Arthur Campbell (3 November 1743–8 August 1811), member of the Convention of 1776, was born in Augusta County, the son of David Campbell and Mary Hamilton Campbell, both children of Scots-Irish immigrants who settled in western Virginia in the 1720s. The marriages of his six brothers and sisters connected the Campbells to many of the most influential families in the region. In September 1758, while serving in a company of Virginia rangers during the French and Indian War, Campbell was captured by Wyandot Indians and held captive until he escaped near Fort Detroit two years later. He returned to his family, who had presumed that he was dead, received a grant for 2,000 acres of land, and began a career in landownership and speculation. By the time of his death Campbell's landholdings totaled almost 15,000 acres.
About 1769 Campbell moved with his family to the Holston River region. In 1773 he married his cousin Margaret Campbell. They had six sons and six daughters and lived at Royal Oak (later the site of Marion). Campbell became a justice of the peace in the new county of Fincastle in 1773. The following year he was a major in command of county volunteers who guarded the southwestern Virginia frontier during Dunmore's War. Campbell was an original member of the Fincastle County Committee, established on 20 January 1775, and during the ensuing months he kept his eye on frontier defense and on opportunities for land acquisition in Kentucky. He may have been engaged in Richard Henderson's attempt to create a separate western colony of Transylvania. That attempt pitted members of rival land companies against one another, and Campbell became embroiled in controversies resulting from Henderson's venture.
In April 1776 Campbell became a lieutenant colonel in the Fincastle County militia, and he and William Russell won election to represent the county in the fifth and last of the Revolutionary Conventions. Campbell served on the standing Committees of Propositions and Grievances and on Public Claims and on drafting committees for measures to stimulate manufacture of munitions, to enlarge the 9th Virginia Regiment, and to raise four troops of cavalry to defend the frontiers. He voted for independence on 15 May, for the Virginia Declaration of Rights on 12 June, and for the first constitution of Virginia on 29 June.
Campbell returned to Williamsburg in October 1776 as a member of the House of Delegates and took seats on the Committees of Propositions and Grievances and on Public Claims. He strenuously opposed a bill to divide Fincastle County into two new counties, one to include Kentucky, and perhaps viewed the measure as a threat to Henderson's western landholdings. After passage late in 1776 of an amended bill dividing Fincastle into three new counties (Kentucky in the west, Montgomery in the north, and Washington in the south), Campbell became the first county lieutenant of Washington County and presiding justice of its court. His local political position secure, he helped coordinate operations against Indians and Loyalists in the Virginia backcountry throughout the Revolutionary War. Campbell was elected to one-year terms in the House of Delegates in 1778, 1782, and 1783. He arrived at the 1778 assembly too late to be appointed to a major standing committee, but he served on the Committee of Propositions and Grievances during the 1782 and 1783 sessions and also sat on the Committees for Courts of Justice and of Privileges and Elections in 1782.
By 1785 Campbell owned almost 5,500 acres in Washington County, far more than any of its other residents. Like many other ambitious frontier settlers, he built his public career through a combination of entrepreneurship, local leadership, and connections with political patrons from Virginia's Tidewater elite. A large man of impressive appearance, Campbell read and traveled widely, especially after the Revolution, and was a fluent conversationalist. His nephew David Campbell (1779–1859), later a governor of Virginia, remembered that he was "hasty and excitable and disposed to be overbearing; and was often engaged in violent personal quarrels."
Campbell's relationship with eastern Virginia leaders changed in the 1780s when he developed connections with the separatist movement that was attempting to establish a state of Franklin in western North Carolina. Believing that a new southwestern state would provide people in his area of Virginia with a more responsive legislature and better protection from the Indians, he led the effort to transfer jurisdiction over Washington County from Virginia to Franklin. When Governor Patrick Henry learned of these activities, he dispatched William Russell to suppress the perceived revolt. Henry's action must have been galling to Campbell. Russell had been his sometime colleague and frequent competitor for office in the county for a decade, and Russell had recently become Henry's brother-in-law by marrying the widow of Campbell's own cousin and brother-in-law Brigadier General William Campbell (1745–1781). The two men were even then contesting guardianship of the general's children. At the June 1785 meeting of the Washington County Court, Russell executed Henry's order to strip Campbell of his appointed offices. Henry also pushed through legislation that defined separatist activity as treason.
Campbell's political estrangement from Virginia proved short-lived, and his local standing remained undimmed. He won election to the House of Delegates in 1786 and 1787 and served on the Committee for Courts of Justice during both sessions and on the Committee for Religion in 1787. In the latter year the new governor, Edmund Randolph, reappointed Campbell justice of the peace and county lieutenant. During the winter of 1787–1788 Campbell took a leading role in meetings at the Washington County courthouse at which local political leaders drafted amendments to the proposed constitution of the United States, many of which were intended to weaken the power of the new national government, to abridge the influence of the president and the Senate, and to require that a bill of rights be added.
Campbell nevertheless became an active Federalist during the 1790s. George Washington appointed him an Indian agent in 1793, and the postmaster general gave him responsibility for transporting the mail between Staunton and Abingdon. Campbell resigned all of his public offices by 1799. Ten years later he moved to the Yellow Creek settlement in Kentucky (later the site of Middlesboro), near some of his children and other family members. Arthur Campbell died there of cancer on 8 August 1811. His will directed that he be buried at Gideon's Tenements near Cumberland Gap.
Sources Consulted:
Lewis Preston Summers, History of Southwest Virginia, 1746 –1786, Washington County, 1777–1870 (1903), esp. 463 –464, quoting birth and death dates from now-lost grave marker; Robert L. Kincaid, "Colonel Arthur Campbell: Frontier Leader and Patriot," in Historical Society of Washington County Publications, ser. 2, 1 (1965): 2–18; Hartwell L. Quinn, Arthur Campbell: Pioneer and Patriot of the Old Southwest (1990); Arthur Campbell Papers, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Ky.; Campbell letters in David Campbell Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C., and Lyman C. Draper Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wis., esp. ser. DD, QQ (quotation in David Campbell to Lyman C. Draper, 12 Dec. 1840, 10DD6); William J. Van Schreeven, Robert L. Scribner, and Brent Tarter, eds., Revolutionary Virginia, the Road to Independence: A Documentary Record (1973–1983), vols. 2, 4 –7; James William Hagy, "Arthur Campbell and the Origins of Kentucky: A Reassessment," Filson Club History Quarterly 55 (1981): 344 –374; Peter J. Kastor, "'Equitable Rights and Privileges': The Divided Loyalties in Washington County, Virginia, during the Franklin Separatist Crisis," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 105 (1997): 193 –226; John P. Kaminski et al., eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution: Ratification of the Constitution by the States, vols. 8–10: Virginia (1988 –1993), 8:283 –284, 472–475, 9:769 –779; will and estate settlement in Knox Co., Ky., Will Book, A:38 –45, 78 –82.