William Grayson, Bounty Land, and the Settlement of Kentucky

William Grayson

Among the thousands of descendants of Benjamin Grayson (1684-1757) and Susannah Monroe (1695-1752) of Colonial Virginia, among the most notable is their third child William Grayson (ca. 1736-1790). William was a well-read scholar, a skilled debater, and a respected lawyer and civic leader. William served as secretary and aide-de-camp to General George Washington in 1776, then saw further combat as a regimental colonel in 1777 and 1778, spending the harsh intervening winter at Valley Forge. After the near-destruction of his regiment at Monmouth Court House, William resigned his commission and served on the Continental Board of War. After Independence, he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, the Confederation (or Constitutional) Congress, the Virginia Constitutional Convention, and, finally, as one of the first two U.S. Senators from Virginia. William was reportedly a tall and handsome man with both an affable sense of humor¹ and, as the following speech excerpt demonstrates, a cutting sarcastic wit.

Horrors have greatly been magnified since the rising of the Convention. We are now told by the honorable gentleman [Governor Edmund Randolph]… that we shall be ruined and disunited forever unless we adopt this constitution. Pennsylvania and Maryland are to fall on us from the north, like the Goths and Vandals of old. The Algerines… are to fill the Chesapeake with mighty fleets to attack us on our front. The Indians are to invade us with numerous armies on our rear…, and the Carolinians from the south, mounted on alligators I presume, are to come up and destroy our commerce, and eat up our little children.²

William Grayson at the 1788 Virginia Constitutional Convention

Bounty Land and the Northwest Ordinance

To limit financial outlay and to encourage patriotism, Virginia offered Western bounty land in lieu of pay for three years of military service during the Revolutionary War. This conditionally promised land was primarily in the portion of Virginia beyond the Appalachian mountains that in 1792 would become the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Veterans or their heirs were eligible to claim the land.

William Grayson was a key contributor to the drafting and passage of the Land Ordinance of 1785 (aka the Northwest Ordinance), which established the framework for future land grants and sales of undeveloped land in the Northwest Territory (to become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin). He helped develop the Public Land Survey System, which subdivided the territory into rectangular grids of townships containing 36 one square mile sections.

Anti-Slavery Clause

Importantly, this legislation addressed future statehood for the territories, the land rights and fair treatment of natives already living there, and banned slavery and involuntary servitude in those territories in perpetuity. William, though a southerner and a slaveholder, wrote to his younger cousin James Monroe in 1787, “The clause regarding slavery was agreed to by the southern members for the purpose of preventing tobacco and indigo from being made on the northwest side of the Ohio [river], as well as for several other political reasons.” ¹ William’s will stipulated freedom for “all my slaves born since the Independence of America.” ³

Settlement of Kentucky

Frontiersmen and trading expeditions across the Appalachians were sporadic into the 1750s. During the French and Indian War most of the few white settlers fled back East. The 1763 Treaty of Paris ceded those lands to Britain, and a 1768 Treaty with the Iroquois encouraged a 1769-1771 Daniel Boone-led expedition and exploration. In 1774-1775 the settlements of Harrodsburg and Boonesborough were established. Boone cut back and blazed the long-used Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap in 1775, later widened and improved in the 1790s to accommodate wagon teams.⁴ The non-native population grew from a few hundred in 1775 to about 75,000 by 1790. It would swell to 175,000 by 1800.⁵

Revolutionary War Bounty Land

William Grayson applied for and was awarded war service bounty land in 1783, the warrant for which has been preserved. Neither he nor his wife Eleanor Smallwood (1744-1789) would live long enough to stake the claim. Their heirs, however, would shortly afterward contribute to the early history of Kentucky in various and notable ways.

¹ Nehring, Marilyn, William Grayson: An Overview of the Life of One of Virginia’s First United States Senators (24-page pamphlet, Historic Dumfries Virginia Inc., 1978)

² Quoted in Tyler, Lyon G., The Letters and Times of the Tylers Vol. 1, pg, 139 (Whittet and Shepperson, Richmond VA, 1884)

³ Quoted in William’s Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grayson

⁴ https://www.americanhistorycentral.com/entries/wilderness-road/

⁵ https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/United_States_Migration_to_Kentucky_and_Tennessee_1785_to_1840_-_International_Institute