1753–54.
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