Sunday, October 9, 2011

The "Dour Scot," Robert Dinwiddie

From The Plains of Abraham, a book about the French-Indian War:

...the Lieutenant-Governor [of Virginia], Robert Dinwiddie, took a jaundiced view of these high-spirited, free-spending colonials. A dour, broad-bottomed Scot, with short grey hair like wire and steady, blue-grey eyes, Dinwiddie was a professional civil servant. For most of his life he had been a Customs surveyor in Virginia and the British West Indies, and now, at the age of sixty, brought his fierce integrity to the upholding of the royal prerogative against an elected assembly whose increasing pleasure it was to bait him.  As devoted and effective a British administrator ever to function in the American colonies, he (Dinwiddie) had become alarmed at the encroachments of the French in the huge no-man's-land of the Ohio Valley beyond the mountains.  


From "The Official Records of Robert Dinwiddie...":

Dinwiddie died in Clifton, Bristol, England.

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