Historians note the April 1775 “shot heard ’round the world” — the opening round of gunfire when colonial Patriots engaged the British army for the first time during a skirmish in Massachusetts.
But the figurative “first shots” of the American Revolutionary War were words, pointed and barbed — assertions on paper that tyranny from across the Atlantic would not be tolerated in the American colonies. Those words, known as the Fort Gower Resolves, were crafted in November 1774 in what is present-day Hockingport, at the confluence of the Hocking and Ohio rivers, and published four months before those Patriots fired upon the Redcoats at Lexington and Concord, more than 18 months before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
The Fort Gower Resolves was a gutsy expression of American independence, backed by promised action of force.
It read, in part, “As the Love of Liberty, and Attachment to the real Interests and just Rights of America outweigh every other Consideration, we resolve that we will exert every Power within us for the Defence of American Liberty, and for the Support of her just Rights and Privileges; not in any precipitate, riotous, or tumultous Manner, but when regularly called forth by the unanimous Voice of our Countrymen.”
In today’s parlance, it might be described as a challenge to “fool around and find out.”
To understand how that came to be, rewind a bit. The Virginia colonial government authorized a military expedition during the summer and fall of 1774 through present-day West Virginia and Ohio against Native Americans, primarily Shawnee, that later became known as Dunmore’s War.
Virginian soldiers engaged combatants up the Muskingum, Scioto, and Hocking rivers, some going as far as present-day Columbus to quell Native American attacks on encroaching settlers.
As they were making their way back from the interior of the state, some 500 men gathered at Fort Gower. It was there that they got word that the Continental Congress in Philadelphia enacted a boycott of British goods in protest of the British Parliament’s “Intolerable Acts.”
The Virginians at the mouth of the Hocking were incensed. The Resolves they crafted were published in December 1774 in the Virginia Gazette, quickly shared throughout the colonies, and eventually read in Parliament across The Pond. The words stirred revolutionary sentiment among the Colonists and inspired the resolve of their countrymen to stand for liberty.
