The Dorchester Heights were a series of hills lying to the south of Boston from which one could command the harbor. After the British defeated the revolutionary army at the Battle of Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775), neither side fortified Dorchester Heights. During the winter of 1775-76, General George Washington, who had taken command of the armed forces surrounding Boston in the summer of 1775, determined that the best way to force the British to evacuate Boston was to capture the Dorchester Heights and establish batteries on them. Two problems confronted Washington. First, he needed artillery. This difficulty was overcome by bringing an artillery train across the snow and ice from the recently captured Fort Ticon-DERoga in New York. Second, he needed to occupy the heights in one night to prevent British interference. Since the ground was frozen, the troops could not dig regular earthworks. Instead, the revolutionary soldiers prepared to build fortifications with logs and other materials and bring them to the top of the hills in one night. This maneuver was carried out the night of March 4-5, 1776. When the British awoke that morning they discovered that their position was untenable in Boston. They either had to attack the entrenched Continentals, with possible results similar to the Pyrrhic victory at Bunker Hill, or evacuate. General William Howe had determined to evacuate Boston already. While he first contemplated an attack, he quickly gave up on the idea and merely accelerated his schedule for departure. On March 17, 1776, the last British ship left Boston Harbor, providing an important victory for Washington and the Continental army.
See also Revolutionary War.
Dow, Lorenzo (1777-1834) American Methodist preacher
A successful transatlantic evangelical known for his eccentric behavior and appearance, Lorenzo Dow preached for the Methodists and espoused radical democratic ideas. Dow was born in Connecticut and raised as a strict Calvinist. A sickly youth, he had a conversion experience when he was 17 years old and began to espouse the idea that an individual had to open his or her heart up to God to achieve salvation. Dow started his career as an itinerant preacher in 1796. Over the next two decades he traveled the length and breadth of the United States holding camp meetings and converting thousands of people. Dow also made several trips to Great Britain, beginning with a visit to Ireland in 1798. This journey antagonized Methodist leaders on both sides of the Atlantic and demonstrated Dow’s own independent streak. His camp meetings in Ireland unleashed a debate in Great Britain over the value of using such events to find converts.
Dow had a radical faith in democracy. Taking Thomas Jefferson’s words to heart he exclaimed “but if all men are ‘BORN EQUAL,’ and endowed with unalienable RIGHTS by their CREATOR, in the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—then there can be no just reason. . . why he may or should not think, and judge, and act for himself in matters of religion, opinion, and private judgement.”
Such ideas combined with his wild looks—he had long straggly hair and a long beard, worn-out and disheveled clothes, and a crazed gaze in his eyes—attracted audiences. He would often begin a sermon by quoting Thomas Paine and would rail against more formal clergy, lawyers, and doctors. A tremendous storyteller, he also used gimmicks to reach his audience, including a hidden trumpet to echo the sounds of Gabriel and feigning his own collapse and death in front of the assembled crowds. At the height of his preaching in 1804 he spoke between 500 and 800 times, and in 1805 he traveled 10,000 miles. His books and pamphlets appeared in many editions. After 1820 he remained largely in Connecticut living off the profit of his publications while also peddling “Lorenzo Dow’s Family Medicine.’”
Further reading: Nathan Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989).
Dragging Canoe (1751?-1792) chief of Chickamauga band, British ally in the Revolutionary War Dragging Canoe led a Native American resistance movement during and after the Revolutionary War (1775-83) in the rugged region in what is now the Georgia-Tennessee border. He was born a Cherokee while they were still a powerful force in the southern colonies. Little is known about his early life.
A group of investors called the Transylvania Company bought a large tract in Kentucky from the Cherokee in 1774. This act infuriated the young Dragging Canoe who told Daniel Boone that although the company had purchased the land, the white settlers would find that their new lands would be “a dark and bloody ground.” Dragging Canoe refused to recognize the sale and vowed to kill any European American who tried to move into the region. When the Revolutionary War began, he immediately sided with Great Britain. He declined offers to negotiate with the Virginia representatives at Fort Patrick Henry.
Dragging Canoe fought the rebellious colonists with such vehemence that he became the single most powerful Native American at that time. He led raids on settlements in Kentucky during the early part of the war, and he gathered a large band of nearly 600 men to attack the revolutionary Americans living along the Watauga River. A militia detachment foiled the assault, and Dragging Canoe received a leg wound. He realized that his men could do better if they broke into small war parties rather than fighting in the European-American style. He ordered raids all along the central and southern frontier. Sensing that he needed to establish a secure base, Dragging Canoe moved to the Chickamauga River valley, where many warriors from different nations flocked to his cause, and thereafter this branch of Cherokee are sometimes referred to as the Chickamauga. By 1778 as many as 1,000 Shawnee, Cherokee, Creek, and Miami men fought under his leadership. The Continental army sent a force under the command of Colonel Isaac Shelby to put an end to the raids. Dragging Canoe merely shifted his people to Chattanooga and parried the blow. The raids continued in their intensity.
The end of the war did not mean peace for Dragging Canoe since he still considered the revolutionary
Americans to be invaders. He sent men to attack the settlers flooding into Kentucky and Tennessee through the Cumberland Valley. His influence grew during these years and reached its peak in 1790. He attracted the allegiance of many warriors who would later become famous. Tecumseh allegedly fought alongside Dragging Canoe at this time.
Dragging Canoe died undefeated. The U. S. military eventually curbed some of his raids but never managed to stop them. After his death, his followers joined forces with the Miami in Ohio and suffered defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers (August 20, 1794). In the years after the battle, Chickamauga moved into Spanish Louisiana and joined with their relatives, the Western Cherokee in present-day Arkansas.
Further reading: Thomas M. Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
—George Milne
Duane, William (1760-1835) journalist William Duane edited the stridently Jeffersonian Aurora newspaper in Philadelphia. He was born in New York but moved to the British Isles at a young age. Trained as a printer, he went to India in 1787 to establish the Indian World in Calcutta. Although the paper was successful, his attacks on the East India Company led to his deportation. He worked in London for a newspaper, while he sought restitution of his seized property in India. Unsuccessful in this effort, he left for Philadelphia in 1796, and he began to work for Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Aurora. After the yellow fever epidemic of 1798 killed Bache and Duane’s wife, Duane took over the editorship of the Aurora, and in 1800 he married Margaret Bache, widow of Benjamin Franklin Bache and owner of the newspaper (see also disease and epidemics).
As editor, Duane made the Aurora the most important Democratic-Republican Party (Jeffersonian) paper in the country, attacking the John Adams administration, the Quasi-War (1798-1800) with France, and the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798). As a result, Duane found himself assaulted by a mob of soldiers in Philadelphia who supported the Federalist Party (May 15, 1799), sued for libel by Federalist politicians, prosecuted under the Sedition Act by the courts, accused by the U. S. Senate with “false, scandalous, defamatory, and malicious assertions,” and charged with contempt when he failed to appear before the Senate. Neither legal nor illegal actions, however, were able to silence his biting pen. He was a major supporter of Thomas Jellerson in the election ol i8oo, and the Democratic-Republican triumph of that year seemed to guarantee his future. But the removal of the nation’s capital to Washington, D. C., left his paper at a disadvantage, and promised patronage was not immediately forthcoming. Duane remained active in local Pennsylvania politics, and eventually obtained a variety of government posts to supplement his income. He retired from the editorship of the Aurora in 1822 and traveled to South America. On his return he obtained another government office, which he held until his death on November 24, 1835.
See also journalism.
Further reading: Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers." Newspaper Politics in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); Kim Tousley Phillips, William Duane: Radical Journalist in the Age of Jefferson (New York: Garland, 1989).
World History
