Lazarus Stewart - Yankee-Pennamite War

Yankee-Pennamite War

Stewart had no love for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and in January 1770, he led thirty-nine militiamen from Lancaster County to the Wyoming Valley. At the time, settlers from Connecticut were contesting the possession of the area with the Pennsylvanians, in a struggle that became the first of the Pennamite Wars. Captain Zebulon Butler was able to recruit Stewart and his men for the Connecticut, or Yankee, side, encouraging them with the promise of land in Hanover Township. Stewart's band, reinforced by ten Yankees, recaptured Fort Durkee from the Pennamites on February 12, 1770. One of his soldiers, Baltzer Stage or Stagard, was the first man to be killed in the conflict, when the Pennamites under Captain Ogden unsuccessfully attempted to retake the fort in March.

On September 24, 1770, a surprise assault by the Pennamites retook Fort Durkee, but Stewart escaped and fled southward. He was arrested two weeks later in York, Pennsylvania, but escaped at night. He returned to Lancaster County and assembled twenty-five of the Paxton Boys, who retook Fort Durkee by ambush on December 18, 1770. On January 21, 1771, a Pennamite force led by Ogden returned to construct Fort Wyoming and besiege Fort Durkee, but their demand that Fort Durkee be surrendered was met with gunfire. There was one casualty, Ogden's brother Nathaniel. Fearing arrest for murder, and outnumbered by the Pennamites, Stewart and his troops slipped away in the night and fled to Connecticut. The victorious Pennamites destroyed Fort Durkee and took possession of the area.

In July 1771, one hundred men under Captains Butler and Stewart returned to the Wyoming Valley to lay siege to Fort Wyoming. Captain Ogden slipped through the lines at night to raise a relief column in Philadelphia. The relief force was ambushed by the Yankees and lost their baggage and supplies. After a month-long siege, Fort Wyoming capitulated on August 15, 1771, and there would be peace in the Wyoming Valley for the next four years, in which Stewart and his militiamen could enjoy the cultivation of the lands granted them for their military services. He and his wife, Martha Espy raised a family of seven children here.

The war resumed in August 1775, when a strong Pennsylvania force of seven hundred men under Colonel William Plunkett was dispatched to the area. They defeated the outnumbered Yankees in September, and drove out the settlers on the west bank of the Susquehanna River. Connecticut was able to raise four hundred men, under Zebulon Butler (now a colonel), and the confrontation took place at Christmas in conditions of heavy snow. Captain Stewart, with twenty men, ambushed the Pennsylvania column at Rampart Rocks on December 24, 1775 and caused them to flee back to their camp. The next day, he and his company attacked the Pennamites as they attempted to cross the river into Wilkes-Barre under cover of darkness, and broke up their attack. After an unsuccessful attack by the Pennamites on the Yankee positions at Rampart Rocks, Plunkett's column withdrew. By now, the attention of both parties was fixed upon a greater theater of war, the American Revolution.