Joseph Howe (British Army officer)

Major Joseph Howe (1729 – 4 March 1794) was an English gentleman of a noble family who left England for America and fought in the French and Indian War as well as the American Revolutionary War.

While quite young, he ran away from England to join his brother, George Howe, 3rd Viscount Howe, who at that time was fighting in the French and Indian War. He was brother, or cousin, of George Lord Viscount Howe, Admiral Richard Howe and General William Howe (sources disagree). (According to The Family of Hoge by James Hoge Tyler, Joseph was brother of all three, but some historians and genealogists have questioned this.)

Most of the information about Joseph Howe is from James Hoge Tyler's The Family of Hoge including the following passages:

He arrived in America about the time that Lord Howe was killed at the Battle of Ticonderoga, and finding his brother dead, he drifted southward and finally settled at what came to be known as "Sunnyside," in Pulaski County, Virginia

Joseph Howe is reputed to have been of robust physique. His English home was one of refinement and wealth from which he was separated by reason of his sympathy for the Colonists - a thing the more intolerable because of the prominence of his relations on the British side. It is not known that any of the English estate reverted to him although it was considerable and although two of his three brothers (or his cousins) died without issue. All of the property may have gone to an only sister, whom the Encyclopedia Britannica mentions as a friend of Benjamin Franklin.