In 1775, Henry Hamilton was appointed as Lieutenant Governor and Superintendent of Indian Affairs at Fort Detroit, Province of Quebec (it then extended from the Atlantic to this area), British North America.

When Governor Hamilton reached his base at Fort Detroit to assume his government duties in the Great Lakes region, the American Revolutionary War was already underway.

Hamilton was in a difficult position: as a civil official, he had few British Army regulars at his command, and the loyalty of local Canadians and Indians was far from assured.

Hamilton responded to Lord Germain, "Would to God this storm which is ready to fall on the Frontiers could be directed upon the guilty heads of those wretches who have raised it, and pass by the miserable many who must feel its fatal effects.

[5] Despite this, Indian warriors carried out their own customs during the raids, resulting in hundreds of women and children in Kentucky and western Pennsylvania being killed and scalped during the war.

According to an early 20th-century local history, Americans on the frontier accused Hamilton of paying bounties for prisoners and scalps brought in by the Indian warriors, calling him the "Hair-buyer General".

[8][9] In 1778, Patriot Colonel George Rogers Clark, commanding Virginia state forces, captured several undermanned British posts in the Illinois Country, including Fort Sackville[10] at Vincennes (then in Virginia-claimed land, now in present-day Indiana).

In early March, General George Rogers Clark ordered Hamilton to be taken to the Virginia state capital in Williamsburg as a prisoner of war.

Governor Jefferson eventually dropped charges of scalp-buying,[13] but did not release Hamilton until October 1780, and only after George Washington during several months had entreated him to accept his parole.

He administered during the transition in the postwar years as the Crown granted thousands of acres of land, mostly in what became Upper Canada, to Loyalists as compensation for their losses in the former Thirteen Colonies and as payment to soldiers.

Among his papers, Hamilton had kept a journal from 1778 to 1779 as Lieutenant Governor at Fort Detroit during the American Revolution; this was published for the first time posthumously in 1951 in a history that addressed his and George Rogers Clark's roles in the war.

[15] US author Winston Churchill wrote an epic historical novel in 1904 called The Crossing covering a man's life in the old Northwest from the Revolution to the Burr Conspiracy.