John Armstrong was born at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1758. He was an aid on General Gates’ staff, and served with him through the campaign against Burgoyne. On the 1st of March, 1776, he was appointed brigadier-general in the Continental service. In February, the following year, he received the appointment of adjutant-general of the Southern army, but in consequence of ill health was obliged to retire from the army for a time. After the war Armstrong was secretary of the State of Pennsylvania. In 1787 he was sent to Congress; from 1800 to 1802 he was United States Senator, and again in 1803–1810. From 1813 to 1814 he was Secretary of War. He was censured for his lack of success in preventing the British from sacking Washington City in 1814–15, and became very unpopular. He resigned in 1814, retiring to Red Hook, New York, where he died April 1, 1843.
WILLIAM THOMPSON.
William Thompson, born in Ireland about 1725, emigrated to the State of Pennsylvania. During the French and Indian War he was captain of a troop of mounted militia, and when in June, 1775, Congress ordered the raising of eight companies of riflemen by the State of Pennsylvania, Thompson was appointed colonel of the battalion. These troops were the first raised on demand of the Continental Congress, and reached the camp at Cambridge before the 14th of August; and on the 10th of November following, they repulsed a British landing party at Lechmere’s Point. On the 1st of March, 1776, Thompson was promoted to the rank of brigadier-general; and on the 19th he superseded Gen. Charles Lee in command of the troops in New York. In April, being ordered to Canada to reinforce General Thomas, he met the retreating army and took command during the fatal illness of that officer, but resigned it on the 4th of June to Gen. John Sullivan, by whose orders, two days later, Thompson made the disastrous attack on the British at Trois Rivières, resulting in the defeat of the Americans, and the taking prisoner of their general. Released on parole in August, Thompson returned to Philadelphia, but was not exchanged until two years later. He was never again actively employed in the service, but died near Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on the 4th of September, 1781.
ANDREW LEWIS.
Andrew Lewis, born in Donegal, Ireland, about 1730, was of Huguenot descent, his father coming to this country in 1732, and being the first white resident in Bellefonte, Augusta County, Virginia. In 1754, he joined an expedition to take possession of the lands lying along the Ohio, in which he acquired great reputation by his conduct at Braddock’s defeat in 1755, and for the part he took in all the Indian wars down to the time of the Revolution. He served under Washington in various capacities, and was with him at Fort Necessity. He commanded an expedition to Sandy Creek in 1756, and was made prisoner in 1758 and taken to Montreal. In 1768, he acted as commissioner from Virginia, to conclude a treaty with the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix, New York. “About 1775, when hostilities began again on the western frontier of Virginia, he received the appointment of brigadier-general, and as commander-in-chief at the battle of Point Pleasant, at the mouth of the Great Kanawha, gained a victory over the Shawnee confederacy under the celebrated chief Cornstalk” in what was considered the severest engagement with the Indians up to that time.
On the 1st of March, 1776, Congress made Lewis a brigadier-general, much to the surprise and disappointment of Washington, who considered him entitled to a higher rank; and Lewis himself felt that he had been slighted, but his patriotism triumphed, and he accepted the inferior position. Ill health, however, caused him to tender his resignation on the 15th of April, 1777; but afterward he accepted a commission to treat with the Indians at Fort Pitt. On his way home from the Ohio, he was seized with a fever, and died in Bedford County, Virginia, on the 26th of September, 1780, when only forty miles from his home on the Roanoke River. His statue occupies one of the pedestals at the base of the Washington monument in Richmond.