Defending the Frontier
As the shocking news of Braddock’s defeat spread through Britain’s American colonies, Washington rode from Fort Cumberland to Mount Vernon and collapsed, exhausted, into bed. He had barely done so before a letter arrived from his neighbor, Colonel Fairfax, congratulating him on his deliverance. It included a postscript written by Sally, thanking heaven for Washington’s safe return and gently chiding him for his “great unkindness in refusing us the pleasure of seeing you this night.” If he did not call at Belvoir first thing next morning, then the Fairfaxes would come to him.1 Given Washington’s persistent but totally futile attempts to engage Sally Fairfax’s correspondence during the Braddock campaign, her sudden show of interest must have been as vexing as it was flattering. Washington was now the hero of the moment and the toast of Virginian society, but his flirtation with the married Sally continued in its familiar pattern, delicious yet ultimately frustrating.
Far from tranquil Mount Vernon, on the exposed frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania, the consequences of the massacre on the Monongahela were all too soon apparent. As Washington recalled many years later, the “very avenue” that had been so laboriously hacked to the Forks of the Ohio by Braddock’s army now offered a ready conduit for retaliatory raiders against the frontiers of Pennsylvania, but “more especially those of Virginia and Maryland.”2 The Shenandoah Valley, where Washington had first ventured as a young surveyor, now lay wide open to Indian war parties. Settlers who had established isolated farmsteads in the sixty-mile swathe of forest between the town of Winchester and the advanced outpost of Fort Cumberland bore the brunt of raids that left burned cabins and scalped and mutilated bodies behind them and which spread terror in a wave that sent refugees scuttling eastward.
In the midsummer of 1755, Britain’s few regular soldiers on the continent were either demoralized by their recent introduction to frontier warfare under Braddock or based far to the north, in New England, New York, and Nova Scotia. Virginia must look to its own defense, and the colony’s Assembly voted £40,000 to reconstitute the Virginia Regiment on an enlarged strength of 1,000 men organized in sixteen companies, plus another 200 or so skilled woodsmen to serve as “rangers”; if insufficient recruits were forthcoming within three months, the regiment would be completed by drafting militiamen.
Given his public profile, which was now higher than ever thanks to his exploits on the Monongahela, Washington was the obvious choice to command the Virginian force. There can be little doubt that Washington, ambitious for distinction and recognition, wanted the job. While he had no intention of thrusting himself forward for what promised to be a thankless task involving “insurmountable obstacles” likely to cost him whatever reputation he had already acquired, his correspondence makes it clear that he would feel duty bound to accept such a responsibility if it were offered to him—provided the terms were honorable, of course.3
On August 14, 1755, Governor Dinwiddie commissioned the twenty-three-year-old Washington as both colonel of the Virginia Regiment and commander in chief of all the forces to be raised for the colony’s protection. Washington had discretion to select his own staff officers, to contract for all necessary supplies, and to act defensively or offensively as he considered best. These were extensive powers, but they brought commensurate responsibilities that would soon drive him to distraction. Washington had been ordered to establish his headquarters at Winchester, “the nighest place of rendezvous to the country which is exposed to the enemy.” Recruits were to assemble there and at Fredericksburg and Alexandria.4
From the outset, Washington’s orders to his officers made it clear that his regiment would aspire to high standards of training and discipline. His major, Andrew Lewis, was urged to make sure that the muster rolls were called three times a day, with the recruits trained as often in “the new platoon way of exercising” that formed the cornerstone of the British Army’s regulation drill for delivering volley fire. Significantly, they were also to undertake regular shooting practice at individual targets, “that they may acquire a dexterity in that kind of firing”: this was to be a flexible unit, competent in “conventional” tactics, but also capable of “irregular” bush fighting. And in all things, Major Lewis was to ensure that “good regular discipline” was observed, in line with the established “Rules and Articles of War.”5
In mid-September, Washington assumed his new command with a tour of inspection, riding from Winchester back to the familiar Fort Cumberland on Wills Creek. This strongpoint still held a residue of Virginian, Maryland, and North Carolinian troops from Braddock’s campaign; it now became the base for the rump of the Virginia Regiment, under its lieutenant colonel, the fiery Adam Stephen. Upon his arrival at Fort Cumberland, Washington formally appointed his officers, drawing heavily upon fellow veterans of the previous year’s fighting. Ever a stickler for appearances, Washington was determined that they should match his own exemplary sartorial standards. Like the Virginian companies that had served under Braddock, the colony’s revived regiment wore coats of blue faced with red. Besides an ordinary soldier’s uniform for rough work on detachment and scouts, each officer was to provide himself with a far more splendid “suit of regimentals” for duty in camp or garrison. This was to be “of good blue cloth; the coat to be faced and cuffed with scarlet, and trimmed with silver.” A scarlet, silver-laced waistcoat, blue breeches, and, if possible, a silver-laced hat completed the ensemble.6
It was one thing to organize a Virginia Regiment on paper and to announce a corps of gaily uniformed officers, quite another to find the humble rank and file needed to fill its companies. From the outset, the recruiting net was flung wide, falling far beyond the Old Dominion. For example, Captain Joshua Lewis was ordered to Annapolis in Maryland and to any other center of population in that colony where there was a prospect of drumming up men; his junior officers were to range even farther afield, trawling the “back parts” of both Maryland and Pennsylvania for manpower.7
From Fort Cumberland, Washington resumed his tour of inspection, dropping down through the Shenandoah Valley for some 120 miles to Fort Dinwiddie, a strongpoint on Jackson’s River garrisoned by a company of his regiment under Captain Peter Hog. By early October he was back in Alexandria. In Washington’s absence, the garrison at Fort Cumberland had come under increasing pressure from enemy raiders.
With recruitment sluggish, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen lacked the manpower to intercept Indian war parties that crossed the mountains, leaving the settlers below his post dangerously exposed. “It sits heavy upon me,” he wrote, “to be obliged to let the enemy pass under our noses without ever putting them in bodily fear.” So many hostiles were lurking around the fort that all contact with the inhabitants was cut off. As Stephen reported, “Nothing is to be seen or heard of, but desolation and murders heightened with all barbarous circumstances and unheard of instances of cruelty.” The smoke from the burning farmsteads soon hung so thick that it screened the very mountains from the garrison’s sight.8
Given the enemy’s ability to bypass Fort Cumberland with impunity, it was soon clear to Washington that, far from establishing any outer defensive cordon to the west of the Allegheny Mountains, simply safeguarding the Shenandoah Valley itself would be challenge enough. This fact was underlined in early October, when Washington returned to his base at Winchester, just over the Blue Ridge Mountains and only seventy miles from peaceful Alexandria. There he soon encountered a scene of panic and confusion as shoals of terrified backcountry settlers sought sanctuary in the town. Washington offered to head the local militia against the Indians, but they were understandably unwilling to leave their own families undefended.9
Chaos bred defiance: as Washington informed Dinwiddie, his orders to requisition wagons for essential supplies had to be enforced at sword point and in the face of threats to blow his brains out. The frontier folk were fiercely independent and suspicious of authority; this was scarcely the kind of deference that a Tidewater gentleman like Washington expected. Even the men of his regiment were proving truculent, with desertion rife. Indeed, unless the Virginia assembly passed a military law with enough teeth to curb “the growing insolence of the soldiers, [and] the indolence, and inactivity of the officers,” Washington warned that he would be obliged to give up his command.
Thoughts of resignation were soon forgotten, however, when fear-crazed messengers arrived, warning that whooping hostiles were now within just miles of Winchester itself. Washington finally managed to muster some forty militiamen and rangers and led them out into the forest. This tense patrol ended in farcical anticlimax: the hubbub that had triggered the reports stemmed from the antics of a trio of drunken Virginian light horsemen, “carousing,” cursing, and firing off their pistols in the woods.10
Yet the hysteria was real enough and proof of the psychological potency of the French and Indian terror tactics: for every one of the seventy or so settlers reported killed or missing in the first wave of raiding, scores more were left displaced and traumatized. Even small bands of tribal warriors could wreak havoc out of all proportion to their numbers. As Washington emphasized time and again during his frontier command, in the wilderness the Indians held all the cards: cunning, vigilant, and able to live off the land, they were “no more to be conceived, than they are to be equaled by our people,” he warned. Indeed, the only “match” for Indians were more of their own kind.11
Washington explained to his old friend Christopher Gist, who had been given a captain’s commission to recruit a company of “active woodsmen” intended to go at least some way to meeting the shortfall of skilled forest fighters, that Indian allies were never “more wanted than at this time.” But the disasters at Fort Necessity and on the Monongahela, which had dealt devastating blows to British and Virginian prestige, ensured that none came forward that autumn. Hearing rumors that Andrew Montour, a renowned Pennsylvanian scout, was marching against the French outpost of Venango at the head of 300 warriors, the desperate Washington tried to divert some of them to Fort Cumberland. Calling upon his experience of frontier diplomacy, he hoped that Montour would extend his hearty welcome to his old acquaintance Monacatoocha and others, assuring them how happy it would make him, “Conotocaurious,” to take them by the hand and “treat them as brothers of our great King beyond the waters.”12
Washington’s gambit came to nothing. Meanwhile, and just a month into his command, he faced another, and no less galling, frustration. This chafed at Washington’s most sensitive spot, his finely tuned sense of honor. The problem surfaced in late October, after Washington rejoined the core of his regiment at Fort Cumberland: although nominally supreme commander of Virginia’s forces, he was now apparently outranked by John Dagworthy, a mere captain of Maryland troops.
Dagworthy headed just thirty men at Fort Cumberland, yet he claimed to possess something that Washington craved but still lacked: a commission from King George himself. Back in 1746, Dagworthy had gained a captaincy in provincial forces recruited for a projected expedition against Canada. That attack never took place, the troops were disbanded, and Dagworthy accepted a cash lump sum in lieu of his half pay as a retired officer. But in 1755, he was still citing his defunct commission to pull rank on officers holding colonial appointments, including Lieutenant Colonel Stephen.
It was a state of affairs that Washington found intolerable and which he resolved to redress through official channels. Meanwhile, he avoided an unseemly confrontation by the simple expedient of quitting Wills Creek as soon as possible. Pausing only long enough to order the companies of rangers under Captains William Cocks and John Ashby to construct two small bastioned stockades on Patterson Creek, intended to go some way to filling the undefended void between Forts Cumberland and Dinwiddie, Washington rode back to Winchester and then on to Williamsburg to enlist Governor Dinwiddie’s backing against Dagworthy.13
Although exasperated that Washington and Stephen had let the situation arise in the first place, Dinwiddie was quick to appreciate the potentially disastrous implications of such wrangling. He reported the problem to Lieutenant Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts, who had become Britain’s stop gap commander in chief in North America after Braddock’s death. Dinwiddie feared that the insult to Virginia was grave enough to discourage the House of Burgesses from backing the war effort. The best solution, he felt, would be to award Virginia’s highest-ranking officers temporary, or “brevet,” commissions in the regular army so they could not be outranked by awkward juniors.14
While awaiting Shirley’s adjudication, Washington was able to enjoy such modest social pleasures as Williamsburg offered; its round of balls provided a marked contrast to the hardships of the frontier zone some 150 miles off. Washington’s hopes that royal commissions would soon be on their way were bolstered by reports that highly exaggerated accounts of the Virginians’ exploits at Braddock’s defeat were circulating in London. Already convinced that “strict order” was the very “life of military discipline,” Washington was further heartened to learn that Virginia’s Assembly had passed a bill authorizing stiffer punishments for men of the colony’s regiment found guilty of serious offenses: previously, only treason carried the death penalty; now a soldier could also forfeit his life for mutiny, sedition, desertion, and striking a superior. Earlier that summer, Virginia’s legislators had already approved draconian corporal punishment for those same crimes: while “not extending to life or members,” this nonetheless permitted the same savage floggings of up to a thousand or more lashes that were inflicted upon the redcoats, earning them the grim nickname “bloody-backs.” As Washington put it to Lieutenant Colonel Stephen, “We now have it in our power to enforce obedience.”15
By the autumn of 1755, the men of Washington’s Virginia Regiment were already under what amounted to British Army discipline. Elsewhere in British North America, a very different regime prevailed: while theoretically facing the death penalty for the most serious military crimes, the provincial troops raised in New England served under far milder discipline, with corporal punishment limited to the biblical thirty-nine lashes.16
But as 1755 drew to a close, the Virginia Regiment could hardly afford to hang even the most hardened reprobate: with fewer than 500 men, it mustered below half of the official number voted by the Assembly. That autumn’s recruiting drive had been a dismal failure: as Washington complained, several officers had been out for six weeks or even two months “without getting a man,” instead frittering away their time “in all the gaiety of pleasurable mirth” with friends and relations. At the appointed rendezvous at Alexandria on December 4, he told Dinwiddie, ten recruiting officers produced just twenty men between them: if he had anything other than Virginian paper currency, which was shunned beyond the Old Dominion, he would send officers to “Pennsylvania and the borders of Carolina,” where he was confident recruits could be found. The situation was so dire that Washington hoped that Virginian soldiers who had joined the regular 44th and 48th Regiments during the Braddock campaign, but had since deserted, might reenlist with him if they were granted indemnity.17 But in slave-owning Virginia, even now certain recruits remained unacceptable. When Captain Hog reported the presence of “mulattos and negroes” in his company at Fort Dinwiddie, Washington was adamant that they should be barred from carrying arms, instead serving only as “pioneers or hatchetmen”—in other words, manual laborers.18
Fear of a slave revolt in the eastern Tidewater counties underpinned the Assembly’s reluctance to order a major mobilization of Virginia’s manpower to fight the war on the western frontier.19 Lack of numbers dictated the strategy that Washington would adopt in 1756, and long after. In the New Year, he formally sought Dinwiddie’s directions about whether to “prepare for taking the field—or guarding our frontiers in the spring,” but in reality there was no alternative to a defensive stance. Even had the Virginia Regiment boasted its full complement of 1,000 men, any strike against Fort Duquesne was ruled out by a dearth of artillery and of skilled engineers capable of conducting a siege. With no prospect of an offensive, further steps were taken to shore up Virginia’s shaky frontier; besides the two new forts on Patterson Creek, Washington had ordered Captain Thomas Waggoner and sixty men to build and garrison two more stockades on the South Branch of the Potomac. In addition, he began lobbying for Virginia’s evacuation of Fort Cumberland and its replacement by another “strong fort” within the Old Dominion. In Washington’s opinion, not only was Fort Cumberland poorly sited in defensive terms, but it presented an “eye sore” to Virginia—a veiled reference to the ongoing affront to Washington’s authority posed by the stubborn Dagworthy.20
Meanwhile, Governor Dinwiddie awaited William Shirley’s adjudication of that “great dispute.” When Shirley’s response finally arrived, it could scarcely have been more unsatisfactory for Washington: Governor Sharpe of Maryland had been appointed to settle the row with Dagworthy—his own colony’s officer. Goaded beyond endurance, Washington now secured Dinwiddie’s permission to approach Shirley in Boston and present him with a “memorial” from his officers for the Virginia Regiment to be accepted into the regular British Army. While Washington was preparing for his trip to Massachusetts, Shirley himself took action, instructing Sharpe to order Dagworthy to stop exercising command over the Virginians. However, as the question of his regiment’s status remained unresolved, Washington decided to head north regardless and plead its case to Shirley in person. Washington had good reason to expect a sympathetic hearing. Not only had he met Shirley at Braddock’s Alexandria conference in April 1755, but he had become friendly with the governor’s son William, who served as the general’s personal secretary and was slain at the Monongahela.
In early February 1756, in company with his aide Captain George Mercer and another close friend, the Scottish Highlander Robert Stewart, Washington set off on a round-trip of more than 1,000 miles to Boston. All three officers wore the brave blue, red-faced, and silver-laced uniform that Washington had specified, and they were accompanied by two liveried servants. This conspicuous display had a purpose of its own, helping to enhance George Washington’s standing in colonies already growing familiar with his name and exploits.
The journey introduced Washington to British America’s Middle and Northern Colonies, and to its three largest cities, all of them thriving urban centers without counterparts in the Old Dominion. His party traveled via Philadelphia; with about 18,000 inhabitants and 3,000 houses, it was then the largest city in the American colonies. Fronting the Delaware River, its formal grid of streets made straggling Williamsburg look like a glorified village. From there they rode on to New York, a city still jammed into the tip of the peninsula flanked by the Hudson and East Rivers, but already boasting a population of some 14,000. Leaving their horses at New London in Connecticut, Washington and his entourage took ship to Newport, Rhode Island, before continuing by water to Boston. With a population of 15,000, the busy port, balanced on its narrow “neck,” was second only to Philadelphia in size and importance.21
En route, the thriving provincial press took flattering note of Washington’s progress and of his mixed fortunes as a soldier. At his destination, the widely read Boston Gazette praised him as “a gentleman who has deservedly a high reputation for military skill, integrity, and valor; though success has not always attended his undertakings.”22 While such public recognition was surely gratifying, the long-awaited meeting with Shirley brought little satisfaction. Now that the Dagworthy conundrum had been resolved, the governor was surprised that Washington had even bothered to make the arduous trip north. All the same, he provided him with written confirmation that Dagworthy no longer held a royal commission and that Washington was his superior.23 But Shirley was not empowered to upgrade the Virginia Regiment or any of its officers to regular status: Washington—like all other colonial field officers—would remain subservient to any redcoat captain. Even worse, before Washington’s arrival, Shirley had already approved the appointment of Governor Sharpe as commander of all forces raised not only in Maryland, but also in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.24
Besides a hefty bill in expenses and gambling losses and a half-hearted dalliance with the well-heeled and long-faced heiress Mary Eliza Philipse, which was conducted intermittently as he passed through New York, Washington had little to show for his month’s jaunt. More frustrated than ever, he was once again resolved to resign his commission.
Back in Virginia, Washington’s mood was not improved by the first signs of what would become a mounting wave of criticism against the conduct of his regiment’s officers. There were clearly some grounds for these gripes. In January, for example, a court of inquiry had found Ensign Leehaynsious De Keyser guilty of behaving in a “scandalous manner such as is unbecoming the character of an officer and a gentleman” after he cheated at cards. During a game of brag at Fort Cumberland, De Keyser had hidden the nine of diamonds under his thigh—“foul play” that was revealed when he rose from his chair and the card flopped to the floor.25
Washington capitalized on the ensign’s disgrace to send an “Address” from Winchester that was read to the assembled officers of the seven companies at Fort Cumberland by Lieutenant Colonel Stephen. He wrote: “This timely warning of the effects of misbehavior will, I hope, be instrumental in animating the younger officers. . . . Remember, that it is the actions, and not the commission, that make the officer—and that there is more expected from him than the title.” Besides indulging their pleasures, Washington added, his officers would do well to devote leisure time to professional study. Much information could be gleaned from reading military texts—for example, Humphrey Bland’s Treatise of Military Discipline; first published in 1727 and already in its seventh edition by 1753, this was the era’s most popular and influential English-language military manual. A standard primer for the young British Army officer of the mid-eighteenth century, Bland’s book would be quarried by Washington for decades to come.26
Lieutenant Colonel Stephen believed that a regiment so top-heavy with officers could afford to shed several “without hurting the service.” Resorting to vocabulary from his medical days, he was sure that a “purgation” would be positively beneficial, leaving behind the “men of spirit and honor,” of whom “proper things” might be expected. While acknowledging that some of his officers had “the seeds of idleness very strongly ingrafted in their natures,” Washington assured Dinwiddie of his own efforts, “both by threats and persuasive means . . . to discountenance gaming, drinking, swearing, and irregularities of every other kind.” Regrettably, the problem had been aggravated by “that unhappy difference about the command” at Fort Cumberland, which had kept him from enforcing his orders in person.27
Given Washington’s decision to walk away from a direct confrontation with Dagworthy, this was lame stuff. Virginia’s speaker, John Robinson, had urged him to silence the critics once and for all by shifting his own headquarters forward to Fort Cumberland, so that he could oversee the situation personally. Determined to ride out the storm, Washington refused to budge. Replying to Robinson, he grew even more prickly and defensive, while again seeking to offload the blame onto the Maryland officer. Indeed, while Washington couldn’t be answerable for the behavior of individuals, his intentions were pure. No one had acted more for Virginia’s interests than he, and if anyone was responsible for the “many gross irregularities” at Fort Cumberland, it was Dagworthy. He assured Robinson: “It will give me the greatest pleasure to resign a command, which I solemnly declare I accepted against my will.”28
For all this blustering, Washington soon changed his mind. Men of influence were quick to caution against anything as rash as resignation. Colonel Landon Carter sought to cool Washington’s temper by assuring him that such criticism could not have come from anyone who knew him. But this reassurance was double edged: if Washington relinquished his command, Carter added, he and his friends would be hard pressed to justify his conduct. For Washington, as Carter cheerfully continued, surely death was preferable to such dishonor: better to share “Braddock’s bed” than allow anything to tarnish those laurels that still lay in store for him. The final touch was an unsubtle thrust at Washington’s chivalric soft spot. “A whole crowd of females” had tendered their wishes for his success, Carter reported, and were even now praying for his safety. The canny Carter must have known that gallant Washington, so hungry for acclaim, and for the admiration of young women like Sally Fairfax, could never have disappointed them.29
Besides such direct appeals to his sense of duty and honor, other factors gave Washington reason to reconsider his latest threat to resign. Governor Sharpe, it seemed, had a higher opinion of his abilities than he had imagined: in the event of any intercolonial westward offensive, Sharpe wanted Washington for the plum job of second in command. In addition, active steps were finally being taken to increase Washington’s manpower: Dinwiddie anticipated that the House of Burgesses would vote funds to increase the Virginia Regiment to 2,000 men; if necessary, one in every twenty militiamen from all save five exposed frontier counties would be conscripted. This initially raised the alluring prospect of a powerful regiment of two battalions, each ten companies strong. In fact, it soon became clear that the total “number in pay”—if they could be raised at all, of course—would be just 1,500, with new recruits added to the existing sixteen companies to constitute a single, expanded regiment.30 It was not an ideal solution, but it seemed that at least something was being done to augment Washington’s resources.
Above all, Washington shelved all thoughts of resignation because of a fresh crisis on the frontier. The French and Indian raiders, who had been quiet over the winter, now resumed their assaults with a vengeance, striking with devastating effect against soldiers and settlers alike. On the evening of April 18, 1756, in a textbook decoy ambush, they inflicted a heavy blow on the garrison of one of the outposts between Winchester and Fort Cumberland, Fort Edwards on the Cacapon River. Three soldiers searching for stray horses had encountered hostiles close to the fort and raised the alarm. A party of about forty to fifty men under Captain John Fenton Mercer promptly sallied out to give chase. But the first Indians were merely bait. When Mercer and his men had been lured a mile and a half from the fort and were breathlessly “rising a mountain,” the trap was sprung. Fired upon “very smartly,” outnumbered two to one and in danger of being totally surrounded, after half an hour of heavy fighting, the surviving Virginians retreated while they still could. More than a third of them failed to get back to the stockade: Captain Mercer—a veteran of Fort Necessity and the brother of Washington’s close friend George—was killed, along with Ensign Thomas Carter and fifteen men; another two came in wounded. It was, in Washington’s words, “a very unlucky affair” and all the more galling because it was impossible to avenge: given the continuing lack of men, a council of war at Winchester reluctantly resolved against marching to the scene.31
Elsewhere, isolated settlers who refused to abandon their farmsteads fell prey to the raiders. In an episode that underlined Washington’s helplessness and frustration, on April 22, a small war band of six Indians crossed the mountains within five miles of another stockade, Cunningham’s Fort, surprising David Kelly and his family. Kelly was killed and scalped; his wife and six children hustled off as captives. One of Kelly’s teenaged sons escaped and brought tidings of the raid to Winchester. As the Pennsylvania Gazette reported, Colonel Washington immediately sent off a detachment of thirty men. It was a futile gesture: they buried what was left of Kelly and found the raiders’ tracks but could not “get up with them.”32
The raid underlined the fundamental flaw in the defensive “chain of forts” strategy that Washington was reluctantly obliged to accept: isolated stockades and blockhouses were worthless beyond the limited zones that their paltry garrisons were prepared to patrol and were therefore unable to stop the infiltration of swift-moving Indian war parties. It also highlighted a phenomenon that only exacerbated the sufferings of the settlers. Like those who descended upon the Kellys, Indian raiders often killed potentially troublesome adult males, while sparing women and youngsters seen as more biddable and likely to be assimilated into the tribe. Such widespread adoption of white captives left raw wounds among settler communities: the dead could be decently buried and mourned; captives, whose fate remained uncertain, granted grieving kinfolk no such sense of closure. Unsurprisingly, the practice only intensified “Indian hating” among the beleaguered inhabitants of the “backcountry.”33
The shock engendered by the upsurge of enemy activity had a major impact upon Washington and was the decisive factor in causing him to shelve his plans of relinquishing a command from which he could never expect to “reap either honor or benefit.” As an emotional letter to Dinwiddie, written on the same day that the Indians descended upon Kelly and his brood, makes clear, he was deeply affected by the sufferings of the inhabitants and felt a personal responsibility for them. He pledged: “The supplicating tears of the women, and moving petitions from the men, melt me into such deadly sorrow, that I solemnly declare . . . I could offer myself a willing sacrifice to the butchering enemy, provided that would contribute to the people’s ease.”34
In lieu of recruits or Indian allies, the beleaguered Virginia Regiment was bolstered by militia summoned to Winchester from ten Tidewater counties. Some 1,200 militiamen answered the call, yet, from Washington’s perspective, these undisciplined, costly, contrary, and unreliable amateur soldiers were more of a hindrance than a help. Many of them lacked firearms, yet all made inroads into his carefully hoarded stockpiles of supplies.
The new crisis subsided when the Indian raiders withdrew, but the frontier’s defenders were soon fighting among themselves. Drunkenness and brawling prompted Washington to issue orders on May 1 threatening five hundred lashes, without benefit of court-martial, to “any soldier, who shall presume to quarrel or fight” and one hundred lashes for drunks. The militia faced no such sanctions, with predictable results. A week later, Washington noted, the militia detachment from Prince William County began to demonstrate “superlative insolence” toward his soldiers and officers. After a militiaman was sent to the guardhouse for abusing an officer of the Virginia Regiment, his own officer instigated a rescue bid, swearing that Washington’s officers were all scoundrels, and he could “drive the whole corps before him.” When one of them called his bluff, the militia officer took “fright” and publicly acknowledged his fault the following morning.35
Washington’s exasperation at the shortcomings of the temporary militia, in particular their inferiority to regularly maintained troops, would only intensify in coming years. In May 1756, however, his complaints drew an increasingly unsympathetic response from Williamsburg. Even Washington’s old patron and friend Colonel William Fairfax cautioned him to stop grumbling about a force that he had himself called upon, and instead seek to emulate those stoic Roman heroes who had happily overcome far greater “fatigues, murmurings, mutinies and defections” than he was ever likely to face.36
Once the alarm was over, most of the militia was sent home, save for about 500 from frontier counties who were posted to bolster garrisons until the Virginia Regiment could be brought up to strength by the expected drafts. The long-anticipated draft act was finally implemented during May, but the results were disappointing, not least because those selected by lot could avoid service by finding another man to take their place or by immediately paying a £10 fine. In consequence, as Dinwiddie reported, “the draughts in most of the counties paid fines rather than go to Winchester, [and] these fines were given to volunteers that enlisted and received the 10 pounds.” In a pattern that would be repeated in future wars, the burden of Virginian military service fell most heavily on the poor and desperate: those drafts who could not afford to pay the fine—which amounted to a poor man’s annual earnings—and substitutes unable to resist an offer of hard cash. The yield was unimpressive: of the 246 drafts brought into Winchester by June 25, several deserted, three were discharged as unfit for service, and another six were Quakers who refused to serve on religious grounds. In mid-July, the Virginia Regiment mustered just 591 men—not even half of the promised 1,500. As an act of Parliament had been passed to allow the British regulars to recruit indentured servants, provided their masters were compensated for the time they still had to serve, Washington hoped that the Virginia Regiment could do likewise. If so, the regiment could soon be completed, he believed, although Dinwiddie cautioned him “not to enlist any convicts who probably may be fractious, and bad examples to the others.”37
British units like the bloodied 44th and 48th, and the newly authorized “Royal American Regiment” had enjoyed considerable success in seeking recruits among the servants of Pennsylvania and Maryland. By attempting to tap into the same pool of manpower, the Virginia Regiment was drawing ever closer to the British regular model. A muster roll for Washington’s own company, listing eighty-six men present during August 1757, shows that only twenty-three—just over a quarter—were natives of Virginia. Of the rest, there were one each from New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Holland, and Germany; but the majority—fifty-six men, or 65 percent of the total—had been born in the British Isles. The percentage of native-born recruits for the regiment as a whole was higher, at 41 percent, but the preponderance of incomers remains striking, particularly compared with the Massachusetts provincials, where more than 80 percent of personnel had been born in that colony.38
Now that Dagworthy’s pretensions had been curbed, there was nothing to stop Washington from joining the bulk of his regiment at Fort Cumberland and taking command in person. Yet he maintained his headquarters at Winchester. With the Blue Ridge now effectively Virginia’s frontier, Washington argued, that town could become a rallying point for inhabitants who would otherwise flee. Emphasizing Winchester’s suitability as a base for assembling reinforcements and supplies and for reacting against raids, Washington convinced Dinwiddie that a large and strong fort should be built there.39
When Washington paid another visit to Fort Cumberland in early July, however, his presence was immediately apparent through intensified discipline and training. On July 6, a general court-martial sentenced several deserters to severe floggings of a thousand lashes: they were to “receive as much of their punishment as the surgeon . . . shall judge they are able to bear.” Next evening all the men except the new drafts were to practice the official “exercise,” followed by a stint of unofficial “bush fighting.” The following afternoon, the garrison fired at targets, then formed up into a single battalion to “go through the platoon exercise and evolution.”40
After Washington rode back down to Winchester, Adam Stephen carried on his work with a will. Having caught two men in “the very act of desertion,” he reported, they “wealed them ’til they pissed themselves and the spectators shed tears for them.” Stephen hoped these bloody floggings would “answer the end of punishment,” by providing a grim example calculated to deter others from going astray.41 Through a series of regimental orders sent up from headquarters, Washington sought to instill the behavior expected of officers and gentlemen at second hand. These instructions, like the imposition of a regular-style regime of training and discipline, had a clear purpose. The ultimate object, as Washington emphasized in a proclamation printed in the Virginia Gazette on August 27, 1756, was to “show our willing obedience to the best of Kings” and through “unerring bravery” earn the royal favor and “a better establishment as a reward for our services”—in short, to be officially recognized as a “regular corps.”42
Washington’s brave words were undermined by an advertisement, on the very same page of that issue of the Gazette, seeking the apprehension of seventeen men of the Virginia Regiment who had deserted from the post at Maidstone, just south of the Potomac River. Interestingly, none of them were Virginians. Save for a Scot and an Irishman, all had been born across the Potomac in Maryland and were in their late teens or early twenties. Reporting such “great and scandalous desertions” to Dinwiddie, Washington blamed them on the “fatiguing service, low pay, and great hardships in which our men have been engaged.”43
Criticism of Washington and his regiment now intensified. Rumors and gossip escalated into an effective propaganda campaign that harnessed the growing power of the press to broadcast its allegations as widely as possible. In an article that dominated the front page of the Virginia Gazette of September 3, 1756, an anonymous correspondent writing as “the Virginia-Centinel” lambasted the officers of the colony’s regiment as a bunch of vice-ridden rakes who disparaged the noble efforts of the militia and skulked idle in their forts while the country around was ravaged by merciless raiders. It concluded by denying that the public could “receive much advantage from a regiment of such dastardly debauchees.”44
Washington was not named in the article, but, as commander of the regiment, he was clearly deemed culpable for his subordinates’ shortcomings. His friends were quick to reassure him. John Kirkpatrick wrote that the “self-evident falsities asserted by that witty writer of the Centinel, must condemn him in the judgment of every rational, reflecting being.” Such an effort to “foment an ill spirit of slander, and propagate lies, to amuse the unthinking mob” did not reflect the views of the “whole thinking part of the legislative power.” They still backed Washington and were satisfied with his “conduct for the preservation of the country.” Like Kirkpatrick, another friend, William Ramsay, urged him to ignore the tirade: “Show your contempt of the scribbler by your silence,” he advised.45
In fact, the broadside was about more than Washington and his touchy officers: harking back to the old antipathy toward standing armies, it voiced an ingrained distrust of paid professional soldiery and an admiration for a selfless amateur militia. Such opinions were only reinforced by Braddock’s defeat and more recent humiliations on other fronts.
Indeed, while the frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania sustained hit-and-run raids during the spring and summer of 1756, far heavier fighting had already flared elsewhere. At first, things had gone surprisingly well. During the previous September, the disaster in the Ohio Country had been partially offset by Anglo-American successes to the north. A mixed force of British regulars and Massachusetts provincials had fulfilled its role under the original plan for the 1755 campaign and captured Fort Beauséjour in Nova Scotia. In addition, a French lunge from Canada against the New York frontier had been parried and rebuffed during a rambling and bloody engagement at the foot of Lake George. Colonial forces commanded by the Irish-born superintendent of the northern Indians, William Johnson, had acquitted themselves well during the sprawling fight, fending off a formidable combination of French regulars, Canadian militia, and their Indian allies. Losses among the enemy’s officers had been heavy, with the slain including Captain Saint-Pierre, the aging veteran who had so impressed Washington with his soldierly bearing at Fort Le Boeuf in December 1753.46
Despite these badly needed and much-trumpeted victories, by late summer of 1756, when the “Virginia-Centinel” unleashed his attack, the initiative had swung back in favor of the Franco-Canadians. Under the command of a determined new governor general, Pierre de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil, and a competent field commander from France, Louis Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, they had launched a lightning strike against the isolated post of Oswego on Lake Ontario, snapping up its demoralized garrison and cowing the remaining troops on the New York frontier.
That same season saw the arrival of Braddock’s official replacement as Britain’s commander in chief in North America, John Campbell, Earl of Loudoun. The earl and the reinforcements of redcoats that arrived with him came too late to stave off disaster at Oswego, but he lost no time in seeking to orchestrate a renewed war effort in which the colonies would be obliged to place their burgeoning resources behind the Mother Country. This was an objective that was to cause Loudoun intense frustration, and to further sour relations between Crown and colonies.47
For Washington, Loudoun’s arrival promised a fresh source of patronage, particularly as the earl had also received the honorary title of governor of Virginia. It revived hopes of the military advancement, and the regular officer’s commission, that Braddock would surely have provided had he lived. As a clear sign of his intentions, Washington’s new Winchester strongpoint, which was constructed despite the ongoing clamor that he should shift his base forward to Fort Cumberland, was named Fort Loudoun in compliment to the incoming commander in chief.
During the autumn of 1756, Washington quit Winchester for long enough to make a fresh inspection of his extensive front line, which stretched from the Potomac down to the North Carolina border. This “very long and troublesome jaunt on the frontiers” gave him a taste of the hazards that his scattered detachments, based in isolated stockades and blockhouses, were daily facing in the field. Washington had ridden about 100 miles down the Shenandoah Valley to reach Augusta Court House when he received warning that Indians were roaming to the south. After pushing on to Vause’s Fort, on the Roanoke River, where it was rumored that militia could be assembled to oppose the raiders, Washington, accompanied by just his servant and a guide, apparently escaped death by the skin of his teeth. As the trio rode down a rain-swept, forest-fringed road, they were spotted by hostiles lying in ambush. These warriors let them pass unmolested, saving their bullets for two horsemen who appeared from the other direction less than two hours later. This deliverance from almost “certain destruction,” as Washington described it, must have seemed like another manifestation of the “Providence” or “Destiny” that had protected him at Fort Necessity and on the Monongahela. Expressing his conviction in the existence of some benevolent force controlling the fate of humans, Washington used both terms as readily as “God” or “Heaven.” Indeed, while conforming to the conscientious churchgoing expected of the gentry in Anglican Virginia, there is no compelling evidence that Washington was deeply religious.48
Despite his close shave, after three weeks in the saddle Washington returned to Winchester without even having seen an enemy Indian. The report that the colonel sent to Williamsburg was nonetheless a bleak one: owing to “the bad regulation of the militia,” the “wretched and unhappy” inhabitants of the “whole back-country” were convinced of their approaching ruin and streaming off toward the Southern Colonies. They had petitioned Washington for men of his regiment to protect them, but such a redeployment would leave Winchester vulnerable. Another observation implied criticism of Dinwiddie himself: some eleven Catawbas from the south—Indian allies that Washington had been desperate to attract ever since he accepted his command—had come into Winchester. More could have been had, Washington complained, if only “the proper means [had] been used, to send trusty guides to invite and conduct them to us.”49
In hectoring the man who had first given him his command and who shared many of his own goals and frustrations, Washington went too far: his “unmannerly” criticisms earned a personal rebuke from Dinwiddie, who was rapidly losing patience with his headstrong and apparently ungrateful protégé. It was time to bring him to heel. Rather than accept Washington’s recommendation that Fort Cumberland be evacuated and the frontier anchored upon the new Fort Loudoun, Dinwiddie and his council resolved that the contentious strongpoint on Wills Creek should not be abandoned, but rather reinforced. To that end, Washington was to march there immediately with most of the men he had assembled at Winchester.50
When Washington pointed out that such a move would strip Winchester bare, he was ordered to recall the garrisons of his smaller, outlying posts to make up the shortfall. He grudgingly agreed to go to Fort Cumberland, but a letter to one of his captains, in which he regretted “the fate of the poor, unhappy inhabitants left by this means exposed to every incursion of a merciless enemy,” left no doubt of his feelings. Shortly before Christmas 1756, more than a year after assuming command of Virginia’s forces, Washington finally established his headquarters at Fort Cumberland.51
Dinwiddie’s decision had been influenced by a comment from Lord Loudoun himself, who agreed that reinforcing the most “advanced” outpost was the best way of baffling the raids. Assuming that Washington had already “executed his plan” to retire to Winchester, Loudoun registered his grave concern at such a move: it would not only have a “bad effect as to the Dominion” but would “not have a good appearance at home,” he warned.52
Washington was mortified that Loudoun should “have imbibed prejudices so unfavorable” to his character.53 In the New Year, he set about seeking to change Loudoun’s opinion by sending him an analysis of the Old Dominion’s war effort. In what he characterized as a “concise” letter, but which in fact rambled on at pamphlet length, he aimed to provide a “candid” account of Virginian affairs and more “particularly of the grievances which the Virginia Regiment has struggled against for almost three years.”54 As “a principal actor from the beginning of these disturbances,” Washington considered himself well qualified to do so. In the pages that followed, he resurrected familiar themes: the ineffectiveness of the disorderly and tardy militia; the money that had been squandered by failing to pursue “regular schemes or plans of operation”; the misplaced reliance on a “pusillanimous” defensive strategy that earned the “contempt and derision” of the Indians; the futility of such a policy given the lack of manpower to defend an extensive frontier; and the unassailable logic of an offensive campaign to destroy the root of the problem.
In a passage that must have struck a chord with Loudoun, who had encountered determined resistance to his policies from elected assemblies across British America, Washington railed against Virginia’s failure to impose effective “military laws and regulations.” Instead, the Old Dominion had a mere “jumble of laws” that did nothing except render “command intricate and precarious,” making it difficult to exercise authority without riling the “civil powers,” who, “tenacious of liberty,” were instantly suspicious of “all proceedings that are not strictly lawful,” even when such innovations were justified by the circumstances.
Yet for all the obstacles placed in its way, Washington maintained that the Virginia Regiment had proved stalwart in the colony’s defense. His beleaguered bluecoats had seen their fair share of action, fighting “more than twenty skirmishes” in which they had lost “near a hundred men killed and wounded.” The regiment had long been “tantalized” by hopes of becoming a regular unit of the British Army while, if Braddock had lived, Washington himself would surely have met with “preferment equal to my wishes.” He had long since reached the conclusion that it was impossible to continue in his present service “without loss of honor.” Only Loudoun’s appointment raised hopes that this dismal situation might change for the better. A passage that Washington wrote, but decided against including in his letter to Loudoun, reveals deeper personal bitterness. In this, he begged leave to add that his own “unwearied endeavors” were “inadequately rewarded.” His orders were ambiguous, leaving him “like a wanderer in a wilderness,” while he was held answerable for the consequences “without the privilege of defense!”55
Washington’s most significant proposal was not presented directly to Loudoun but was saved for a covering letter addressed to his aide-de-camp, Captain James Cunningham. This suggested that Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland should together raise 3,000 well-regulated men. They would be enough to secure the key “passes” between Fort Cumberland and the Ohio and take possession of that waterway. Supplied with a “middling” train of artillery, the same force could then conquer “the terror of these colonies”—Fort Duquesne itself.56
Hearing that Loudoun had summoned five lieutenant governors of the “Southern Colonies” to a meeting in Philadelphia to thrash out a plan of operations for 1757, Washington sought Dinwiddie’s permission to attend in person. As Dinwiddie would be on hand and whatever was decided would be passed on to Washington anyway, the governor could see no good reason for the trip but, as the colonel was so insistent, gave him leave to go. By late February 1757, Washington was in Philadelphia once again, whiling away several weeks in gambling, dancing, and shopping before Loudoun arrived. While there, he took the opportunity to write a “memorial” to Loudoun on behalf of the officers of the Virginia Regiment, formally requesting his patronage. This was couched in suitably deferential terms, but in a letter to Dinwiddie written some two weeks earlier, likewise seeking royal recognition for the regiment and its officers, Washington made no effort to conceal his mounting resentment at what seemed like a deliberate policy of discrimination against colonials.57
Washington listed the attributes that entitled the Virginia Regiment to regular status: its long and arduous service, rigorous training, proper uniforms, and, above all, the fact that it was raised to serve “during the King’s or colony’s pleasure,” unlike other provincial units, which were seasonal formations, assembled “in the spring and dismissed in the Fall.” The truth of all this prompted Washington to voice deep-seated frustrations, expressed in biting and sarcastic language:
We can’t conceive, that being Americans should deprive us of the benefits of British subjects; nor lessen our claim to preferment. . . . Some boast of long service as a claim to promotion—meaning I suppose, the length of time they have pocketed a commission—I apprehend it is the service done, not the service engaged in, that merits reward; and that there is, as equitable a right to expect something for three years hard and bloody service, as for 10 spent at St. James’s etc. where real service, or a field of battle never was seen.
For good measure, Washington took a swipe at Dinwiddie himself, complaining that it was the “general opinion” that the Virginia Regiment’s services were “slighted” or had “not been properly represented to His Majesty.” In its criticism of what Washington believed to be the British Empire’s lopsided system of patronage, the letter has been convincingly identified as revealing a “significant development” in his “political identity and thinking,” marking “a step toward republicanism and nationalism.”58
In his long letter to Loudoun, Washington had tactfully glossed over his own role in the great controversy of 1754—the “Jumonville affair.” By an extraordinarily unlucky coincidence, at the very moment that he was seeking to cement his credentials with the commander in chief, that embarrassing episode was suddenly resurrected. A French book, which included a translation of the rough journal of events that Washington had lost at Fort Necessity, had been captured aboard an enemy ship. In March 1757, the proprietor of the Pennsylvania Gazette advertised his intention to publish a translation within two months. That year, English-language editions emerged in both Philadelphia and New York, so reminding readers of events that Washington would have preferred to forget.59
Lord Loudoun finally reached Philadelphia on March 14. His strategic summit convened next day and lasted for a fortnight.60 By its end, all Washington’s hopes had been dashed. There would be no offensive against Fort Duquesne in 1757. In fact, as South Carolina was considered to be in greater danger than Virginia, some 400 of the Old Dominion’s troops would be diverted there instead. As part of the shake-up, however, Loudoun decreed that Fort Cumberland was henceforth to be garrisoned by Maryland, leaving Virginia responsible for manning five forts within its own territory: Washington’s headquarters would revert to Winchester after all. Nothing came of Washington’s plea that the Virginia Regiment be formally attached to the British Army. Neither was there any prospect of the king’s commission that he had sought for himself.
Loudoun was an exceptionally busy man, mired in paperwork and hobbled by instructions from London; the difficulties he faced in securing supplies, manpower, and the cooperation of colonial officials with little enthusiasm for the war were Washington’s own problems writ large. Under the circumstances, Washington’s failure to achieve his personal goals at Philadelphia was unsurprising. But his approaches to Loudoun did not draw a total blank; his recommendations on behalf of fellow Virginians who were keen to serve as regular officers received serious consideration at headquarters. For example, it was through Colonel Washington’s interest and recommendation to Loudoun’s aide-de-camp, Captain Cunningham, that William Henry Fairfax, the son of his esteemed Belvoir neighbor, gained an ensign’s commission in the 28th Foot later that year.61 Washington’s conspicuous failure to secure a king’s commission for himself may have been a reflection of his unwillingness to accept a drop in rank from colonel—and the fact that he was too useful in his present post. In addition, unlike “Billy” Fairfax and other colonial officers who secured regular rank, Washington never offered to purchase a commission, instead expecting one as a just reward for his efforts.62
On his return from Philadelphia, Washington revealed his disappointment in a letter to Richard Washington, the London merchant who supplied him with fashionable goods and to whom he had last written back in December 1755. Since then, Washington explained, he had become an “exile,” posted “for twenty months past upon our cold and barren frontiers” and charged with protecting “from the cruel incursions of a crafty savage enemy a line of inhabitants of more than 350 miles extent with a force inadequate to the task.” Returning to his favorite theme, Washington once again emphasized that an attack on Fort Duquesne, that notorious “hold of barbarians” who had become “a terror to three populous colonies,” was the only cure for Virginia’s woes: the continuing failure to launch such an assault was all the more galling because the prospect of a major offensive to the north by Lord Loudoun would distract French attention to that sector.63
Reluctant to take no for an answer, Washington wasted little time in presenting his pet scheme to Colonel John Stanwix, commanding the first battalion of the newly raised Royal American Regiment, who had been appointed by Loudoun as commander in chief of all the forces—regular and provincial alike—in Pennsylvania and the southern provinces. Based in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with five companies of his battalion, the experienced Stanwix was now Washington’s immediate superior. Escaped captives from the Ohio Country confirmed that just 300 men garrisoned Fort Duquesne, Washington informed him. Surely the opportunity to reduce Fort Duquesne was too good to be lost? “I do not conceive that the French are so strong in Canada as to reinforce this place, and defend themselves at home this campaign,” he argued.64
Because the unusually large number of companies—and therefore officers—in the Virginia Regiment made it an expensive unit to pay, in May 1757, Governor Dinwiddie informed Washington that the Assembly had decided to slash its strength. It would now consist of ten companies rather than sixteen.65 However, as each of these was to consist of 100 men and the regiment still only mustered about 650 rank and file, a sum not exceeding £30,000 had been earmarked to raise the manpower needed to bring it up to strength. Given the continuing unpopularity of military service, exactly how the recruits were to be found remained unclear, although the Assembly subsequently approved another draft, targeted even more specifically at the poorest and most vulnerable members of white Virginian society—men considered to be work-shy vagrants or who lacked the property qualifications to vote. This new attempt to swell the Virginia Regiment with reluctant conscripts rather than willing volunteers would create more problems than it solved.
In the same letter in which he announced the reorganization of the Virginia Regiment, Dinwiddie made another announcement redolent of future difficulties for Washington: as Charleston merchant Edmond Atkin had been appointed superintendent of Indian affairs for the Southern Colonies, Washington was to have no more dealings with Virginia’s Indian allies. Expertise in managing relations with the Indians was badly needed. Some 150 Cherokees who had been gathered at Winchester by Major Andrew Lewis were already disgruntled and disillusioned by their treatment at the hands of the Old Dominion. Captain George Mercer warned that their loyalty was wavering owing to mismanagement: they complained that “the great men of Virginia were liars,” in contrast to the French, who “treated them always like children, and gave them what goods they wanted.”66 But if Washington assumed that Atkin would relieve him of a burden, he was to be sorely disappointed: the new superintendent lacked the tact and diplomacy crucial for his post; by contrast, Atkin had the unfortunate knack of irritating and alienating those he was required to work with, Indians and whites alike.
Predictably enough, the draft bill passed in the spring of 1757 failed to solve Washington’s manpower problems; the resentful draftees deserted in droves. Lenient treatment of the first to be apprehended merely encouraged others to abscond, so Washington determined to take harsher measures: on July 11, he wrote to Dinwiddie, pleading for a copy of the recently reactivated “mutiny and desertion bill,” along with blank warrants to allow the sentences of courts-martial to be enforced. Just days later, he informed Colonel Stanwix that, of some 400 drafts, no fewer than 114 had promptly gone off. Some of them had been retaken, albeit only after a fight, and Washington had now built a lofty gallows, “near 40 feet high,” on which he intended to “hang two or three . . . as an example to others.”67
Washington meant what he said: writing to Dinwiddie from Fort Loudoun on August 3, he reported that two of those condemned, Ignatious Edwards and William Smith, had already been strung up. Both were, in Washington’s opinion, beyond redemption: Edwards had deserted twice before, while Smith “was accounted one of the greatest villains upon the continent.” Washington had actually warned Edwards in person that another lapse could not be forgiven; Edwards, described as a “great fiddler and dancer,” may have gambled that his winning ways would save his neck. If so, he misjudged his colonel. Other, less heinous offenders escaped with a severe lashing.68
Such harsh sentences were mandatory only when colonial troops were actually serving alongside British regulars and fell under their Articles of War. By seeking to impose them upon his own provincial regiment, even though it was acting independently of the redcoats, Washington once again underlined his determination to transform his regiment into an elite unit worthy of joining the regular establishment. In the opinion of an officer who served alongside him in the following year, however, Washington’s reputation as “a tolerably strict disciplinarian” came at the cost of his personal popularity: he was “not then much liked in the army” as his “system” jarred with “the impatient spirits of his headstrong countrymen, who are but little used to restraint.”69
While Washington was whipping his men into shape, a fresh campaign was unfolding far from the Ohio. As Washington had anticipated, it involved a major assault upon Canada. In line with specific instructions from William Pitt, the new secretary of state for the Southern Department with responsibility for American affairs, Loudoun concentrated the bulk of his regulars at Halifax, Nova Scotia, poised for an amphibious thrust against the fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. Loudoun had originally planned to strike first at Quebec, the capital of New France, but Pitt preferred Louisbourg. This interference from afar clearly unsettled the commander in chief, and when subsequent orders arrived granting him discretion over which objective to attack first, he now plumped for Louisbourg rather than Quebec. It was a disastrous choice. Stormy weather and the appearance of a superior French fleet in North American waters thwarted Loudoun’s great expedition before a gun was even fired.
Anglo-American embarrassment at this misadventure was soon compounded by horror and rage after Montcalm exploited the conspicuous absence of Loudoun and the bulk of his troops, and the removal of any immediate danger to Quebec, to assault the lightly defended New York frontier. In August 1757, after a short siege, the marquis captured Fort William Henry at the foot of Lake George. The garrison, which, like Washington’s command at Fort Necessity, surrendered upon condition of receiving the “honors of war,” fell victim to France’s tribal allies. Montcalm had secured his own military objective, yet these warriors deemed themselves cheated of the legitimate prizes—scalps, prisoners, and booty—for which they had fought. Perhaps 200 prisoners, including soldiers’ wives and children, were killed before order was restored.70
The massacre, bad enough in reality but further exaggerated in gory newspaper reports on both sides of the Atlantic, had an even greater psychological impact, marking a low point in the war and in the reputation of Britain’s soldiers and their leadership. Together with the total failure of Loudoun’s Louisbourg expedition and his brusque, imperious treatment of the touchy colonial assemblies, this latest disaster left the earl facing mounting criticism, not only in America, but also in London. There, Loudoun’s patron, the British Army’s commander, the Duke of Cumberland, had likewise suffered a dramatic fall from grace after failing to preserve his father’s prized continental territory of Hanover from the French. That defeat, allied with the emergence of a viable coalition ministry combining the financial gifts of Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, and the vigorous war leadership of Pitt, ushered in a radically new approach to the war in North America and ultimately sealed Loudoun’s fate.
While Loudoun’s strategy for 1757 was clearly flawed, placing too much emphasis upon a single front, his troubled tenure as commander in chief laid the foundations for ultimate victory over New France. The unglamorous but essential logistical infrastructure for a concerted war effort had laboriously been put in place; and far from ignoring the realities of local conditions that had contributed to Braddock’s defeat, Loudoun had taken pains to train his redcoats to fight in the bewildering American woods, exploiting the hard-earned experience of irregulars like the tough New England ranger Robert Rogers, who had spent the past two years waging a vicious guerrilla conflict in the Champlain Valley.
The war’s axis shifted northward during 1757, but the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia continued to face sporadic raids by war parties fitted out at Fort Duquesne. In consequence, the Virginia Regiment’s detachment to South Carolina was halved to 200 men. Including the new drafts, this gave Washington eight companies, or about 700 men, to protect Virginia’s lengthy frontier. As ever, the regiment’s manpower was insufficient for the job. In mid-June, when intelligence suggested that a large body of French and Indians, complete with artillery, were heading hotfoot for Fort Cumberland, a council of war at Fort Loudoun reluctantly resolved that the scarcity and dispersal of the troops ruled out any relief expedition. Instead, vulnerable garrisons should be concentrated at Winchester, the enemy’s next likely objective. Alerted by Washington, Colonel Stanwix prepared to march there at the head of his Royal Americans and as many Pennsylvanian provincials as could be assembled. The alarm proved false, and Stanwix never moved from Carlisle, but his response to the emergency highlighted the professional reputation that Washington had established: Stanwix—a veteran of half a century of regular service—readily deferred to the Virginian’s local knowledge, trusting to his “judgment and experience in the operations in this country.” Washington exploited his standing with Stanwix to drum home a favorite theme: the unreliability of the colonial militia. “No dependence is to be placed upon them,” he warned. Indeed, militiamen were “obstinate and perverse” and too often egged on to disobedience by their own officers.71
While obliged to remain on the strategic defensive, Washington was keen to exploit any opportunity for low-level aggressive action. His instructions to his company commanders emphasized that, although their main objective was to protect the inhabitants, “and to keep them if possible easy and quiet,” one-third of available manpower should be pushed out in “constant scouting parties” capable of intercepting raiders before they could strike: rather than simply waiting for the enemy, Washington’s men were to seek them out. Once again, Washington stressed the need for his captains to “neglect no pains or diligence” in training their men and to devote some of their own leisure hours to studying the finer points of their chosen profession. The captains’ instructions included a statement that underpinned Washington’s own creed as a soldier: “Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable, procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.”72
That summer the viability of the small-scale patrols that Washington recommended was enhanced by the presence of significant numbers of Cherokees and Catawbas. The value of such warriors had been demonstrated when Lieutenant James Baker of the Virginia Regiment and some Cherokees penetrated about 100 miles beyond Fort Cumberland, then tracked and ambushed ten Frenchmen. The skirmish epitomized the ferocity of frontier warfare. After opening fire, Baker and his allies rushed in with their tomahawks. They killed three and took prisoner three others, all of them officers. Of these, one was too badly wounded to march and was therefore slain on the spot; another was “served in the same manner soon after” in vengeance for the death of the Indians’ leader, “the truly brave” Swallow Warrior, and the wounding of his son. It was only after a punishing march, during which they had no “morsel” to eat for four days, that the party came in to Fort Cumberland with five scalps and the surviving officer.73
Baker’s raid gave a rare cause for celebration but had unforeseen consequences. When the French officer was brought down to Winchester, some of Washington’s officers invited him and one of his Cherokee captors to join them for a convivial glass of wine. Atkin, the Indian superintendent, took umbrage: he had not yet had a chance to interrogate the prisoner and complained to Washington. This provoked a feisty response from the Virginians: “as our officers and men risked their lives in [the] taking of the prisoner, we are entitled to speak to him when we please,” they informed their colonel. Indeed, whatever command Atkin enjoyed over the Indians, he had none over them—“gentlemen who from their station in life, their births and education ought to be treated with respect.”74
The squall blew over, but Atkin was soon at the center of a fresh storm, which caused Washington far greater concern. As he knew from hard-earned experience, allied Indians didn’t fight for nothing: they required endless gifts and careful nurturing. Far from managing matters at Winchester, in early July Atkin alienated the Indians by jailing ten Cherokees and Mingos he suspected of spying. Not surprisingly, as the exasperated Washington reported to Stanwix, this had “greatly alarmed” the prisoners’ friends. They sent runners to inform their people “that the English had fallen upon their brethren.” Irate warriors managed to force the release of the prisoners; they refused to even talk to Atkin until Washington had reassured them that a mistake had been made.75
All that was bad enough, but when Atkin left Winchester in mid-August, he took his deputy—Washington’s old frontier companion Christopher Gist—and his Indian interpreter, Richard Smith, with him, along with the essential supply of presents, thereby exacerbating Washington’s problems when more Cherokees turned up demanding the customary largess. The consequence, as Washington warned Dinwiddie, was that while the “warlike, formidable” Cherokees seemed to have a “natural, strong attachment” to the English, the treatment they had received was now inclining them toward the French, who were “making them vastly advantageous offers.” The present system of managing Indian affairs risked losing allies who were crucial to the English colonies in general and to Virginia in particular.76
That summer, Washington’s myriad frustrations—with Atkin, with deserters, and, above all, with the futility of the defensive policy he was forced to follow—fed into increasing tensions with Dinwiddie, by now a sick man and heading for retirement. Not least, Washington believed that his reputation was being unfairly traduced and that he had been condemned without the chance to defend it. Washington had been incensed by malicious gossip, passed on by one of his former captains, William Peachey, that the great scare of spring 1756, when the frontier reeled under the prospect of Indian attack, was simply a “scheme” by which he, as Virginia’s commander in chief, hoped to enhance his own influence by extracting men and money from the gullible Assembly. He denied such slanders with a passion:
It is uncertain in what light my services may have appeared to Your Honor—But this I know, and it is the highest consolation I am capable of feeling; that no man that ever was employed in a public capacity has endeavored to discharge the trust reposed in him with greater honesty, and more zeal for the country’s interest, than I have done: and if there is any person living, who can say with justice that I have offered any intentional wrong to the public, I will cheerfully submit to the most ignominious punishment that an injured people ought to inflict!77
Dinwiddie knew nothing of such stories and advised Washington to ignore them. Looking back over their sometimes troubled four-year relationship, however, the long-suffering Scot was adamant that any blame for the recent breakdown lay with Washington: “My conduct to you from the beginning was always friendly,” he wrote, “but you know I had great reason to suspect you of ingratitude.” Dinwiddie had the king’s leave to sail for England in November; he could only wish that his successor as incoming lieutenant governor would show Washington as much friendship as he had done.78
Washington’s touchiness was exacerbated by his own declining health. Attempting the impossible had stretched him to the limit, mentally and physically. Under the continuous strain, even his formidable constitution began to crack. By August 1757, Washington was suffering from the “bloody flux,” the graphically descriptive slang for the pre-twentieth-century soldier’s all-too-frequent companion, dysentery. When fever ensued, his friend, regimental officer, and personal physician James Craik resorted to the era’s customary response and bled him copiously: applied three times in two days, this drastic treatment not surprisingly left him weaker than ever and incapable of even walking. On November 9, it was Washington’s close friend and aide-de-camp Robert Stewart who informed Dinwiddie that his colonel had reluctantly followed Dr. Craik’s strong recommendation to seek a change of air and “some place where he can be kept quiet” as offering the best chance of recovery.79
That same day, with winter fast approaching and no improvement to his condition in sight, Washington quit his Winchester headquarters. He headed home to Mount Vernon, to recuperate or die.