Hearing the Bullets Whistle
In token of its approval for his recent excursion into the Ohio Country, Virginia’s assembly awarded Washington £50, a sum, as he later grouched, that did nothing to recognize the hardships and dangers endured but merely covered his expenses.1 The evidence in Washington’s journal gave Governor Dinwiddie the ammunition he needed to contest French ambitions: at his urging, but only after much wrangling, the House of Burgesses voted £10,000 to raise a force of 300 volunteers to uphold Virginia’s rights on the Ohio.
To help fill the six companies of what would become the Virginia Regiment, Dinwiddie lured recruits with promises of a share in 200,000 acres of land on the frontier they would be contesting. As a first step, 100 men from Frederick and Augusta Counties were to be placed under Major Washington’s command. After training and equipping his detachment at Alexandria, Washington was to lose no time in marching for the Forks of the Ohio, where a small advance party of Virginians under Captain William Trent was already building a fort.2 The urgent need for action was reinforced by reports from friendly Indians that the French were now heading there in overwhelming force.
While eager to join the offensive, given his youth and lack of military experience, Washington was reluctant to assume the responsibility of overall command. The rank of colonel and commander in chief of the Virginia Regiment instead went to Joshua Fry, with Washington placed under him as lieutenant colonel. An Oxford-educated professor of mathematics in his early fifties, Fry was no more qualified for military command than Washington but was reckoned steady and reliable by Dinwiddie. The regiment’s other officers were a polyglot bunch, born in North America, Great Britain, Holland, Sweden, and even France. They included men like George Mercer, who shared Washington’s own Virginian roots, and more recent arrivals from Europe, such as the Scottish medical men Adam Stephen and James Craik; in the coming months of hard campaigning, these three, among others, would forge long-standing friendships with their young lieutenant colonel.
Recruits for the Virginia Regiment were not easy to come by. From Alexandria, Washington reported to Dinwiddie that such men as had enlisted were mostly the flotsam and jetsam of colonial society, “loose, idle persons that are quite destitute of house and home.” Many also lacked coats on their backs, and even shoes on their feet, and, with no sign of a regimental paymaster, it was impossible to advance them the money to buy proper outfits. The recruits were nonetheless keen to acquire uniforms, and Washington was adamant that these should be red; even the “coarsest” local cloth would do. As he explained to Dinwiddie, the Indians would be “struck with” this martial display as “red with them is compared to blood and is looked upon as the distinguishing marks of warriors and great men.” By contrast, Washington believed that the dowdy gray-white uniforms of the French common soldiers presented “a shabby and ragged appearance” that earned the Indians’ contempt.3 Dinwiddie, too, was persuaded: like his half brother Lawrence before him, George Washington embarked upon his first combat command wearing the blood-red coat that had been the trademark of the British soldier for more than a century.
Despite all the nagging logistical problems—which gave a foretaste of those that would dog him as commander of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War—on April 2, 1754, Lieutenant Colonel Washington marched for the Forks with such men as he had already enlisted, about 160 in all, without waiting for Colonel Fry.4 After several hard weeks on the trail, news came in that the French had already pounced. Trent’s deputy, Ensign Edward Ward, and the thirty-odd men pushed ahead to dig in at the Forks had been sent packing upon the arrival of the long-anticipated enemy force on April 17. This had struck from Venango in overwhelming strength. According to reports, there were “upwards of one thousand men, eighteen pieces of artillery, and large stores of provisions and other necessaries” under Captain Claude Pierre Pécaudy, sieur de Contrecoeur, all ferried in “a fleet of 360 canoes and bateaux”;5 these were the very craft that Washington had seen laid up around Fort Le Boeuf that winter. Although the size of the French force was exaggerated, it was formidable enough to convince Ward and his puny command to surrender their post before a single shot was fired. Content with achieving his objective, Contrecoeur allowed the Virginians to retire unmolested.
Marching on to Wills Creek, familiar as the jumping-off point for his recent trek into the Ohio Country, Washington called a council of war to consider how best to respond to this crisis; such consultations were standard procedure within eighteenth-century armies and navies, and Washington would convene many more during his military career. Amid all the gloom there was one ray of hope: although the French had taken the Forks with contemptuous ease, their appearance had drawn a defiant response from the indignant “Half-King,” Tanaghrisson. He sent Washington emissaries bearing the customary wampum belt as proof of his sincerity. They explained that the Half-King and his warriors were eager to fight the French and only waited upon Washington’s assistance to strike.
Sensing that Virginian, and therefore British, prestige was at stake, Washington decided to advance to the Ohio Company storehouse at Redstone Creek, less than forty miles from the Forks. He assured Dinwiddie of his intention to construct a road to Redstone “sufficiently good for the heaviest artillery” and then hold out there until reinforcements arrived, ready to uphold his country’s rights “to the last remains of life.” Using his “inherited” Indian name, “Conotocarious,” Washington had also responded to Tanaghrisson’s speech, anticipating joint action against the “treacherous” French.6
Given the odds stacked against Washington’s force, this was a remarkably bold response. In addition, and acting entirely on his own initiative, Washington sent dispatches to the lieutenant governors of Virginia’s northern neighbors, Pennsylvania and Maryland, soliciting their aid in the common cause. His letter to Maryland’s Horatio Sharpe, who Washington believed to be “solicitous for the public weal and warm in this interesting cause,” included a dramatic rallying cry worthy of Shakespeare’s warrior-king Henry V. Indeed, he wrote, the news from the Forks “should rouse from the lethargy we have fallen into, the heroic spirit of every free-born Englishman to assert the rights and privileges of our king” and rescue “from the invasions of a usurping enemy, our Majesty’s property, his dignity, and lands.”7
As Washington knew all too well, the mountainous and densely forested terrain, which rose in a series of rampart-like ridges, posed a daunting barrier to military operations; his advance from Wills Creek was predictably slow, with a maximum pace of four miles a day. Yet the rough road inched inexorably forward, until, some twenty miles from Redstone, Washington was forced to halt by the rain-swollen waters of the Youghiogheny River. As he waited for these to subside, reports arrived that the French had now begun constructing their own fort at the Forks and were being reinforced.
Meanwhile Washington was fuming at news that he and his fellow officers in the Virginia Regiment were to receive less pay than British regular soldiers. Here was a prime example of colonial Americans being treated like inferior beings. “Why should the lives of Virginians be worth less than Britons?” he complained to Dinwiddie. Only the prospect of imminent action had prevented his officers from resigning their commissions in disgust. Washington himself, for whom personal honor and “reputation” would always be paramount, initially refused all pay, preferring to soldier on as a “volunteer.”8
Dinwiddie now sent word that Colonel Fry was on his way with the much-needed reinforcements. As the level of the Youghiogheny had dropped, however, Washington resolved to resume his march for Redstone rather than await his tardy commanding officer. It was a clear sign of the young Washington’s hunger for military distinction—whatever the risks. He had not gone far before he received another message from the Half-King: this warned that the French intended to attack the first English they encountered, reaffirmed his own allegiance, and pledged that he and his fellow chiefs would meet Washington for a conference in five days’ time.9
Surmounting the last great barrier of Laurel Hill, Washington’s little force descended until, on May 24, it reached a natural clearing within the blanketing forest—the Great Meadows. By scouring stray bushes from the lush grassland, Washington created what he described as “a charming field for an encounter.” But his probing scouts could find no sign of an enemy to fight there.10
Christopher Gist, Washington’s trusty companion on his Ohio diplomatic mission, arrived on May 27 with intelligence that fifty Frenchmen were heading that way, asking for the Half-King. Washington responded by sending out seventy-five men—about half of his force—to find them. Before their return, an Iroquois runner named Silver Heels came in with news that the Half-King was encamped six miles off. There was more: the chief had followed the tracks of two men to a well-hidden hollow, where he believed that the entire French party lay concealed.11
Despite misgivings that he was being duped into abandoning his camp, Washington divided his remaining force once again. Now at the head of about forty men, he followed Silver Heels to what he hoped would be a rendezvous with the Half-King. It was raining steadily, and as the night was “as dark as pitch” and the path barely wide enough to march single file, they often strayed and stumbled over one another. At sunrise on May 28, 1754, they reached the Indian camp. There, they found Tanaghrisson and a dozen warriors, all keen to smite the French; they included Monacatoocha, the Oneida sachem whom Washington had met on his diplomatic mission into the Ohio Country. The two parties moved off, with the Indians scouting ahead. A pair of warriors returned with news that some thirty French lay half a mile from the track, encamped within a rocky glen.
The Virginians and their Indian allies approached stealthily, resolving to surround the enemy and then “fall on them together,” but before the cordon was complete, they were discovered. According to Washington’s contemporaneous journal, it was only after the French raised the alarm and sprinted for their muskets that he gave the fateful order to open fire. He subsequently denied reports that the French had sought to avoid bloodshed by shouting an appeal for his party “not to fire.” Whatever the precise sequence of events, Washington’s own journal, and likewise his reports to Dinwiddie, leave no doubt that he approached the glen with hostile intent, and was planning a surprise attack when the French reacted.12
A brisk firefight followed. Caught in a crossfire from above, the French began to drop. After fifteen minutes the survivors broke and ran. With all escape barred, they tried to surrender. Washington moved forward to accept their submission, only to stand in dumbfounded horror as his Indian allies dashed forward to tomahawk and scalp the fallen, dead and wounded alike. It was only “with great difficulty” that Washington persuaded Tanaghrisson and his warriors to halt the slaughter. Such ferocity, while shocking to the uninitiated, was part and parcel of American frontier warfare, where enemies were for killing and vengeance to be exacted: indeed, the Half-King had insisted upon “scalping them all, as it was their way of fighting [and] . . . those people had killed, boiled and eat[en] his father.”
Before Washington managed to stop the butchery, ten Frenchmen lay dead, including their young commander, Joseph Coulon, sieur de Jumonville. In a symbolic, yet all-too-physical rejection of French power, he had been dispatched by Tanaghrisson himself. Standing over the wounded ensign, the Half-King observed: “You are not yet dead, my father.” He promptly finished the job, smashing Jumonville’s skull with his hatchet, then reportedly scooping out his brains and “washing his hands” with them.13
The score or so of Frenchmen who escaped the carnage desperately craved the protection of Washington’s Virginians. To add to the confusion, their surviving officers were frantically protesting and waving papers under Washington’s nose: they were on a diplomatic mission to locate the English and warn them away from their king’s rightful domains, and look, here were their credentials. By instigating his unprovoked ambush, they accused, Washington had committed the heinous crime of murdering ambassadors.
Despite the obvious parallels with his own recent mission into the Ohio Country, Washington maintained that such claims of diplomatic immunity were no more than a belated smoke screen, sent up to blur the reality: had the boot been on the other foot, with the French succeeding in surprising him, they would have dropped all such pretense as soon as they had his men in their sights. Reflecting upon the episode in his journal, he wrote: “they came secretly, and sought after the most hidden retreats, more like deserters than ambassadors.” In his report to Dinwiddie, Washington told how his own officers all agreed that the Frenchmen “were sent as spies rather than any thing else,” and they were therefore being shifted to Williamsburg as prisoners. Tanaghrisson likewise held no illusions about their objectives, concluding that they had “bad hearts.”14
Yet, knowingly or not, Washington had gone too far. Although Dinwiddie had failed to drum home the fact, his orders from London made it clear that, while Anglo-French hostilities on the Ohio were all too likely, the imperial rivals were still officially at peace, and so the British must avoid being branded as aggressors: actual fighting was only permissible if the French were informed that they were trespassing and then refused to withdraw.15 Washington had given Jumonville no such opportunity.
First reports of the affair, brought in by the tireless Gist, reached Williamsburg on June 12. The following day, the Virginia Gazette welcomed this “total defeat of a party of French.” The “well-timed success,” which was attributed to Washington’s “vigilance and bravery,” had “riveted” the Indians to Virginia’s cause, the newspaper crowed.16 That canny Scot, Governor Dinwiddie, was more cautious. Sensing an impending international storm, he sought to sidestep his own responsibility as the man who had ordered Washington out on his hazardous enterprise. He claimed that the Half-King and his warriors were the prime movers: they had instigated the “little skirmish,” so the Virginians were no more than their “auxiliaries,” and acting on the defensive.17
Beyond the Old Dominion, the episode was viewed differently. As the nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman observed in his classic history of the French and Indian War, Montcalm and Wolfe, “this obscure skirmish began the war that set the world on fire.”18 In doing so, it put North America’s history on a trajectory that few, least of all Lieutenant Colonel George Washington, could have predicted.
On May 31, 1754, in the wake of the short but shocking explosion of violence within what became known as “Jumonville’s Glen,” George Washington wrote to his brother Jack describing his baptism of fire: he had heard the “bullets whistle” for the first time and believed there was “something charming in the sound.”19 The letter subsequently found its way across the Atlantic and into the pages of the popular monthly London Magazine, where it was perused by none other than King George II. That curmudgeonly old monarch, who had led his own British and Hanoverian troops against the French at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743 and who as a young cavalry officer had survived the far greater bloodbath of Oudenarde under John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, in 1708, quipped that the Virginian would not consider that sound quite so charming once he had heard it more often.20 In fact, it was a noise that Washington was destined to become reacquainted with all too soon.
Washington’s letter to Dinwiddie, written after the Jumonville fight, had concluded on a pessimistic, if stoic, note. He expected the enemy to retaliate in overwhelming force at any moment. Come what may, they must be resisted, or the Indians would desert. Washington initially fell back to his old position at the Great Meadows. There he ordered his men to build a small circular stockade of split logs, subsequently extended on two sides by low banks and shallow, knee-deep ditches: this was the aptly named “Fort Necessity.” Conspicuously sited in the center of the lush expanse of grass, the rudimentary post was overlooked by hills, while woodland and scrub encroached to within 100 yards, enabling attackers to creep under cover to within comfortable musket range. Tanaghrisson was clearly unimpressed, later dismissing the fort as “that little thing upon the meadow.”21 He had been joined there by other Indians, mainly women and children, who feared French retribution for their menfolk’s role in the defeat of Jumonville’s party. Warriors were all too few, although the Half-King assured Washington that they would be coming.
Washington now learned that the death of Joshua Fry in a riding accident had led to his own appointment as colonel of the Virginia Regiment, a heavy responsibility for an inexperienced twenty-two-year-old. But a colonial commission, however exalted, meant little when set beside one signed by King George himself. That fact was soon made abundantly clear to Washington when, in mid-June, some 300 reinforcements arrived from the east. Most of them were badly needed drafts for his own regiment, but about 100 were regulars of an independent company from South Carolina commanded by Captain James Mackay. The Scottish-born Mackay had been a British officer since 1737, seeing service on the Georgia frontier during the previous war; as a holder of the king’s commission, he was unwilling to take orders from a colonial officer, so his company remained a command distinct from Washington’s regiment, “independent” in every sense. In standing on his dignity, Mackay anticipated London’s official line on the relative seniority of regular and colonial officers: soon after, Secretary at War Henry Fox wrote to one of Mackay’s colleagues, Captain Paul Demeré, stating: “no officer who has the honor to bear the King’s Commission can be required, or ought, to act under the orders of a person who does not . . . without His Majesty’s particular order for so doing.” This blanket directive was soon after modified, but in a fashion that offered no comfort to Colonel Washington: when Crown and colonially appointed officers of the same rank served together, the regular would take command, even if the provincial officer’s commission was of “elder date”; even worse, provincial general and field officers would have “no rank” alongside their Crown-appointed counterparts. This meant that any provincial officer of the rank of major or above would be junior to a regular captain.22
On a personal level, Washington and Mackay liked and respected each other as officers and gentlemen, but tensions inevitably arose between the professional soldiers and the amateurs. Mackay’s regulars were unwilling to toil on Washington’s road toward Fort Duquesne without the extra pay that they customarily received for such pick-and-shovel work. Washington was incensed, and when he moved westward once more, Mackay and his redcoats remained behind at Fort Necessity.
Washington’s own progress soon came to a halt at Gist’s trading station, where a conference opened on June 18 in hopes of rallying local Indians to the British cause. Despite the presence of the experienced George Croghan, the Indian agent for Pennsylvania, during three days of speeches it became increasingly clear that the Mingos, or Ohio Valley Iroquois, were under the Confederacy’s orders to remain neutral in the Anglo-French contest; and for all their continuing protestations of friendship, the local Shawnees and Delawares were veering toward the French.23 After the conference broke up, scarcely a handful of warriors stood by Washington. Even the Half-King, Tanaghrisson, decamped to Fort Necessity and, when summoned to return, demurred with lame excuses.
As Washington’s own support dwindled, news arrived that the French at the Forks were now stronger than ever. An Indian reported that a force of 1,200, a third of them tribal warriors drawn from as far afield at the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Valley, the rest Franco-Canadian troops and militia, were on the warpath to avenge Ensign Jumonville. The party actually numbered about 700, yet this still gave them a significant edge over the 400 or so with Washington, of whom scores were sickly. It was not simply a question of numbers. Unlike Washington’s command, the force heading toward him was composed of skilled guerrilla fighters. For the Indians, war was a way of life, its techniques of concealment and ambush readily adapted from hunting. The Canadian militiamen were also far more formidable opponents than their amateur status suggested: in contrast to the disparate English colonies, where the militia had long since lost its cutting edge, the tightly controlled and militarized society of New France ensured that its able-bodied menfolk became highly effective irregulars, fine marksmen who were as adept at paddling canoes as marching on snowshoes, capable of campaigning in all seasons across the most rugged terrain. Moreover, they were now led on by an officer with a strong personal motivation to avenge Jumonville: his elder brother, Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers.
In response, Washington quickly fortified Gist’s storehouse with a sketchy stockade, recalled his road builders, and appealed for Mackay’s aid. The captain responded to the crisis, and another council of war was convened. As their men had less than a week’s rations and their supply lines were already dangerously stretched, the Virginian and the Scot agreed to fall back the thirteen miles to Fort Necessity. Even so, it took three days to manhandle the nine swivel guns—simple, wheelless cannon capable of being mounted on wooden fortifications—across the punishing mountainous terrain to the Great Meadows.
When Washington arrived at the stockade, the Half-King bluntly advised him to keep going east. But the Virginians were too tired from hauling their swivels to move any farther, and there were heartening rumors that more reinforcements were drawing near. Unconvinced, Tanaghrisson and his remaining Mingos now melted into the forest, never to return. As Indian agent Conrad Weiser noted in his journal, the Half-King had become exasperated by Washington’s domineering attitude toward his Indian allies; although “a good-natured man,” he was inexperienced, always “driving them on to fight” while ignoring their sage advice.24 Indeed, the bold front maintained by Washington in an effort to win the respect of the tribes had backfired badly: his determination to stay put and slug it out with the far larger force heading his way, so hazarding his entire command, was the antithesis of Indian warfare, where fighting was typically avoided if the odds were unfavorable. Further evidence of his own reckless quest for glory, this decision ignored the specific advice of Dinwiddie, who had cautioned Washington to avoid making “any hazardous attempts against a too numerous enemy” and was clearly troubled by his advance to Redstone without awaiting the expected reinforcements.25
At first light on July 3, 1754, an excited party of scouts jogged into Washington’s camp at the Great Meadows, dragging a wounded sentry with them. A “heavy, numerous body” of the enemy were just four miles off, they reported; all—whites and Indians alike—were stripped for action in the summer heat. By 11 a.m. the enemy was at hand.26 To Washington’s delight, the French were out in the open, apparently eager for a conventional firefight. Shouting and whooping, they opened fire from about 600 yards away—too far off to inflict any casualties. Washington drew up his men outside their unfinished entrenchments, waiting for the enemy to come within effective range. Filtering into woods just 60 yards off, the French and Indians fired again. They were now well within killing distance, and at Washington’s order his men fell back. Some of the Virginians retreated with undue haste, a fault attributed to the cowardly example of their commanding officer, Washington’s lieutenant colonel, George Muse.27 Their withdrawal left Washington and the South Carolina Independent Company dangerously isolated; although the enemy failed to exploit this opportunity, Muse’s brief loss of nerve was to haunt him for the rest of his days.
Back behind their shallow earthworks, the defenders returned fire with muskets and swivel guns. The vulnerability of Washington’s position was now readily apparent. All too soon, bullets began slapping into the fort and its defenders, fired by men maximizing every scrap of cover and whose position was betrayed only by their muzzle flashes and gunsmoke: within easy musket range of the surrounding woods and hills, Fort Necessity was less a refuge than a deathtrap.
As the hours dragged on, the desultory fusillade began to take its toll. Late afternoon brought misery of another kind. A rainstorm drenched the meadows, swiftly turning the defenders’ trenches into muddy streams and soaking much of their ammunition. Besides Mackay’s regulars, few carried bayonets, so a determined sortie with cold steel was not an option: in any event, the enemy’s Indians and militia would never stand to meet the shock of such a frontal assault but simply slip aside and shoot down their assailants from cover. Lashed by the enemy and the elements alike, the dejected defenders turned to their rum kegs for solace.
With darkness, the enemy’s fire finally slackened. In the ensuing silence a Frenchman called across the sodden grass with an invitation to parley. Washington sensed a trap. Given their obvious advantages, why would the French want to talk unless this was a ploy to enable their negotiator to spy out his deployments? The Dutchman Captain Van Braam was ordered to shout a refusal. But the response indicated that the French were themselves willing to receive an emissary from the fort, so Van Braam was sent out under cover of a flag of truce. By now a third of the defenders were dead or wounded, the rest demoralized at the grim prospects before them or too drunk to care. At the start of the fight, the French had deliberately killed all the defenders’ horses and cattle and even their dogs: with no means to carry off the swivel guns, retreat was not an option; without meat on the hoof, neither was a continued defense.
The French apparently held all the cards. Washington was therefore pleasantly surprised by Villiers’s lenient terms: if the garrison surrendered, they would be allowed to go free. Inside the tiny stockade, by the light of a spluttering candle, Van Braam haltingly translated the clauses on the rain-blotted paper for Washington and Mackay. Both officers had some minor quibbles, but Villiers quickly addressed them. It was agreed that they must deliver up the prisoners taken with Jumonville and leave two captains, Van Braam and a Scotsman, Robert Stobo, behind as hostages. In exchange, they would be granted the coveted “honors of war,” marching off with drums beating, and carrying their weapons and ammunition and even one of their swivel guns. Such surprising generosity should have raised suspicions. Neither Mackay nor Washington expressed any, and both signed the capitulation, the king’s officer writing his name above the Virginian’s.
In fact, the French commander’s preamble contained the true explanation for his leniency. This stated: “Our intention has never been to trouble the peace and good harmony which reigns between two friendly princes, but only to avenge the assassination which has been done to one of our officers, the bearer of a summons.” That same crucial word, l’assassinat, appeared again in the main document.
This open admission that the English had murdered an official French emissary subsequently caused an international storm. In his own defense, Washington maintained that Van Braam—whose acquaintance with English was also far from perfect—had mistranslated the crucial French words as “the death” or “the loss” of Jumonville. In reality, the point was less important than it seemed. What mattered was that at the time of the incident, Britain and France were still officially at peace: it followed therefore that Jumonville had been killed unlawfully.
The next morning, Washington and his hungry, bedraggled, and hung-over force marched out of their muddy trenches, carrying their wounded with them. Ironically, given the future significance of that date for Washington and his countrymen, it was July 4. Despite the capitulation terms, they were systematically plundered by the “savages.” Exhausted and disheartened, the garrison plodded just three miles before encamping once more. There Washington left them, riding on to Williamsburg to deliver his personal report of the disaster.
The word is not too strong to describe a mission that had failed at all levels and for which Washington himself bore a large share of responsibility. At twenty-two, he was too young, naïve, and inexperienced for the command. His humiliating defeat and the plummeting decline in British prestige that immediately resulted swiftly drove those Ohio Indians who remained undecided into the French camp.
In personal terms, however, these same events only enhanced Washington’s reputation as a man of honor in the eyes of his countrymen. At Fort Necessity he had demonstrated a bravery in the face of heavy odds that endeared him to his fellow Virginians, not least because the colonial press, quoting Washington’s and Mackay’s own report, inflated wildly the losses they had inflicted upon their attackers. On September 15, the House of Burgesses registered its approval by formally thanking Washington and the other officers for their bravery at Fort Necessity.28 Two names were conspicuous by their absence: the hapless Van Braam, whose flawed translation of the capitulation terms was briefly blamed for the furor over Jumonville’s “assassination,” and the wretched Muse. The Huguenot ensign William La Péronie, who would have been the obvious choice to translate the surrender terms on July 3 had he not been seriously wounded at the time, went to Williamsburg in early September to seek compensation for possessions lost at Fort Necessity. While there, he heard that Muse had not only confessed his own cowardice but compounded his dishonorable conduct by telling many of the councillors and burgesses that the rest of the officers were “as bad as he.” La Péronie had even been quizzed whether it was true that Muse had challenged Washington to a duel. The “chevalier” had answered that Muse would rather go to hell, “for had he had such [a] thing declared, that was his sure road.” If he had crossed Muse’s path himself, La Péronie assured Washington, he would have answered his impudence with his horse whip.29
In international diplomatic terms, the “Jumonville Affair” and its aftermath at Fort Necessity had branded the British as aggressors and Washington as an assassin. The French mood of righteous indignation was bolstered by their possession of Washington’s own journal of events during the early summer of 1754, which had been lost amid the confused evacuation of Fort Necessity and picked up by the victors. As part of the ongoing propaganda war against Britain, this was eventually published in Paris in 1756, along with other documents intended to support the French version of events.30
Before then, the journal’s contents had already stirred the wrath of none other than New France’s governor general, the Marquis de Duquesne. On September 8, 1754, he could barely control his rage when he wrote of it to Captain Contrecoeur, commanding at the Forks of the Ohio. The marquis castigated Washington as “the most impertinent of men,” who had lied “a great deal in order to justify the assassination of Sieur de Jumonville, which has recoiled upon him, and which he was stupid enough to admit in his capitulation.” Duquesne concluded on a note of wishful thinking: “There is nothing more unworthy, lower, or even blacker than the opinions and the way of thinking of this Washington! It would have been a pleasure to read his outrageous journal to him right under his nose.”31
At Williamsburg, where Washington arrived on July 17, 1754, Governor Dinwiddie quickly tried to slough off responsibility for the consequences of his brisk young protégé’s latest actions. Just as he had sought to avoid personal blame for the killing of Jumonville, he now shifted culpability for the defeat at Fort Necessity; this setback had resulted from a failure to obey his own orders to halt any offensive until all the available forces had been concentrated, he argued.32 In an attempt to redress the situation, Dinwiddie and his council now aimed to do just that, ordering Washington to unite with Colonel James Innes, who would lead a fresh strike across the Allegheny Mountains. Thoroughly disillusioned by his recent experiences, Washington protested that Virginia’s forces were totally inadequate for the job required of them, not simply numerically, but in terms of supplies, equipment, and pay. Dinwiddie’s initiative promptly stalled, and the French remained unchallenged in the Ohio Valley, their position now anchored upon Fort Duquesne at the Forks.
Washington’s bloody scrimmages had broadcast what the politicians in London and Paris already knew only too well: that the next major military confrontation between the old enemies was merely a matter of time. In a reversal of the conventional pattern, where hostilities in Europe generated shock waves that eventually triggered colonial sideshows across the Atlantic, this time North American events ignited wider conflict. Accordingly, both powers soon took action to strengthen their forces on that continent, now set to become a significant theater of operations in its own right.
As a first step, Great Britain pledged more cash and arms for colonial defense. In addition, Maryland’s governor, Horatio Sharpe, received a royal commission as lieutenant colonel to command all troops recruited locally “to oppose the hostile attempts committed by the French in different parts of His Majesty’s Dominions.”33 This was just a stopgap measure. To the politicians back in London, Washington’s recent performance had simply reinforced the prejudice against “amateur” colonials. One British veteran, the royal governor of Virginia and ambassador in Paris, William Anne, Earl of Albemarle, acknowledged that, while Washington and many other colonials possessed “courage and resolution,” they lacked “knowledge or experience” of real soldiering; in consequence, there could be “no dependence on them.” If the job was to be done properly, it would be necessary to send professional soldiers from the Old Country, “to discipline the militia, and to lead them on.”34
In November, the British Army’s captain-general, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, authorized the dispatch of two regiments of redcoats from Ireland, the 44th and the 48th Foot, and the raising of two more in the colonies themselves. These regulars were intended to provide the disciplined kernel of manpower around which an ambitious new strategy aimed at crushing French ambitions in North America, and “to secure, for the future, His Majesty’s subjects and allies in the just possession of their respective lands and territories,” could be based.35 The first step would be to drive the French from their posts on the Ohio and to secure that region for Britain with a strong fort. That done, it would be necessary to dislodge the enemy from Niagara and establish a post there that would make the British masters of Lake Ontario, so cutting communications between Canada on the St. Lawrence and Louisiana on the Mississippi. Secondary objectives were the French forts at Crown Point, at the southern end of Lake Champlain and menacing the colony of New York, and at Beauséjour, which posed a similar threat to Britain’s northernmost colony, Nova Scotia.
For Washington, the closing months of 1754 brought fresh disappointment. Rumors that the Virginia Regiment was to be placed on the British regular establishment (that is, officially adopted as a British Army unit)—raising the prospect that Washington might receive the coveted king’s commission as colonel—were cruelly dashed. Instead, the regiment was to be split up into independent companies: that meant there would be no officers ranking higher than captain, and they would of course be junior to regulars of the same rank. Accustomed to exercising command and unwilling to accept demotion from colonel, Washington promptly resigned his commission in indignation and rode home.
Governor Sharpe, along with his counterparts Dinwiddie and Arthur Dobbs in neighboring Virginia and North Carolina, now hoped to launch a winter assault against Fort Duquesne. Washington, whose experience and knowledge of the terrain was considered invaluable for such an operation, was urged to accept command of a company, an offer sweetened by assurances that he would not have to take orders from anyone he had previously commanded and would keep the honorary title of “colonel.”
Replying to Sharpe’s aide, William Fitzhugh, from Belvoir on November 15, Washington spurned this offer with contempt, drawing attention to the services he had already rendered, hazards for which he had received the official thanks of Virginia. The hollow honor of a colonel’s title left him especially irate: “If you think me capable of holding a commission that has neither rank or emolument annexed to it,” he wrote, “you must entertain a very contemptible opinion of my weakness, and believe me to be more empty than the commission itself.” For all that, Washington made it clear that a future military appointment was certainly not out of the question, stating unequivocally: “My inclinations are strongly bent to arms.”36
Momentarily putting his abiding martial ambitions to one side, Washington now turned to domestic matters. As his mother remained stubbornly ensconced at Ferry Farm, which he should by rights have inherited on his twenty-first birthday, Washington looked elsewhere for a home of his own. Mount Vernon was currently empty: Lawrence Washington’s daughter Sarah, who had been left the estate in his will, died in 1754; this made George himself heir to the estate in succession to Lawrence’s widow. As she had remarried soon after Lawrence’s death and moved away, George took her place. That December, he became squire of Mount Vernon, renting the estate, which included eighteen slaves, for an annual fee of 15,000 pounds of tobacco.
All thoughts of developing Mount Vernon were soon put on hold by the arrival of news that revived hopes of a military career under terms that even the touchy Washington was willing to consider. Although the proposed colonial expedition against Fort Duquesne had come to nothing, in February 1755, advance elements of the expected force of British regulars, commanded by Major General Edward Braddock, arrived in Virginia’s Hampton Roads. Aged sixty, Braddock had gained his first commission at fifteen. Despite this lengthy military career, his experience of combat was minimal. Braddock had been selected for the job as a faithful political adherent of Cumberland and for his abilities as an administrator and disciplinarian. Braddock’s orders from Cumberland were to assemble a substantial force of regulars and provincials and, as the first step in the ambitious strategy already agreed, to lead them against Fort Duquesne.
Quickly sensing a new opportunity, Washington lost no time in writing to congratulate the general on his arrival. This gambit had the desired effect: Washington’s readiness to serve, along with his established reputation and knowledge, swiftly drew an invitation to join Braddock’s “family” of personal staff. The letter came from the general’s senior aide-de-camp, Captain Robert Orme of the prestigious Coldstream Guards, who added a most flattering comment: “I shall think myself very happy to form an acquaintance with a person so universally esteemed.”37 The urbane, dashing, and sophisticated Orme, whose appearance when Washington knew him was captured in a splendid portrait by Joshua Reynolds, was exactly the kind of company that the young Virginian aspired to and epitomized his notions of martial glory. Washington emphasized his willingness to serve under Braddock as a volunteer, deploying a little flattery of his own: his zeal to join the expedition was only increased by what he knew of Braddock’s “great, good character,” and by his earnest desire to “attain a small degree of knowledge in the Military Art” under his command. Because Washington’s own business affairs required his attendance and would suffer in his absence, he asked the general’s further indulgence while he settled them and promised to call on him as soon as he reached Alexandria.38 They met there in late March 1755, and it was agreed that Washington should officially join the army at its base camp at Fort Cumberland, a new strongpoint built on the Maryland side of the Potomac near the old Ohio Company warehouse at Wills Creek.
Washington ensured that men of influence knew of his latest deed in Virginia’s defense. He broadcast his decision to serve—“without expectation of reward or prospect of attaining a command”—in letters to three of the colony’s key figures: John Robinson, the speaker of the House of Burgesses, which was frequently at loggerheads with Governor Dinwiddie; to Carter Burwell, the chairman of the Military Committee; and to the prominent landowner William Byrd III of Westover. As this selfless act would inevitably involve heavy expenses, Washington also wondered whether Virginia might see fit to give him another modest award of £50 in recompense for his personal losses during the previous campaign.39
It was not only Virginia’s power brokers whom Washington sought to impress by his return to military service in April 1755. At the end of the month, while en route to join Braddock’s army, and with the prospect of fresh dangers looming ever closer, Washington halted at his Bullskin plantation to write to Sally Fairfax. He expressed the fervent hope that she would help to ease the hardships of the campaign by corresponding with him. None of his friends, he added, were “able to convey more real delight” than Sally, to whom he stood “indebted for so many obligations.” It was only the first of several unavailing appeals he would send to Belvoir in coming months.40
On May 1, Washington caught up with Braddock and his staff at Frederick; the general had been there for more than a week, attempting to organize transport and supplies for his expedition. Two days later, when they arrived at the tiny township of Winchester, the general’s frustrations only intensified. Dinwiddie had promised that a powerful band of Cherokees and Catawbas from the Carolinas would be awaiting him there, but they were nowhere to be seen. Dinwiddie had sent a “proper person,” Christopher Gist’s Indian trader son, Nathaniel, to conduct the southern warriors to Virginia. Some 300 had actually started north, but, to Braddock’s mortification, after a few days’ march they were “diverted” by Gist’s estranged business partner Richard Pearis, who plied them with liquor and persuaded them to view Gist as an impostor without authority. Braddock was left wondering why Virginia, and not the governments of North and South Carolina—the “natural allies” of the Cherokees and Catawbas—had handled such an important affair in the first place.41
Increasingly disillusioned by the failure of the colonies to deliver the support and resources that he had expected, Braddock and his “family” of staff reached Wills Creek on May 10. That same day, Washington was formally appointed as Braddock’s third aide-de-camp, ranking after Orme and Captain Roger Morris of the 48th Foot.
During May, Braddock gradually concentrated his army of about 2,000 men, some three-quarters of them regulars from the 44th and 48th Regiments, and the independent companies of New York and South Carolina. The two redcoat battalions from Ireland had been brought up to strength by intensive recruiting within America, enjoying rich pickings among the Chesapeake’s under class of indentured servants; according to a soldier in the 48th Foot, they included unfortunates “that had been kidnapped in England and brought over here and sold to the planters.”42 The balance of Braddock’s army consisted of locally raised “provincials,” enlisted from volunteers. These were mostly recruited by Virginia, whose companies now wore coats of “blue turned up with red,” with small contingents from Maryland and North Carolina.43
In addition, Braddock’s force was accompanied by an impressive “train” of twenty-nine cannon, howitzers, and mortars manned by men of the Royal Artillery. This gleaming brass ordnance was very different from the crude iron swivel guns usually seen on the frontier, reflecting recent technological advances that would continue to characterize artillery throughout Washington’s career as a soldier and for long after. The twelve- and six-pounder guns (so designated by the weight of the shot they fired) and the eight-inch howitzers (classified from the diameter of their shells) were all mounted on field carriages fitted with limbers (detachable wheeled frames with attachment poles), to enable them to be drawn easily by teams of horses. The guns were equipped with the recently introduced elevating screw, which greatly improved accuracy. In skilled hands, such weapons were capable of surprisingly rapid fire: according to James Wood, a Royal Artillery volunteer during the War of the Austrian Succession, at a contest between the Austrian and British artillery in May 1747, he and his colleagues “fired a short 6-pounder ten times in a minute.” This seemingly incredible feat was made possible by the use of “quick-firing” ammunition, with the projectile and charge “fixed” together. Such speed came at the cost of safety, as it allowed no time for the gun barrel to be carefully sponged of any smoldering embers that might ignite the next round prematurely: at a review in the following year, Wood reported how “the gunner in ramming up the charge of one of the short sixes, it went off and blew off the arm that rammed home and the end of the ramrod struck a foot soldier in the head and killed him on the spot and wounded several others.” A more realistic rate of fire was two to three rounds a minute, keeping pace with the infantry’s musketry. Such guns could fire either solid shot or, for close-range work, canister: this was a tin case filled with musket balls that spread its contents on leaving the muzzle, like a giant shotgun. Designed to fire at higher elevation, the short-barreled howitzers were becoming increasingly popular: they could fire canister but more typically employed a hollow shell filled with gunpowder that exploded, scattering shards of metal once its fuse had burned down. Mounted on flat wooden beds, the stumpy cohorn mortars were simpler weapons, designed solely for lobbing shells during siege operations.44
Whether Braddock’s powerful artillery would ever see action remained a moot point that May, as the expedition showed no sign of leaving Fort Cumberland. Washington had been there for just five days when he received the general’s orders to ride back to Virginia’s Tidewater and collect £4,000 for the army’s use from the Crown agent John Hunter at Hampton Roads. Directing Hunter to forward a further £10,000 to Fort Cumberland inside two months, Washington was to return with the first consignment of bullion without delay.45 Braddock had entrusted his new aide with a heavy responsibility and an irksome journey across drought-hit countryside. From Winchester, Washington sent a special express messenger warning Hunter to meet him at Williamsburg with the cash. By May 22, Washington was at Claiborne’s Ferry on the Pamunkey River; there he encountered a courier from Governor Dinwiddie with the perplexing news that Hunter was away on business in the north. Thankfully, Hunter’s partner in Williamsburg was able to assemble virtually all of the vital £4,000. Back at Winchester, where he arrived on May 27, Washington had expected to meet a troop of Virginian Light Horse to shepherd him and the gold safely to Fort Cumberland. Instead, he was obliged to make do with a less dashing escort of local militia.46
When he rejoined Braddock on May 30, Washington found the general more furious than ever at the colonies’ continued failure to deliver the promised wagons, horses, and supplies upon which his campaign depended. With the notable exception of the Pennsylvanian Benjamin Franklin, who had produced the expected vehicles, teams, and drivers, Braddock’s wrath encompassed virtually the entire colonial population, high and low, and not just the contractors actually responsible for the breaches of faith. This irked the proud Virginian Washington, who complained that Braddock looked “upon the country . . . as void of both honor and honesty.” He and the general had become embroiled in frequent disputes on the subject, “maintained with warmth on both sides.”47
Yet the relationship between the British general and his young American aide was clearly far more cordial than such wrangling suggests. Many years later, when himself an aging man, Washington gave a surprisingly balanced picture of the general: “His attachments were warm—his enmities were strong—and having no disguise about him, both appeared in full force. He was generous and disinterested—but plain and blunt in his manner even to rudeness,” Washington recalled.48
As the expedition’s acknowledged expert on North American frontier warfare, Washington was keen to impress Braddock with the need to adapt his European techniques to the irregular bushfighting he could expect to encounter at the hands of the “Canadian French and their Indians.” According to Washington’s recollection, the bluff general and his cronies were so predisposed toward “regularity and discipline” that they held their enemies in “absolute contempt.”49
This was too harsh. In fact, while still at Alexandria, Braddock had issued orders intended to relieve his men of all unnecessary equipment—their heavy buff leather shoulder and waist belts and their useless swords—and to swap their thick woolen waistcoats and breeches for lighter garments made from tough “Osnabrig” cloth. In addition, the regulation system of drill, by which a battalion of British infantry was split up to deliver its firepower in a complex sequence of numbered “platoons,” was simplified so that each of the ten companies could become a “firing” in its own right under the command of its own familiar officers. Perhaps most significantly, at a council of war at Fort Cumberland, Braddock gained his officers’ approval for proposals to secure the army while it was on the march and encamped. This would be achieved by sending out “small parties very well upon the flanks, in the front, and in the rear, to prevent any surprise which the nature of the country made them very liable to.”50
Such precautions would be badly needed. One thing was already clear: not only would the expedition lack aid from the formidable southern Indians, but it could anticipate little support from the local tribes of the Ohio. Already disenchanted by the events of the previous summer at Fort Necessity, they were further alienated by Braddock’s arrogance and indifference toward them and their interests. The general’s attitude was recalled with bitterness by Shingas, the same Delaware sachem who had met Washington at the Logstown council in November 1753. In company with representatives of the Shawnees and Mingos, “King Shingas” had approached Braddock to discover his plans for the Ohio Country once the French had been ousted. Braddock had replied bluntly that “the English should inhabit and inherit the land.” When Shingas then asked “whether the Indians that were friends to the English might not be permitted to live and trade among the English and have hunting ground sufficient to support themselves,” Braddock was blunter still, stating “that no savage should inherit the land.” After the general refused to change his uncompromising stance, Shingas and the other chiefs responded “that if they might not have liberty to live on the land they would not fight for it.” Only a handful of Mingos, including Washington’s old acquaintances Monacatoocha, White Thunder, and Silver Heels, stayed on to scout for the army.51
While the fuming Braddock impatiently awaited essential supplies from Winchester, a detachment of about 600 men under his efficient but irascible deputy quartermaster general, Sir John St. Clair, was pushed forward to clear a path for the main army and establish an advanced supply depot. They found the going even harder than anticipated. One redcoat of the 48th Foot reported that it was necessary to halt every hundred yards to “mend” the road, sometimes blasting rocks to make it viable for the “great quantity of wagons.” They slogged doggedly onward “over rocks and mountains almost unpassable,” fueled on a wilderness diet of rattlesnake, bear, and deer.52
By June 5, after six days of strenuous road building and two days of rest, St. Clair’s contingent had reached no farther than the Little Meadows, just twenty-two miles west of Fort Cumberland. Meanwhile the stalled “grand Army” still at the base camp was growing sickly as “the bloody flux”—dysentery—began to take a grip, as it inevitably did in crowded, static encampments. In addition, intelligence from Pennsylvania that the French were sending reinforcements to the Ohio from Canada led Washington to believe that Braddock’s army would “have more to do than go up the hills to come down again.”53
During this enforced lull, Washington took the opportunity to renew his own campaign to engage the correspondence of Sally Fairfax, sending off his third appeal since leaving Mount Vernon. He had actually seen Sally in May while en route to Williamsburg to collect Braddock’s gold. On that occasion, while Sally had expressed a desire to be informed of Washington’s safe return to camp, she had asked that any letter should be sent to an “acquaintance,” rather than to her in person. Washington had taken that “as a gentle rebuke and polite manner of forbidding my corresponding with you.” This inference, which was borne out by the fact that Washington had “hitherto found it impracticable to engage one moment” of Sally’s attention, did little to quash his hopes of a correspondence that would, as he wrote, “remove my suspicions, enliven my spirits, and make me happier than the day is long.”54
Washington was nothing if not persistent in his approaches to the married Sally, who seems to have deliberately withheld her own letters to avoid encouraging his attentions. Despite much speculation, there is no evidence that their relationship was ever consummated physically.55 Given the close-knit world of the Virginian gentry, in which the merest whiff of scandal would have been detected and commented upon by letter writers and diarists, an affair is certainly unlikely. However, in terms of Sally’s role as a powerful motivating force for the young Washington, the sexual issue is irrelevant: indeed, his attitude toward her resembled that of a medieval knight-errant, a courtly lover keen to win some token of favor through conspicuous deeds of bravery.
Leaving in staggered divisions, the rump of Braddock’s army finally moved out from Fort Cumberland between June 7 and June 10, 1755. Its progress was glacial, sometimes covering just two miles a day across the mountainous terrain. After it became obvious that the army was hobbled by its dependence upon heavy wagons, a council of war resolved to cut back on wheeled transport and increase the use of packhorses to carry supplies. Officers, including Washington, cheerfully gave up their own baggage horses for “His Majesty’s service.”56
Yet the army’s rate of advance remained unacceptably slow. On June 16, after halting at the Little Meadows, Braddock faced the fact that something more drastic needed to be done. He summoned yet another council of war but, before it met, sought Washington’s candid opinion. On the previous day, Washington had been seized with violent fevers and headaches, so severe that he had been forced to dismount and accompany the army in a covered wagon. By Washington’s own recollection, it was nonetheless he who suggested the plan that was swiftly adopted: a flying column formed from about 1,300 elite troops, accompanied by the minimum of artillery and ammunition wagons necessary for the job, should forge ahead. The balance of the army, under Colonel Thomas Dunbar of the 48th Foot, would follow with the heavy transport and the rest of the ordnance as soon as it could.57
The advance guard began its march on June 18. During the next five days Washington traveled onward by cart while his illness “continued without intermission.” By June 23, when they reached the Great Crossing of the Youghiogheny River, Washington was so sick that he received “the General’s positive commands” not to stir until he had recovered. Even then, only the doctors’ warning that to push on would risk endangering his life, combined with Braddock’s solemn word of honor that he would be brought up in time to join the final assault on Fort Duquesne, persuaded Washington to obey and to await the reserve troops.
While Washington sweated out his fever, Braddock’s advance guard pushed on. By June 25, it had reached the Great Meadows, where Washington’s command had surrendered almost a year before. The feeble fortifications had been leveled, but, as a British officer reported, the ground remained strewn with the bones of men who had died there. The next day, the troops encountered another ominous scene. Resting under a rocky hill where the enemy had encamped the night before, they examined trees stripped of bark, on which the Indians had used red paint to depict “the scalps and prisoners they had taken with them”; the French had contributed graffiti of their own, huffily described by Captain Orme as “threats and bravados with all kinds of scurrilous language.”58
Such attempts at intimidation did nothing to halt the slow yet inexorable advance of Braddock’s force. The sickly Washington was desperate to be in at the kill: writing to his friend Captain Orme on June 30, he confessed that he would rather lose £500 than miss the campaign’s climactic battle. By July 2, when the rear division under Dunbar had almost reached the Great Meadows, Washington could describe himself as “tolerably well recovered.” He attributed his improvement to a liberal dose of “Dr. James’s Powders.” Prescribed on Braddock’s personal orders before they parted, this popular remedy had lived up to its reputation as the era’s cure-all: within four days, as Washington informed his brother Jack, his fevers and other complaints had eased, and he had hopes of catching up with the general, now twenty-five miles ahead of him.59
Still too weak to mount his horse, Washington resumed his jolting journey by covered wagon along the rough track that Braddock’s advance column had hacked deep into the backcountry. When he finally caught up with the army on July 8, the mood of the general and his men was buoyant, and with good reason. Since leaving Fort Cumberland they had negotiated more than 120 miles of primeval wilderness, laboriously hauling wagons and artillery over daunting mountain ranges and blazing a trail through dark, forbidding forest. It was an impressive logistical feat. Along the way, fear of Indian ambush had been ever present. Yet thanks to Braddock’s careful dispositions, the dreaded enemy had done no more than scalp stragglers. Security along the way had been so intensive that on July 6, jittery scouts had gunned down one of their few tribal allies, the son of Monacatoocha, after mistaking him for a hostile warrior.60 Such episodes were regrettable but had failed to halt the army’s momentum. A formidable force of British redcoats and blue-coated American provincial troops, complete with artillery, was now poised within twelve miles of its objective, Fort Duquesne. Overwhelming victory surely lay within its grasp.
The next morning, July 9, 1755, the long column began its final, methodical approach. Washington now resumed his place as one of Braddock’s three aides-de-camp. Although his fever had subsided, he remained far from well. Before mounting his horse, Washington was obliged to strap cushions to his saddle, presumably because his disordered bowels had brought on an agonizing attack of piles.
Remarkably, the army now drawing ever closer to the Forks of the Ohio included a veritable cluster of men whose destinies were to be intertwined with Washington’s. The commander of Braddock’s advance guard, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage, would rise to head the British Army in North America during the opening phase of the Revolutionary War, opposing Washington at Boston. By then, two other redcoat officers present that day, Charles Lee of the 44th Foot and Horatio Gates of the New York Independent Company, had switched their allegiance to the revolutionary cause, becoming Washington’s colleagues and, ultimately, his rivals. Daniel Morgan, a humble teenaged wagon driver in 1755, was one of Washington’s most effective subordinates during the War of Independence, leading a corps of crack-shot riflemen against the British. For good measure, Morgan’s first cousin and fellow teamster under Braddock was none other than Daniel Boone, destined for future fame as the quintessential American frontiersman.
Briton or American, cultivated gentleman or unlettered bullwhacker, every last man of Braddock’s weary command knew that the campaign’s final phase was fast approaching. In order to avoid a defile, which offered a prime site for a French and Indian ambush, Braddock resolved that his army should instead follow an alternative route involving a double crossing of the snaking Monongahela River. Though the river was shallow, its banks were steep and readily defendable, so the risk of attack there was real enough. But by early afternoon, both crossings had been completed without incident. These hazards now safely behind them, Braddock’s men breathed a collective sigh of relief and marched steadily onward into the silent forest.
This calm was deceptive. The French had no intention of relinquishing Fort Duquesne without a fight, although it had taken the inspired oratory of a tough young Canadian officer, Daniel de Beaujeu, to convince their skeptical Indian allies that even now all was not lost and that Braddock’s seemingly unstoppable force could be confronted, halted, and beaten.
Stripped to the waist, Beaujeu loped off at the head of 850 men—French soldiers, Canadian militia, but mostly greased and painted tribal warriors—along the rough forest trail leading to the Monongahela. About six miles from the fort, they suddenly spotted the red uniforms of Braddock’s advance guard some 200 yards off. Both sides stood, momentarily astonished. Gage’s grenadiers were the first to react, presenting their muskets and sending several volleys crashing through the woods. The range was long for inaccurate smooth bore weapons, but a chance shot killed Beaujeu. Robbed of their charismatic leader, the French and Canadians hesitated and looked set to recoil before Braddock’s juggernaut. But another experienced officer, Jean-Daniel Dumas, promptly stepped forward to steady them. The Indians meanwhile had fanned out into the open woods on either side of the track, concealed themselves behind trees, and commenced a withering fire upon Gage’s exposed men. All the while, these warriors kept up their spine-tingling war whoops. It was a terrifying sound that none who survived that afternoon would forget.
With casualties mounting and unnerved by an enemy who remained unseen but who could be heard all too clearly, the advance guard fell back in disarray. It collided with the main body of Braddock’s army, still marching up the forest track. The effect was catastrophic. In the words of Washington’s report to Dinwiddie, the British regulars were “immediately struck with such a deadly panic, that nothing but confusion and disobedience of orders prevailed among them.”61 This harsh verdict is borne out by other eyewitness accounts, yet the redcoats’ response is understandable: for soldiers trained for conventional European campaigning, there could be no more traumatic introduction to the bewildering and peculiarly savage conditions of American wilderness warfare. Indeed, for one of Braddock’s veteran “old standers,” Private Duncan Cameron of the 44th Foot, the Monongahela was the “most shocking” fight that he had ever experienced: as Cameron had already survived the harrowing siege of Cartagena in 1741, the intensive firefights at Dettingen in 1743 and Fontenoy in 1745, and the savage close-quarters combat at Culloden in the following year, his assessment is telling.62
As their disorder increased, so the regulars instinctively huddled together. Swathed in thick gunsmoke, they fired mechanically and blindly, shooting down their own hapless comrades. Victims of this “friendly fire” included many of Washington’s fellow Virginians, who attempted to fight the Indians in their own fashion by breaking ranks and seeking cover behind trees. As Washington put it in a famous epitaph, they “behaved like men, and died like soldiers.”63 The Virginian troops killed that day included several officers who had served under Washington throughout the previous campaign: the Scot William Polson, the Frenchman William La Péronie, and the Swede Carolus Gustavus de Spiltdorf were among them.
Amid the chaos, Braddock’s officers spared no pains to rally their men and fight back as best they could. Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Burton of the 48th Foot led about 100 of his regiment against a dominating hill to the right of the track, but when he was wounded the attack petered out.64 In all, some sixty officers were killed or wounded. But while others fell fast all around him, Washington somehow escaped unscathed, despite four bullets through his coat and two horses shot beneath him.
Not content with rebuffing Braddock’s army, the exultant French and Indians now sought to annihilate it, attempting to surround the fear-crazed troops bunched on the narrow track. By about 4 p.m., when Braddock himself was mortally wounded, his men could take no more. A formal retreat was ordered but swiftly became a frenzied rout. As Washington reported to Governor Dinwiddie, the traumatized survivors instantly broke in headlong flight, “like sheep before the hounds.” The efforts of Washington and his brother officers to rally them were futile: as well to try stopping the rampaging “wild bears of the mountains,” he wrote.
By now Washington was Braddock’s only unwounded aide-de-camp. He placed the stricken general in a “small covered cart” and, accompanied by the last of the troops, managed to get him across the nearest ford of the Monongahela. When the bleeding Burton and some other officers succeeded in rallying about 100 survivors on high ground, described by Orme as a “very advantageous spot,” Washington was sent to halt the fugitives already farther down the track. Crossing the river’s second ford, he soon encountered Lieutenant Colonel Gage attempting to restore order there. As Washington rode back to the hill chosen for the rear guard’s stand, he met Braddock and his escort coming toward him; as most of the demoralized troops had melted away, there had been no option but to follow them.65
Braddock’s defeat had been total. Some two-thirds of his force were killed or wounded. The injured who could not be carried off were slaughtered and scalped where they lay. An unlucky handful were captured by the Indians, led off in triumph to Fort Duquesne, and ritually tortured to death by fire.66 The survivors faced a harrowing retreat through the woods to reach Dunbar’s reserve column, camped some forty miles off near the spot where Washington had bushwhacked Jumonville just over a year before.
Although drained by illness and reeling from all the exertions and anxieties of the past day, Washington was now charged by Braddock with the task of riding ahead to contact Dunbar, “to make arrangements for covering the retreat, and forwarding on provisions and refreshments to the retreating and wounded soldiery.” That night’s ordeal remained seared in Washington’s memory. Decades later, he recalled how the sights and sounds he encountered could scarcely be described. Indeed, the piteous appeals of the wounded men who littered the route “were enough to pierce a heart of adamant.”67
General Braddock died four days later, near Washington’s old battleground at the Great Meadows. Washington, who received Braddock’s sash and pistols as keepsakes, supervised the interment. The army then marched over the grave, to obliterate all sign of the burial and thus prevent Braddock’s body becoming the object of a “savage triumph.”68
Beyond doubt, Braddock’s defeat was a disaster for British prestige. But despite all the shock and recriminations, George Washington emerged with an enhanced reputation. A year earlier, at Fort Necessity, he had presided over a demoralizing and politically embarrassing defeat from which it was hard to salvage anything more than a reputation for personal courage. At the Monongahela, Washington had participated in a far bloodier rout, only to become a genuine hero. As a mere aide-de-camp, this time Washington shouldered no share of blame for the disaster. On the contrary, he had behaved impeccably, and his conspicuous gallantry did not go unnoticed by the burgeoning Anglo-American press. From Philadelphia to London, newspaper readers once again encountered the name of George Washington.
Washington’s well-publicized exploits, and not least his miraculous survival amid the mayhem that had claimed so many lives, suggested to some that the tall young Virginian was destined for greater things. Just five weeks after the battle, the Reverend Samuel Davies interrupted a sermon to draw attention to “that heroic youth, Colonel Washington, who I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto preserved in so signal a manner for some important service to his country.”69 Decades later, American newspaper editors would remind their readers of the reverend’s prescience.
For many colonial Americans, “Braddock’s Defeat” marked a watershed in their relationship with the Mother Country. During another five years of bloody warfare with New France and her Indian allies, British redcoats would more than redeem the reputation they had lost during that nightmarish afternoon near the Monongahela River. Nevertheless, the stubborn Braddock and his stiffly disciplined regulars were taken to characterize a hidebound and increasingly irrelevant Old World; the resilient Washington and his self-reliant Virginia “Blues” typified the New. However simplistic and misleading, in 1755, this message was widely believed. In 1775, it would resonate more strongly still.