CONNOLLY, John, physician, born in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, about 1750. He resided at Pittsburgh, where he became acquainted with Washington. At the beginning of the Revolution he suggested to Governor Dunmore the plan of rousing the Indian tribes against the colonists, and was his chief agent in that business. He was seized and imprisoned, while at the head of an armed party, in 1774, by the authorities of Pennsylvania, with whom he had a bitter controversy respecting land at the falls of the Ohio, granted him by Lord Dunmore. He was appointed by Lord Dunmore magistrate of West Augusta, and in 1775 was authorized by him to raise in Canada and the west and command a regiment of loyalists and Indians, to be called the Loyal Foresters. He visited General Gage in the autumn of 1775, and while on the way from Williamsburg, Virginia, to Detroit, the rendezvous of the force he expected to raise for the invasion of Virginia, he was captured at Hagerstown, Maryland, with his instructions in his possession, and held prisoner till near the end of the war. He and other disaffooted persons held conferences at Detroit, about 1798, with prominent citizens of the west, with regard to the seizure of New Orleans and the forcible control of the navigation of the Mississippi. The attention of Washington was attracted to the subject, and measures were taken to prevent the execution of the plot.