Robert Dinwiddie

Robert Dinwiddie
Portrait by an unknown artist, c. 1760-1765
Born	1692 Glasgow, Kingdom of Scotland
Died	July 27 1770 (aged 77–78) Clifton, England, Kingdom of Great Britain

Robert Dinwiddie (1692 – 27 July 1770) was a British colonial administrator who served as lieutenant governor of colonial Virginia from 1751 to 1758, first under Governor Willem Anne van Keppel, 2nd Earl of Albemarle, and then, from July 1756 to January 1758, as deputy for John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun. Since the governors at that time were largely absentee, he was the de facto head of the colony for much of the time.

Dinwiddie was born at Glasgow before 2 October 1692, the son of Robert Dinwiddie of Germiston and Elizabeth Cumming. He matriculated at the University in 1707 before starting work as a merchant. Joining the British colonial service in 1727, Dinwiddie was appointed collector of the customs for Bermuda. Following an appointment as surveyor general of customs in southern American ports, Dinwiddie became Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, and featured as such in William Makepeace Thackeray’s nineteenth-century historical novel The Virginians: A Tale of the Last Century.

Dinwiddie's actions as lieutenant governor are cited by one historian as precipitating the French and Indian War, commonly held to have begun in 1754. He wanted to limit French expansion in Ohio Country, an area claimed by the Virginia Colony and in which the Ohio Company, of which he was a stockholder, had made preliminary surveys and some small settlements. This version of history is disputed when one notices that Father Le Loutre's War in Acadia began in 1749 and did not end until the expulsion of the Acadians in 1755, so to pin the blame on Dinwiddie seems both hasty and harsh. In fact, Thomas Jefferys, the Royal Geographer of the day, produced a pamphlet out of his Parliamentary testimony that explained the misconduct of the French in what amounted to a Treaty of Utrecht boundary dispute.