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At 18, Angus McDonald rebelled against King George II. Convicted of treason, he fled from Scotland to Virginia, where he fought Native Americans in Lord Dunmore’s War. Brave, experienced and patriotic, he rejected a commission from George Washington. An untimely death robbed him of the chance to change his mind.
Angus McDonald was born in 1727 in the Scottish Highlands, the mountainous northwestern part of Scotland. The descendant of a long line of fighting men, he was a member of Clan McDonald of Glengarry. Scottish clans are kinship groups, owing allegiance to a clan chief. “Mac” or “Mc” means “son of,” a critical relationship in a patriarchal society.
The ancestral seat of the McDonalds was Invergarry Castle, in a glen, or valley, on the River Garry, in the Scottish Highlands county of Inverness, according to “The Glengarry McDonalds of Virginia” by Flora McDonald Williams.
Williams’ book is full of McDonalds, McDonells, Macdonells, McAnguses and numerous Angus McDonalds, not to mention a Donald MacAngus and a Donald McDonald. These Anguses and McDonalds did not hesitate to sally forth from their stronghold, “never neutral or passive in any contest, but actively striving for the side which appealed to them, usually that of the under dog,” Williams noted.
Catholic James II (James Stuart) lost the crown of England and Scotland to Protestant William and Mary in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. James and his supporters, the Jacobites, did not yield willingly. (Jacob is the Latin version of James; therefore, his supporters were called Jacobites.)
The McDonalds supported the Jacobites. At the 1689 Battle of Killiecrankie, 16 McDonalds died in a single charge.
The Jacobites won that battle, but lost the war. But they did not give up on restoring the House of Stuart. In 1745, James’ grandson Bonnie Prince Charlie tried to regain the throne. Angus McDonald, only 18, joined the rebellion.
The army of German-born George II crushed the Jacobites in the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Young McDonald fled to Virginia, landing at Falmouth, near Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock River.
At first, like many Scotsmen, he worked as a merchant. He then accepted a commission in the Colonial military. He is most likely the Capt. Angus McDonald who commanded a company of Highlanders in the 1758 battle of Fort Duquesne (later the site of Pittsburgh) during the French and Indian War. George Washington was a fellow officer.
In 1762, Angus McDonald bought a 370-acre tract east of Winchester and built a house which he named Glengarry after his ancestral home. It no longer stands, having burned like so many Colonial-era homes.
A proclamation issued by King George III in 1763 temporarily settled Virginia’s western frontier, reserving lands beyond the Eastern Continental Divide for the Native Americans. But by the early 1770s, the trans-Appalachian country was once more in turmoil, with land-hungry Colonists fighting the Shawnee.
McDonald led the first round of Dunmore’s War, which helped set the stage for the Revolution in Virginia. In 1774, Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, ordered McDonald, major of the Frederick County militia, to raid Wakatomica and other Shawnee towns along the Muskingum River in Ohio. From Wheeling, McDonald took 400 militiamen across the Ohio into Natives’ country.
On Aug. 1, the Shawnee attempted to decoy the Virginians into an ambush. The wary McDonald suspected a trap and sent columns to the left and right to outflank the Shawnee. The outnumbered warriors conducted a fighting withdrawal over about 30 minutes. The Virginians suffered two dead and five wounded.
When they reached Wakatomika, they found it deserted. McDonald burned it along with six other villages. McDonald accomplished his mission but not until the decisive Battle of Point Pleasant did the Colonists succeed in quelling Shawnee resistance south of the Ohio.
What kind of man was McDonald? A family story probably stemming from the Wakatomica expedition has an officer disobeying McDonald’s orders for silence in camp. Hauled before McDonald, the officer remained defiant, whereupon McDonald tied him to a tree for 14 hours, until he apologized.
The same source — McDonald’s grandson, also named Angus — says his grandfather was “a powerful man, about six feet two and one-half inches tall, and of fine proportions … He was a man of great composure and equanimity, sedate, stern and commanding, and I have often heard my grand-mother and oldest uncle say, that no one who knew him ever ventured to oppose or contradict him.” He and his wife, Anna, had seven children.
Like other leading Virginians of the Revolutionary era, McDonald speculated in land. In 1765, Lord Fairfax appointed him agent for the Northern Neck Proprietary, a vast tract of land bounded by the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers.
With the frontier temporarily pacified, Virginians turned their attention to the escalating conflict with Britain. In 1777, McDonald received a letter from George Washington appointing him a lieutenant colonel in a unit commanded by Charles Mynn Thruston. “I sincerely wish that you would accept this office,” Washington wrote. “The contest is of too serious and important a nature to be managed by men totally unacquainted with the duties of the field. Gentlemen, who have from their youth discovered an attachment to this way of life, are in my opinion called upon in so forcible a manner that they ought not to withhold themselves.”
Yet McDonald withheld himself. The excuse he gave Washington was that he had “other Business that I Cannot Leave.”
Was there something more? He is known to have been a Patriot. In 1774, he was appointed to a county committee protesting the Boston Port Act.
The answer may lie in church politics. McDonald was appointed to the vestry for the parish of Frederick in 1768. In the Anglican church, the vestry equates to a board of directors. Charles Mynn Thruston became rector of the parish that same year.
In a meeting in November 1770, the vestry received a petition accusing Thruston of neglecting his duties, and voted to withhold Thruston’s salary. A month later, finding Thruston’s excuses acceptable, the vestry reversed its decision and voted to pay him — but Angus McDonald apparently walked out in disagreement. Seven years later, McDonald refused to serve under Thruston.
Thruston wasn’t a military neophyte. An officer under Washington, he was wounded at the Battle of Trenton in 1776 and promoted to colonel. A political leader, he served in the General Assembly from 1782 to 1788. He was one of Frederick County’s foremost citizens, and perhaps a rival to McDonald.
Thruston apparently bore no ill will toward McDonald. In a letter to Washington dated March 14, 1777, accepting regimental command, Thruston wrote, “If Colo. McDonald will serve, no better Lieut. Colonel could be found.”
As the war dragged on and the need for qualified men grew dire, McDonald might have been given the opportunity to reconsider — but he never got the chance. On Aug. 19, 1778, ill with an unrecorded ailment, he took too much of a powerful emetic, antimony potassium tartrate. Williams, the family chronicler, doesn’t spell it out, but it appears that McDonald, proud descendant of a long line of fighting Scotsmen, died not in battle, but from vomiting to death.