Henry Gladwin Henry Gladwin Major-General Henry Gladwin (1729 or 1730 – 22 June 1791) was a British army officer in colonial America and the British commander at the Siege of Fort Detroit during Pontiac's Rebellion in 1763. He served in the disastrous campaign of Edward Braddock and in other actions in the French and Indian War but is best remembered for his defense of Detroit in Pontiac's Rebellion. Henry was born in 1729 or 1730 at Stubbing Court, near Wingerworth, Chesterfield, in Derbyshire. He was the eldest son of Henry Gladwin (1692–1763) by his second wife Mary daughter of John Digby Dakeyne
Illinois campaign the region. When the American Revolutionary War began, in 1775, the Ohio River marked the border between the Illinois Country and Kentucky, an area recently settled by American colonists. The British had originally sought to keep American Indians out of the war, but in 1777 Lieutenant Governor Hamilton received instructions to recruit and arm Indian war parties to raid the Kentucky settlements, opening a western front in the war with the rebel colonists. "From 1777 on," wrote historian Bernard Sheehan, "the line of western settlements was under almost constant assault by white-led [Indian] raiding parties that had originated at Detroit."