Pennamite-Yankee War

Part of American Revolutionary War

Date

1769-1799

Location

Susquehanna River

Result

Negotiated, Legal Settlement

Land titles preserved and transferred to Pennsylvania as part of larger settlement

Belligerents

Pennamites

Yankees

Commanders and leaders

Unknown

Strength

Unknown

Casualties and losses

1 killed

2 killed

Negotiated, Legal Settlement

The Pennamite–Yankee Wars or Yankee–Pennamite Wars were a series of conflicts, consisting of the First Pennamite War (1769-1770), the Second Pennamite War (1774), and the Third Pennamite War (1784), in which the Wyoming Valley, along the North Branch of the Susquehanna River, was disputed between white settlers from Connecticut (Yankees) and Pennsylvania (Pennamites).

Claims on the Wyoming Valley were disputed from the start. The Dutch regarded the Susquehanna River as the border between New Netherland and the English colony of Virginia. King Charles II of England rejected all Dutch claims on North America and in 1662, he granted the land to Connecticut, two years before his country's conquest of New Netherland and its subsequent conversion into the Province of New York. In 1681, Charles II also included the same land in the grant to William Penn.

The charter of each colony assigned the territory to the colony and so overlapping land claims existed. In the 17th century, fierce resistance by the Susquehannock rendered the debate academic, but by the mid-18th century, the double grant became problematic. Thomas Paine mentioned the conflict in his pro-independence pamphlet Common Sense, as evidence that "Continental matters" could be sensibly regulated only by a Continental government.

Both colonies purchased the same land by treaties with the Indians. Connecticut sent settlers to the area in 1754. Yankee settlers, from Connecticut, founded the town of Wilkes-Barre in 1769. Armed bands of Pennsylvanian Pennamites tried, without success, to expel them, from 1769–70, starting the First Pennamite War, followed later, in 1775, by the Second Pennamite War, and a final time, in the Third Pennamite War, of 1784. The "wars" were not particularly bloody; in the First Pennamite war, two men from Connecticut and one man from Pennsylvania were killed, in the course of two years. Pennsylvania established a settlement through two lessees, Ogden and Stewart.

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