Tarnished Victory
Save for servants, Mount Vernon was empty and lonely. At nearby Belvoir, Sally Fairfax was likewise almost alone. To Washington’s great grief, his staunch friend, patron, and surrogate father Colonel William Fairfax had died on September 2, 1757; Sally’s husband, George William, had traveled to England to deal with inheritance matters. Sally knew nothing of Washington’s presence just a few miles away, and, with her husband absent, for reasons of decorum he hesitated to even inform her of it.
It was only after he had been examined by a physician, the Reverend Charles Green of Alexandria, who forbade meat and recommended an insipid diet of “jellies and such kind of food,” that Washington finally took the plunge and wrote to Belvoir, seeking a recipe book and the necessary ingredients. Whether Sally responded to this pitiful appeal is not disclosed in the surviving correspondence. That any contact between them was kept to a minimum, and by Sally’s choice, is suggested by the message that Washington later sent over to Belvoir along with a letter announcing George William Fairfax’s safe arrival in London: this yearned wistfully for the “favor” of a visit from her.1
The New Year brought little improvement to Washington’s condition. When, in January 1758, he set out for Williamsburg to avail himself of its wider medical knowledge, he fell so ill on the way that he was obliged to turn back. As spring came on, Washington had grounds to fear “an approaching decay” and that, like his beloved half brother Lawrence, he faced a lingering cough-racked death by consumption. Reporting to his immediate superior officer, Colonel Stanwix of the Royal Americans, Washington lamented that his ruined constitution had quashed any last “prospect of preferment in a military life”; under the circumstances, it was perhaps better that he should resign his command, making way for another, more capable person whose efforts might be crowned by greater success.2
Despite such pessimistic predictions, in early March 1758, Washington finally managed to complete the painful journey to Williamsburg. There, he consulted Virginia’s most eminent physician, Dr. John Amson. His pronouncement that George was in no obvious danger acted like a powerful tonic upon him. Reprieved from an early grave, his thoughts now turned to the future in general, and to matrimony in particular.
Washington’s infatuation with Sally Fairfax is clear evidence of his fondness for women. But Sally was unobtainable, and, as already noted, his approaches were confined to those of a knight-errant espousing an idealized “courtly love.” That Washington was attracted to females on the earthlier level to be expected from a young man in his early twenties is strongly suggested by a lascivious letter from his close friend George Mercer, sent from South Carolina during the previous summer. Not only did Charleston’s buildings compare unfavorably with Williamsburg’s, but the local “fair ones” were also, in Mercer’s opinion, “very far inferior to the beauties” of Virginia. The Carolina girls were wary of encouraging advances, fearing the “multiplicity of scandal” in their gossip-fueled society; in any event, Mercer was scarcely tempted to try his luck. Employing breathless language that surely indicates that this cannot have been the first time that he and his colonel had discussed such matters, Mercer observed: “Many of them are crooked and have a very bad air and not those enticing, heaving, throbbing, alluring letch, exciting, plump breasts common with our northern belles.”3
On his way to consult Dr. Amson, Washington had called at White House in New Kent County, the home of the recently widowed Martha Dandridge Custis. Returning from Williamsburg with a clean bill of health, the reinvigorated Washington felt strong enough to start courting her in earnest. Whether the twenty-six-year-old widow of Daniel Parke Custis matched Mercer’s physical criteria for Virginian womanhood is unclear from surviving portraits, but her other attractions were certainly ample enough: with an estate assessed at the best part of £24,000, she was one of the colony’s wealthiest matches.
Through her family, Martha enjoyed connections that may have exerted further appeal for an ambitious young gentleman driven by notions of martial glory. Martha’s uncle, William Dandridge, had served in the Royal Navy, and, like Captain Lawrence Washington, saw action during the ill-fated expedition to Cartagena. In addition, her late husband’s grandfather, the Virginian-born Daniel Parke II, had climbed high within the British Army, and was present at one of the era’s pivotal battles as aide-de-camp to none other than John Churchill, the legendary Duke of Marlborough. When Marlborough drubbed the French and Bavarians at Blenheim in 1704, it was Colonel Parke who had been granted the singular honor of delivering news of the victory to Queen Anne. When he finally arrived at Windsor Castle after an eight-day journey, Parke showed his monarch the duke’s first unofficial announcement of his victory, famously scribbled to his wife Sarah on the back of a tavern bill, then gave her his own eyewitness account of events. The customary reward for the bearer of such momentous tidings was 500 guineas, but Parke artfully asked for his delighted monarch’s miniature instead. The colonel’s unorthodox request paid off handsomely: the queen’s portrait came in a diamond-studded golden locket and was accompanied by 1,000 guineas. Despite this spectacular high point of distinction, Parke’s subsequent career was dogged by disappointment, scandal, and tragedy. Hoping for appointment as royal governor of his native Virginia, to his intense chagrin Parke was instead posted to the far-flung, lawless and unhealthy Leeward Islands. There, his bitterness gave vent to debauchery: he reputedly proved so rapacious toward the islanders’ wives and daughters that in 1710, on Antigua, their outraged menfolk lost patience, rioted, and lynched him. For all his brutal and ignominious end, Colonel Parke had nonetheless penetrated the privileged inner circles of Britain’s military and imperial establishment. A reminder of that fact was a fine portrait of Parke in his dashing prime, red coated, bewigged, and flaunting his miniature of Queen Anne, which looked down on Washington when he came courting at White House; given his own repeated but fruitless attempts to infiltrate the ranks of the British Army, it must surely have stirred both interest and envy.4
The strapping and confident Washington clearly made a favorable impression upon the diminutive Martha, who was less than five feet tall. Within a month of first calling upon her, he apparently made a formal proposal of marriage and was accepted. Martha Custis was accompanied not only by a sizable fortune, but by two children. John and Martha, familiarly known as “Jacky” and “Patsy,” were aged four and two: Washington’s forthcoming marriage would bring with it a ready-made family and the responsibilities of a stepfather. Soon after resuming his command at Fort Loudoun, Winchester, in early April, Washington ordered what was in all likelihood his wedding suit. By the first ship bound for Virginia, Richard Washington in London was instructed to send enough “of the best superfine blue cotton velvet as will make a coat, waistcoat and breeches for a tall man with a fine silk button to suit it and all other necessary trimmings and linings together with garters for the breeches.”5
By then the military situation, like Washington’s own domestic prospects, had undergone a dramatic transformation. The new ministry in London, fronted by the energetic and charismatic Pitt, was determined to change Britain’s dismal record in North America. Discredited by his failure to deliver a victorious offensive, Lord Loudoun was recalled in March 1758 and replaced by his fellow Scot, Major General James Abercromby. In essence, however, Pitt’s strategy for the coming campaign followed a blueprint that Loudoun had already prepared in February, which sought to learn from the bitter lessons of the previous year.6 Instead of one main thrust against New France, there would now be three: besides a fresh seaborne expedition bound for Louisbourg, another large army would proceed against Montreal and Quebec via the Champlain Valley; in addition, and as Washington had long urged to anyone willing to listen, there would be a new attempt to take Fort Duquesne and belatedly avenge Braddock’s defeat.7
The renewed Ohio offensive was to be led by the fifty-year-old Brigadier General John Forbes, an experienced and tactful Scot who offered a striking contrast to the bluff and outspoken Braddock. His army, which, on paper at least, was almost three times the size of that assembled in 1755, would include a kernel of British regular troops. These redcoats were all newly raised: thirteen companies of Montgomery’s Highlanders and four of the Royal Americans. Both of these units were unconventional by British Army standards: Montgomery’s was overwhelmingly composed of Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlanders, while the Royal Americans mustered a mixed bag of manpower, including many Germans recruited in Europe and Pennsylvania. The remaining two-thirds of Forbes’s projected 6,000-strong force would be composed of provincials from Pennsylvania and Virginia, with smaller contingents from Maryland, North Carolina, and Delaware.
For the coming campaign, Virginia resolved to raise a second regiment, appointing the prominent planter William Byrd III, who had served as a volunteer aide to Loudoun, as its colonel. This decision to double the Old Dominion’s manpower to 2,000, which flew in the face of its previous niggardly defense policy, resulted from Pitt’s unexpected announcement that the costs involved in equipping and maintaining all American provincial forces would henceforth be met by His Britannic Majesty’s government, with other expenses to be reimbursed in due course.8 Virginia’s resulting readiness to pay generous enlistment bounties in 1758 ensured that both of its regiments were brought up to strength with genuine volunteers rather than truculent conscripts. But while Pitt’s openhandedness worked an immediate and positive impact upon colonial willingness to support the Mother Country’s war effort, it had unforeseen consequences that would ultimately prove disastrous for British North America.
By April 1758, Washington’s health was restored, and he clearly hoped to play a prominent part in the coming campaign. Congratulating Colonel Stanwix on his promotion to brigadier general, Washington asked him to mention his name to Forbes—not as one who sought further advancement, but rather as “a person who would gladly be distinguished in some measure from the common run of provincial officers,” of whom he understood there was to be “a motley herd.” Asking the same favor of his old friend Thomas Gage, who was now colonel of a newly formed regiment of light infantry, Washington felt the request was not unreasonable: after all, he had “been much longer in the service than any provincial officer in America.”9
Washington’s eagerness to serve was increased by another of Pitt’s initiatives, aimed at soothing relations between British regulars and their colonial colleagues: this tackled the vexing problem of relative “rank” by stipulating that for the future all provincial officers—including majors, lieutenant colonels and full colonels—would only be subject to orders from regulars of their own grade or above.10
For a man like Washington, who had twice failed to exert his authority over men holding, or claiming to hold, a royal captain’s commission, this was a crucial concession. A regular colonel would still outrank a colonial one, but that was a realistic ruling and accepted as such. For all the enduring stereotypes of bumbling port-soaked majors or smooth-cheeked foppish ensigns looking down their powdered noses at savvy colonials, the typical British officer rose through merit and hard service. Even though most commissions were bought for set fees, progression up the chain of seniority was only permitted if the candidate had experience to match the responsibility. By contrast, many provincial captains, particularly in New England, were simply “elected” by the men of the companies they would lead, a selection process often based on personal popularity rather than military capacity. Indeed, Washington himself had gained the coveted rank of major at the stroke of Governor Dinwiddie’s pen for nothing more dangerous than agreeing to oversee militia musters; a regular officer might face fifteen or more years of hard and bloody service, rising from ensign to lieutenant and then captain under the gimlet eye of King George II before achieving equivalent status, if he ever did. It was only right and proper that when British and colonial officers of similar rank served together in America, the regular should take seniority.
During the spring of 1758, while Washington remained at Winchester, General Forbes established his headquarters at Philadelphia, slowly assembling the various components of his expedition. As Lord Loudoun’s adjutant general in 1757, Forbes was a specialist in logistics, but, like Braddock before him, he was soon exasperated by the cynical double-dealing he encountered as he tried to amass the wagons and supplies needed to move his army westward.
Recruiting reliable Indian allies for the coming offensive was another headache. During his stint as Loudoun’s right-hand man, Forbes had also been at the forefront of attempts to adapt the British Army for war in the American backwoods and well knew the value of tribal allies. Forbes was therefore delighted to learn that a powerful force of southern Indians—Cherokees and Catawbas—had converged upon Winchester to join his campaign. When Washington wrote to Brigadier Stanwix on April 10, some 500 warriors had already reached the little Shenandoah Valley town, mostly setting off to seek the enemy on the frontiers of Virginia and Maryland. More were on their way. Drawing upon hard experience, Washington warned that it would prove difficult to retain these warriors’ services unless Forbes’s campaign started promptly. If there were delays and the Indians went home, then no words could express how much they would be missed. In Washington’s opinion, the security of Forbes’s army as it marched against Fort Duquesne would depend upon the assistance of tribal allies, making their management “an affair of great importance,” demanding “the closest attention of the commanding officer” himself.11
Forbes was unschooled in the etiquette of Indian diplomacy, but to his dismay and growing anger, neither of Britain’s official Indian superintendents, Sir William Johnson and Edmond Atkin, or even their deputies, was willing to help manage these capricious warriors. True to form, the Cherokees demanded a steady supply of costly presents and provisions. Expecting Forbes’s main army to muster and march immediately, they grew bored and drifted home as the weeks dragged by with no hint of an offensive. Struggling with paperwork in distant Philadelphia, Forbes could do nothing as the most formidable force of Indians yet assembled to aid a British army dwindled away to just a few score warriors.
Given Washington’s experience of frontier warfare, Forbes counted upon him and his veteran Virginians to play a key role in the coming campaign. Back in March, on hearing rumors of Washington’s resignation, Forbes had written to Virginia’s acting governor, John Blair, expressing his disappointment at losing a soldier with “the character of a good and knowing officer in the back countries.” Greatly flattered, Washington thanked Forbes heartily for this good opinion when he wrote to congratulate him “on the promising prospect of a glorious campaign.” Forbes’s faith in Washington and his men was bolstered by the verdict of his quartermaster general, that notoriously quarrelsome and picky survivor of Braddock’s expedition, Sir John St. Clair. He had seen four companies of the 1st Virginia Regiment at Winchester, observing that, if the other six were as good, Forbes could “expect a great deal of service” from a unit that did honor to its colonel.12
St. Clair’s assessment testifies to Washington’s determined efforts to shape his regiment into an elite unit. His success in doing so had already been apparent in Charleston during the previous summer, where the two companies sent there under Adam Stephen and George Mercer had impressed the Royal Americans. According to Mercer, these regulars had expected “to see a parcel of ragged, disorderly fellows headed by officers of their own stamp (like the rest of the provincials they had seen).” Instead, they had encountered “men properly disposed who made a good and soldier-like appearance”; who were capable of performing “in every particular as well as could be expected from any troops”; and under officers who were clearly gentlemen, complete with sashes and gorgets to denote their rank, “genteel uniforms,” and with swords properly hung and hats smartly cocked. By dint of such efficiency and élan, Washington’s men had “lost that common appellation of provincials”; instead, they were distinguished by “the style and title of the detachment of the Virginia Regiment.” As Lieutenant Colonel Stephen proudly reported to Washington, his men were both well disciplined and versatile, “and have this advantage of all other troops in America, that they know the parade as well as Prussians, and the fighting in a close country as well as Tartars.”13 Even allowing for some boasting by his subordinates, Washington had forged an unusually flexible and efficient formation, skilled in both regular and irregular warfare: this was precisely the versatility that Lord Loudoun had sought to instill within his own redcoat battalions.
At the start of the 1758 campaign, therefore, Washington’s stock with Forbes stood high. But for reasons concerned less with strategy than with colonial politics he was soon to forfeit much of that goodwill. Forbes’s original plan had envisaged advancing from Philadelphia via the Pennsylvanian settlements of Carlisle and Raystown to Fort Cumberland in Maryland. From there, his army would follow the existing road to Fort Duquesne, painstakingly created by Braddock’s doomed command three years earlier. Even at this early stage, the mere fact that Forbes’s troops would concentrate on Conococheague Creek, within Pennsylvanian territory, was enough to set Washington’s Virginian hackles rising. On April 18, he wrote to St. Clair, warning that the Indians would take umbrage, as they had long been accustomed to resort to Winchester, leaving from and returning to Fort Loudoun there. This objection merely hinted at a far greater controversy to come, which would “cast its shadow” over Washington’s role in the 1758 campaign.14
Brigadier General Forbes was seriously ill at the opening of his expedition, and became more so as it progressed; tormented by the all-too-prevalent “flux,” it is possible that he was also suffering from stomach cancer. Like so many other Scots to be found on the Appalachian frontier during the 1750s—men like Adam Stephen and James Craik of the Virginia Regiment—Forbes had studied medicine before gaining his first commission, and he now took a grim professional pleasure in chronicling his own ailments. Battling sickness as much the enemy, he was obliged to orchestrate his campaign from the rear, entrusting frontline leadership to his second in command, the thirty-nine-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Henri Bouquet of the Royal American Regiment. Bouquet was an excellent choice for the job. Born in Switzerland, like many of his countrymen Bouquet learned his trade as a mercenary: before becoming an officer of King George II he had held commissions in the armies of Sardinia and the Dutch Republic. During the previous autumn Bouquet had commanded at Charleston, South Carolina, establishing a rapport with the officers of the two companies of Washington’s regiment who had been sent there by Loudoun.
In keeping with Forbes’s plan to safeguard his supply line and avoid lengthy wagon trains, Bouquet anchored the army’s advance upon carefully fortified depots, established forty to fifty miles apart; the first of these was at Raystown, about 100 miles from Fort Duquesne, where the army’s advance units, including half of the 1st Virginia Regiment under the experienced Lieutenant Colonel Stephen, concentrated in early summer. Unlike Braddock’s command, which had enjoyed no such safety net, if by some mischance Forbes’s army met with a check in the wilderness it would have fall-back positions within reach, so preventing a local defeat from escalating into a headlong rout. Somewhat ironically, as Forbes himself acknowledged, this “protected advance” strategy was taken directly from a recent military manual, published in 1754 by a French officer, Lancelot, Comte Turpin de Crissé.15
Like Forbes, with whom he worked well, Bouquet was an unusually enlightened soldier, schooled in the traditions of European warfare but also keen to adapt to American conditions. When Colonels Washington and Byrd each proposed the radical step of dressing their men “after the Indian fashion” for the coming campaign, both the general and his second in command greeted their initiative with enthusiasm. As so few genuine Indians now remained with the army, white men equipped like “savages” could prove useful as scouts, Forbes told Bouquet, “for as you justly observe, the shadow may often be taken for the reality, and I must confess in this country, we must comply and learn the art of war, from enemy Indians or anything [sic] else who have seen the country and war carried on in it.”16
Washington’s readiness to field an entire regiment dressed like tribal warriors, swapping their regulation coats, breeches, and spatter-dashes for “Indian leggings,” shirts, blankets, and even “breech-clouts” (loincloths), is intriguing, particularly given his previous insistence upon high standards of regimental dress and his personal penchant for fine clothing. That the same man who in 1754 had naïvely assumed that blood-red uniforms would impress Indians could now adopt such informal “Indian dress” for officers and men alike also reveals the impact of frontier warfare upon Washington’s evolution as a soldier; by 1758, hard reality had supplanted romantic fancy. As Washington explained to Bouquet that July, “proceeding as light as any Indian in the woods” was “an unbecoming dress I confess for an officer, but convenience rather than show I think should be consulted.”
When 200 of Washington’s men arrived at Raystown under the veteran Major Lewis, all decked out Indian-fashion, Bouquet was delighted. He thanked Washington for “this extraordinary dispatch,” whose “dress should be our pattern on this expedition.”
As Bouquet prepared to march his troops across the forbidding, forested Allegheny Mountains, he was not simply concerned with appearances. During the first weeks of August, on the fields outside Raystown camp, he drilled his regulars and provincials in tactics intended to repel any attack upon his line of march in the woods. One unusually observant eyewitness, the Reverend Thomas Barton, noted that Bouquet arrayed his troops in four parallel columns, each of two men abreast and separated by about fifty yards. After marching for some distance in this formation, the troops shook out into one long, two-deep line, capable of keeping up “an incessant fire.” This fusillade was followed by “a sham pursuit with shrieks and halloos in the Indian way” before the line rallied and reformed. As Bouquet informed Forbes, such “a very long front” would stymie the standard French and Indian tactics, which invariably sought to outflank and surround the enemy.17
Washington was initially ordered to concentrate his men at Fort Cumberland and then start building a road northward to connect with Raystown. Because of the supply and transport problems that dogged the campaign, it was only in late June that Washington could begin his advance to Wills Creek, which he reached on July 3 with the remaining five companies of his own regiment. Colonel Byrd arrived four days later with eight companies of the 2nd Virginia Regiment and about fifty Indians he had brought from the Carolinas. Washington now contemplated surroundings that were familiar, if scarcely auspicious: it was from Wills Creek that he had embarked upon his fruitless diplomatic mission in 1753; from there that he had set off on two ill-fated attempts to seize the Forks of the Ohio in 1754 and 1755; and the rickety stockades of Fort Cumberland had often provoked controversy during the frustrating years of command since then.
As Washington awaited further orders, Forbes dropped what proved to be a bombshell for the Virginians. Acting on the advice of his engineers and of his cousin James Glen, the former lieutenant governor of South Carolina, the general announced that he had now changed his mind about the army’s route to Fort Duquesne. Instead of doglegging down from Raystown to Fort Cumberland and then following the old Braddock Road, it would push directly westward across the Alleghenies to the Forks of the Ohio. Explaining his reasoning to William Pitt, Forbes emphasized that this would shorten his route, and “labor of cutting the road, [by] about 40 miles.” Indeed, using Braddock’s Road would save little work, as in the three years since it was first cut it had become swamped by the returning forest.18
Washington, Byrd and their fellow Virginians were aghast at this unexpected, last-minute change of plan. More than disinterested military factors lay behind their response. Ever the proud Virginian, Washington was outraged that his own colony now looked set to lose the monopoly of what would likely become the key postwar artery to the unexploited west, giving access to those rich and tempting lands that his expert surveyor’s eye had assessed when he first penetrated the Ohio Country in 1753. The fact that the profits would be reaped by the Old Dominion’s archrival Pennsylvania only salted the wound.
In coming weeks, Washington worked assiduously to convince Bouquet, and through him Forbes, that Braddock’s Road remained the best route forward. The resulting rift between Washington and his commanders dealt a damaging blow to his reputation as a trustworthy officer worthy of the king’s commission, and he had no one but himself to blame.
Although Washington lost no opportunity to champion the old road and disparage the new, for many weeks Bouquet refused to question his motives for doing so. Washington’s track record as a brave, selfless officer gave no reason to suspect that he was acting for anything other than the good of His Majesty’s service. Although he had been granted leave to travel to Winchester, where he was standing to represent Frederick County in the Assembly elections, Washington did not take it. This decision was influenced by rumors that “a body of light troops” would soon be pushed forward; keen as ever for a chance to pursue his quest for military glory, Washington lobbied Bouquet to employ both himself and his regiment.19
Indeed, on July 24 —the very same day that Washington topped the Winchester poll, bagging 309 of the 397 votes cast—Bouquet assured him that Forbes had mentioned several times how much he depended upon him and his Virginians and would lose no opportunity to exploit his experience and “knowledge of the country.” Two days later, Bouquet informed Forbes of his confidence that Colonel Washington was “animated by a sincere zeal to contribute to the success of this expedition, and ready to march from whatever direction you may determine with the same eagerness.” On the day after that, Bouquet wrote to Washington again, not doubting that the Virginian was “above all the influences of prejudices and ready to go heartily where reason and judgment shall direct.” In an effort to clarify matters, “so that we all center in one and the same opinion,” Bouquet proposed that he and Washington should meet midway between Fort Cumberland and Raystown on July 29. During their discussion, however, the true reasons for Washington’s implacable hostility toward the new road soon became all too clear to the Swiss veteran. As he wearily told Forbes, “Most of these gentlemen do not know the difference between a party and an army, and find everything easy which agrees with their ideas, jumping over all difficulties.”20
Any lingering doubt in the matter was removed by a letter that Washington soon after wrote to an old friend from the Braddock campaign, Forbes’s aide-de-camp, Major Francis Halkett of the 44th Foot. This was an unsubtle attempt to use Halkett—a worthy, if not especially bright staff officer—to sway Forbes against the Raystown route. “If Colonel Bouquet succeeds in this point with the General,” Washington warned Halkett, “all is lost! All is lost by Heavens!” There would be no victors’ laurels to be gathered; instead, the delays involved in straying off the “beaten path” and negotiating a succession of daunting mountains would scupper the entire campaign.21
This gambit was all the more reprehensible because on that very same day, August 2, Washington sent Bouquet a minutely detailed recapitulation of his case in favor of Braddock’s Road, which concluded with a solemn declaration that all was proposed for the best reasons, without “any private interest, or sinister views.” But by now, even the tolerant Forbes had reached the limits of his patience. On August 9, apparently after stumbling across Washington’s melodramatic note to the hapless Halkett, he wrote to Bouquet: “By a very unguarded letter of Colonel Washington, that accidentally fell into my hands, I am now at the bottom, of their [the Virginians’] scheme against this new road, a scheme that I think was a shame for any officer to be concerned in.” Two days later, Forbes informed the commander in chief, Major General Abercromby, that Washington was the “leader and adviser” of the Virginians’ “foolish suggestions.” This was hardly the kind of notice at British Army headquarters that Washington wanted.22
Not surprisingly, Washington’s intrigues undermined Forbes’s faith in him as an officer and cost him much of the credit he had accumulated as the expedition’s expert on frontier warfare. In early September, when Forbes believed the time was right to march the remaining Virginians from Fort Cumberland to join the main army at Raystown camp, he mentioned to Bouquet that he “would consult Colonel Washington, although perhaps not follow his advice, as his behavior about the roads, was no ways like a soldier.”23
In fact, Washington’s “behavior” was even worse than his disappointed commanders believed. A few days earlier, he had sent a letter to his staunch friend John Robinson, the speaker of Virginia’s House of Burgesses, which painted the campaign in the most pessimistic light. All hopes of winning glory were gone, he predicted, and only a miracle could produce “a happy issue.” In Washington’s opinion, the campaign’s “miscarriage” resulted from the conduct of its leaders, who were “dupes,” or perhaps “something worse,” to “Pennsylvanian artifice.” Rather than let such slights to Virginia pass unchallenged, he added, a “full representation of the matter” should go before the king. Washington even volunteered to present this in person: “I think without vanity I could set the conduct of this expedition in its true colors, having taken some pains, perhaps more than any other, to dive into the bottom of it.” For good measure, Washington added a line lifted from a letter he had recently received from his former military secretary John Kirkpatrick bemoaning “the luckless fate of poor Virginia to fall a victim to the views of her crafty neighbors.”24
The wrangling over the rival roads is significant, and not simply for what it reveals of the young Washington’s stubbornness. For all his apparent desire to enter the imperial establishment by gaining a regular army commission and the approval of British commanders, at heart Washington remained a Virginian. His overriding loyalty to the colony of his birth epitomizes the reluctance of British North America’s inhabitants to abandon local allegiances for the greater good. Little wonder that London-based commentators in the 1750s still used the “mother-child” metaphor to characterize the relationship between Britain and her colonies: all too often, from Whitehall’s perspective, the colonists behaved like unruly offspring—selfish, jealous, and addicted to bickering among themselves. It seemed incredible that they could ever share a broader identity as Americans and work together.
During the late summer of 1758, Brigadier General Forbes had enough on his plate without having to adjudicate colonial rivalries. His own woes were exacerbated by troubling news from the north: although Major General Jeffery Amherst’s army had clawed itself ashore on Cape Breton and commenced besieging the fortress of Louisbourg, the great force of redcoats and provincials led up the Hudson Valley by the commander in chief, James Abercromby, had been decisively defeated. On July 8, his frontal assault upon the French lines at Ticonderoga was bloodily repulsed; that disaster compounded another, two days earlier, when Abercromby’s second in command, Brigadier General George Augustus Howe, was killed in a skirmish after landing at the head of Lake George. During his short time in America, the dashing Lord Howe, who was the eldest of three brothers destined to make a mark upon the continent’s history, had achieved unprecedented popularity among the colonial population. Courteous and debonair, yet fearless, tough, and practical, Howe had personified the qualities of gentleman warrior that Washington himself held so dear. His untimely death, which robbed the Anglo-American cause of its most promising leader, was widely seen as a catastrophe, with Washington among the many who sincerely lamented “the loss of that brave and active nobleman.”25
Despite these bleak tidings from the New York frontier and for all the frustrating setbacks that jinxed his own campaign—chronic supply problems, the “desertion” of his Indian allies, and, not least, his deplorable health—Forbes remained optimistic. The implacable Scot had planted other plans, and his army’s methodical advance allowed them time to mature. In contrast to Braddock, who had given little weight to Indian diplomacy, Forbes appreciated that tribal support was crucial to the campaign’s outcome. This was not simply cynical politicking. Sympathetic to the Ohio Indians’ perspective, Forbes analyzed the underlying reasons for their disaffection. In a dispatch to Pitt, he identified problems destined to sour relations between whites and Indians long after the colonists had won their independence from Britain and the frontier had shifted far to the west. Forbes blamed the current pro-French disposition of the Shawnees and Delawares upon the abuses of “the saddest of mortals called Indian traders,” and the “madness” of thrusting settlements into the Indians’ hunting grounds.26
Forbes’s hopes of luring these hostile nations to a peace conference now rested largely upon unlikely allies. The Quaker Israel Pemberton, who led the Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures, had already given credence to that long-winded title by establishing contact with the Ohio tribes. Pemberton’s initiative was bolstered by the courage and persuasiveness of a Moravian missionary, Christian Frederick Post. He embarked upon a hazardous journey among the Delawares, bearing invitations from Forbes and Governor William Denny of Pennsylvania for them to return to their former lands along Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River. Braving appalling dangers, the tenacious Post proved remarkably successful. While the French could only look on in vexation, he coaxed their key Indian allies into giving him a hearing, heeding his words of reconciliation, and agreeing to attend a great conference scheduled to be held at Easton, Pennsylvania, in October. With an increasingly realistic prospect of unpicking New France’s Indian alliance network on the Ohio, Forbes was no longer so anxious to forge ahead. As he put it in a cryptic observation to Bouquet on August 9, “As we are now so late, we are yet too soon. This is a parable that I shall soon explain.”27
Although most of the Cherokees had long since quit Forbes’s army, clashing ominously with the frontier folk of northwest Virginia as they rambled home, his force retained the services of a small, but significant, contingent of warriors from other southern tribes. In late August about fifty Indians—Catawbas, Tuscaroras, and Nottoways—arrived at Raystown. As the Reverend Barton reported, these warriors craved vengeance: for the death of their English “brothers” under Braddock, whose bones they had seen scattered at the Monongahela, and for the Catawba chief Captain Bullen, freshly slain in an ambush near Fort Cumberland. As Washington informed Bouquet, the loss of Captain Bullen and another warrior killed alongside him, Captain French, was a heavy blow, as they “were very remarkable for their bravery, and attachment to our interest.” Both were buried with military honors.28
As the summer dragged on and Washington’s command at Fort Cumberland awaited orders to advance, other soldiers of the 1st Virginia Regiment encountered the enemy at closer quarters. One of them, Michael Scully, had a narrow escape after he was bushwhacked by Indians as he rounded up horses outside Raystown camp. As Adam Stephen reported to Washington, Scully—an Irishman and a former butcher—was confronted by two warriors who aimed their guns at him; luckily, the weather was wet and their powder damp, and both missed fire. One of the Indians ran forward wielding his tomahawk, but Scully shot him down when he was just four paces away. Scully felled another Indian with the butt of his musket but was instantly seized by a third, who wounded him twice in the head with a sword and slashed him across the face with his scalping knife. That Indian tried to take the Irishman’s scalp, but “Scully being very strong” threw him down on top of the second Indian, “gave him a stroke with his gun” for good measure, then, imagining more of the enemy were coming up, ran into camp covered in wounds. For a forty-five-year-old described in the muster roll of Major Lewis’s company as having “very large though clumsy limbs,” it was an impressive performance. Equally noteworthy is Stephen’s assumption that his colonel would know who Scully was; it testifies to Washington’s keen interest in his men, and the importance of such paternalism for his regiment’s fighting spirit.29
Scully’s determined stand and his arrival in camp “in a bloody condition” was duly reported by Colonel Bouquet in a dispatch to Forbes and also featured in the Reverend Barton’s diary, which noted anything of unusual interest.30 Barton was curious to see Fort Cumberland and arrived there on the evening of September 6 to find Washington and Lieutenant Colonel George Mercer of the 2nd Virginia Regiment encamped with 850 of their men. Both officers treated Barton and his companions to “a very polite reception, and generous, hospitable, entertainment.” On the morning of Sunday, September, 10, Barton preached a sermon, “by desire of Colonel Washington from Nehemiah 4-14.”31 Washington’s choice of text is perhaps significant and, given the ongoing row over the roads, suggestive of his prevailing Virginian, rather than broader British, loyalties:
And I looked, and rose up, and said unto the nobles, and to the rulers, and to the rest of the people, Be not ye afraid of them: remember the Lord, which is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, and your houses.
The next day, Washington unexpectedly received a “short, but very agreeable” letter that immediately pushed the fortunes of the Old Dominion and Fort Duquesne into the background. Dated September 1, it was from Sally Fairfax. Before the start of the campaign, and with a view to his impending marriage to Martha Custis, Washington had ordered an extensive remodeling of Mount Vernon. When George William Fairfax wrote to update Washington on the progress of the renovations, his wife Sally apparently took the opportunity to tease her old admirer about his brisk courtship; as Washington phrased it—in words that may repeat Sally’s—“the animating prospect of possessing Mrs. Custis.”
As usual, Sally’s note has vanished, but she saved Washington’s reply.32 It makes for revealing reading. Written as Washington was once again poised to lead his men into danger, it indicates that, whatever else he had pledged to Martha Custis and for all the painting and plastering at Mount Vernon, his heart still belonged to Sally Fairfax. Washington professed himself a “votary to Love,” but the object of his affections was not his intended bride. His words leave no doubt of that:
I acknowledge that a lady is in the case—and further I confess, that this lady is known to you. Yes Madam, as well as she is to one, who is too sensible of her charms to deny the power, whose influence he feels and must ever submit to. I feel the force of her amiable beauties in the recollection of a thousand tender passages that I could wish to obliterate, ’til I am bid to revive them. . . . You have drawn me my dear Madam, or rather have I drawn myself, into an honest confession of a simple fact. Misconstrue not my meaning—’tis obvious—doubt it not, nor expose it.
In her letter, Sally had declared that she was happy, leading Washington to make a curious confession for a man about to marry: “I wish I was happy also.”
The conclusion that Sally Fairfax, rather than Martha Custis, remained the real object of Washington’s affections in the summer of 1758 is confirmed by his next letter to her.33 This was written in response to Sally’s reply, again missing, to his latest testament of love. Washington opened with a telling question: “Do we still misunderstand the true meaning of each other’s letters? I think it must appear so, though I would feign hope the contrary as I cannot speak plainer without—but I’ll say no more, and leave you to guess the rest.”
But what Washington went on to say, after updating Sally with news of Forbes’s campaign, was plain enough to anyone remotely familiar with Joseph Addison’s play Cato, a tragedy first performed in London in 1713, and especially admired in British North America. Rather than participating in the campaign against Fort Duquesne, Washington wrote, he would consider his time “more agreeable spent believe me, in playing a part in Cato . . . and myself doubly happy in being the Juba to such a Marcia as you must make.” As Marcia was Cato’s daughter, and Juba the Numidian prince obliged to hide his love for her, the message was obvious.
The fortnight that separated Washington’s two impassioned letters to Sally Fairfax must have found him in emotional turmoil; that same period proved a dramatic watershed for Forbes’s campaign. During August the controversial road from Raystown had been pushed across the daunting barriers of Allegheny Mountain and Laurel Hill; by September 1, an advance guard of 1,500 men was constructing the next fortified depot on Loyalhanna Creek, fifty miles from Fort Duquesne.
Given the rugged terrain, this was steady progress; but it was too slow for some. Riding back into Raystown on the evening of September 10, the Reverend Barton encountered a depressing atmosphere: “The season is far advanced,” he noted. “The leaves begin to fall, the forage to wither, and cold nights to approach. All these circumstances concur to damp our spirits, and make us uneasy.” It required the physical presence of General Forbes to dispel the gloom. He finally arrived in camp on September 15, escorted by dashing light horsemen and stolid Highlanders. Forbes was, as Barton reported, “in a low state,” so ill that he was slung in a contraption resembling a horse-borne sedan chair. Yet the appearance of the frail, sickly Scot worked wonders on his jaded army: he smiled at the crowds who turned out to greet him, and the troops seemed “inspired with fresh spirits,” with every face now cheerful.34
Washington lost no time in writing to Forbes, passing on good wishes for his recovery; the general appreciated the sentiment, “being quite as feeble now as a child almost.” For all his pain, Forbes had not lost his dark sense of humor: hearing that Colonel Byrd was also sick, he advised him to come to Raystown, “where I should hope to prove a better physician than he will probably meet with at Fort Cumberland.” Byrd, another victim of dysentery, was too weak to move, but Washington visited the general, arriving in camp on the evening of September 16, accompanied by clattering troopers of Captain Stewart’s light horse. He returned to Fort Cumberland next day with orders to march the Virginians into camp.
On September 21, Washington, Byrd, and the rest of their men finally joined Forbes’s army. They found the general in somber mood, and with good reason: on the previous evening he had received disheartening news from Loyalhanna. In a rare lapse of judgment, Bouquet, the advance guard commander, had approved a proposal from the ambitious Major James Grant of Montgomery’s Highlanders to lead a reconnaissance in force against Fort Duquesne. Besides reconnoitering that post, there was talk of retaliating against the “Indian rabble” that had launched irritating raids on Loyalhanna. Beyond that, Grant’s mission was vague: as Bouquet told Forbes, the major’s actions were to be “guided by the circumstances.”35
Major Grant had left Loyalhanna on September 9 at the head of a picked detachment of about 800 regulars and provincials, including more than 150 men from Washington’s 1st Virginia Regiment under Major Lewis and all the available Indians. Pausing at a forward entrenchment established by Washington’s old antagonist John Dagworthy, now a lieutenant colonel, by the evening of September 13, Grant’s troops were within striking distance of their objective. Present among the Virginians was young Ensign Thomas Gist, the son of Washington’s wilderness guide Christopher Gist. He remembered that they had been ordered to wear their white shirts uppermost, so that they could easily identify each other in the dark. That ploy followed standard European practice for nighttime assaults, which were accordingly known as “camisards”; but now it had another unexpected and disconcerting effect. As they marched silently down toward the fort, each holding onto his leader’s shirttail, the moonlight glittered on their musket barrels and played upon the pale, flapping shirts “in a movement” that, as Gist recalled, “made some of the soldiers observe that we looked more like ghosts.”36
By sunrise on September 14, Major Grant had penetrated close to his target without detection but was flummoxed about what to do next. After burning some of the fort’s outbuildings and apparently with the object of rallying his own scattered detachments, he proceeded to rouse the garrison and its tribal allies by ordering his drummers to beat and his bagpipers to play. During the bush fight that followed, Grant’s divided command was soundly defeated and scattered in confusion. A stubborn stand by Captain Thomas Bullitt and fifty of his Virginians, who had been posted to guard the baggage horses and provisions, gave the survivors a chance to get away. Finally overwhelmed, Bullitt and the last of his men were forced into the Ohio River; the captain escaped, but many others drowned. The portly Grant, who like Forbes was a veteran of the last war in Flanders and one of his most experienced subordinates, refused to flee, declaring “his heart was broken and he could not survive the loss of that day.” He was captured sitting despondently on a log.37
As a senior officer, Major Grant received scrupulously courteous treatment from his captors, reflecting the established international code of conduct between gentlemen. Other, less exalted prisoners were not so lucky. Thomas Gist, who was shot across the forehead and through the right hand before being captured by a Wyandot—or Huron—warrior, saw comrades forced to run from the edge of the woods to the fort. These “poor unhappy fellows” were pursued by Indians and met by others from the fort wielding tomahawks, knives, swords, and clubs. Screaming and yelling, the warriors “beat and drove” their victims “from one side of the cleared ground to the other, till the unhappy men could not stand; then they were tomahawked, scalped, and in short was [sic] massacred in the most barbarous manner that can be imagined.”
In hellish scenes that recalled those enacted in the wake of Braddock’s defeat three years earlier, a handful of prisoners were burned alive. To his “unspeakable grief and terror,” Robert Kirkwood of Montgomery’s Highlanders, who had been captured by Shawnees after being lamed by a blast of buckshot, witnessed five captives “burned in the most cruel manner.” Kirkwood’s account is corroborated by that of a twelve-year-old boy who escaped from Fort Duquesne on December 2 after two years of captivity. He had seen “a prodigious quantity of wood” carried into the fort, which was used to burn “five of the prisoners they took at Major Grant’s Defeat, on the Parade.”38
Grant’s raid was a bloody outing for Washington’s regiment. In a letter to his friend and neighbor George William Fairfax—written on the very same day that he pledged undying love for Sally—Washington described it as “a heavy stroke.” On the official casualty returns, of the 174 Virginians who participated, no fewer than 68 were marked down as killed or missing, presumed dead. It was widely conceded that the Virginians had fought bravely, and, although Washington played no part in the action, he took great pride in his men’s sterling performance. “It is with infinite pleasure,” he wrote to Fairfax, “I tell you that the Virginians, officers and men, distinguished themselves in the most eminent manner.” General Forbes himself had complimented Washington publicly on his men’s good behavior; combat had also forged bonds of comradeship between the Virginians and Highlanders, who were “become one people, shaking each other by the hand wherever they meet.”39
In his letters home, Washington neglected to mention that Forbes had also taken the opportunity to castigate both him and Byrd for their blatantly partisan stance over the rival roads. Already exasperated by tidings of Grant’s debacle, the general’s temper was not improved when he learned of a letter penned by Lieutenant Colonel Stephen reporting opinion that the road from Loyalhanna to the Ohio was “now impracticable.” Quite why Stephen had written such a thing Forbes was at a loss to know, but he assured Bouquet that Washington and Byrd would prefer it to be “true than otherways, seeing the other road (their favorite scheme) was not followed out.” In confronting the colonels, Forbes had not minced his words:
I told them plainly that, whatever they thought . . . in our prosecuting the present road, we had proceeded from the best intelligence that could be got for the good and convenience of the army, without any views to oblige one province or another; and added that those two gentlemen were the only people that I had met with who had showed their weakness in their attachment to the province they belong to, by declaring so publicly in favor of one road without their knowing anything of the other.
Indeed, for all Washington’s mutterings, Forbes had never heard a Pennsylvanian say a word, good or bad, about the road. As for himself—and for Bouquet, too—the “good of the service” was all that mattered, with the jealousies and suspicions of the provinces not worth “one single twopence.”40
Despite this tongue-lashing, Washington was unrepentant and remained convinced that Forbes had taken the wrong route. Writing to Virginia’s new lieutenant governor, Francis Fauquier, on September 25, he reported, “Our affairs in general appear with a greater gloom than ever.” Washington could see no prospect of opening up the rest of the new road that campaign, and therefore no “favorable issue to the expedition.” 41
Not everyone shared such pessimism. Even the jarring blow of Grant’s defeat failed to discourage the resilient Forbes for long; as anticipated, the fortified camp at Loyalhanna minimized the effects, allowing the advance guard to hold its ground. Back at the sprawling Raystown complex, where the bulk of the army now waited to move forward, camp life resumed its familiar routines of drill and discipline. Amid all the continuing delays, boredom and homesickness bred desertion. At a general court-martial held on September 24, eight provincials were found guilty of quitting their units. Serving alongside regulars, they were subject to the full force of military law: three were sentenced to floggings ranging from five hundred to nine hundred lashes; the others were to be shot. Forbes approved the punishments, but of those marked down for death, four were reprieved after their officers interceded for them: those spared included John Hanna, a red-headed Irishman from the 1st Virginia Regiment, on whose behalf Washington himself had spoken up. John Doyle of the Pennsylvania Regiment would provide an example for the rest.42
On September 26, the Reverend Barton walked with Doyle to the place of execution. In eighteenth-century armies, punishment functioned as a grim, instructional theater. Doyle gave a bravura performance. As Barton reported with approval, he “behaved with uncommon resolution; exhorted his brother-soldiers to take example by his misfortunes; to live sober lives; to beware of bad company; to shun pretended friends, and loose wicked companions.” Above all, he implored them never to desert. When he saw the six-strong firing squad, Doyle knelt down and stripped off his coat, inviting them to come close and aim for his heart. He shunned the proffered blindfold but looked his executioners, “who advanced so near that the muzzles of their guns were within a foot of his body,” full in the eye. Here the drama departed from the script. At a signal from the sergeant major the executioners fired, but aimed so low that Doyle’s “bowels fell out, his shirt and breeches were all on fire, and he tumbled upon his side, raised one arm 2 or 3 times, and soon expired.” It was a “shocking spectacle” to all, and a “striking example” for Doyle’s fellow soldiers—so shocking and striking, in fact, that Barton ended his journal abruptly at that precise point.43
Doyle’s execution was intended to discourage desertion as the army prepared to resume its lumbering progress. In orders issued two days later, Forbes acknowledged that his men had already “gone through a great deal of fatigue,” but as “the advance posts of the army [were] almost at the enemy’s nose,” he placed his confidence in their “alacrity and steadiness in carrying on the rest of the service that we may show our enemies the danger of rousing Britons fired and animated with love of their King and Country.”44
Despite the primacy of his Virginian interests, Washington still nurtured some flicker of the broader British patriotism that Forbes sought to kindle. When the general appealed for advice on formations to be adopted when the army made the last lunge for its objective, Washington prepared a detailed response, giving his thoughts “on a line of march through a country covered with wood, and how [it] may be formed, in an instant, into an order of battle.” His accompanying drawings, executed with all the precise penmanship of a trained surveyor, proposed a formation that maximized security on the march, while retaining enough flexibility to respond swiftly to attack. The scheme, which was accompanied by two meticulously detailed plans, was calculated for a short forced march, taking along field artillery but no cumbersome wagons. It envisaged a 4,000-strong force, spearheaded by a vanguard of 1,000 picked men organized in three divisions, followed by two brigades and a rear guard. On the march, the column would be covered by small flanking parties. If the enemy attacked from the front, some 600 men would screen the flanks while the elite vanguard fanned out to the right and left, taking cover behind trees and seeking to execute an aggressive pincer movement. Washington was confident that the enemy would find this “different from any thing they have ever yet experienced from us.” Elements of the “order of battle,” notably the reliance upon a long, thin line to outflank and encircle the enemy, reflected tactics that the innovative Bouquet had already tested at Raystown, although it’s unclear whether he and Washington collaborated on them.45
The prospects for putting such theories to the test improved on October 14, when Washington received orders to march his Virginians to reinforce Bouquet. This move was prompted by news of a determined French descent upon Loyalhanna two days before. Aiming to capitalize on Grant’s defeat and deliver a blow capable of halting Forbes’s advance until the spring, the commander at Fort Duquesne, Captain François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery, sent out a raiding party of 600 French and Indians under Captain Charles Philippe Aubry. They surprised the camp while Bouquet was away searching for an easier route over Laurel Hill; in his absence, the defense was orchestrated by the Pennsylvanian Colonel James Burd. Despite outnumbering their assailants, Burd’s men got the worst of a three-hour-long fight and were forced back behind the camp’s stout stockades. They eventually rebuffed the assault, thanks to the firepower of their artillery, but nonetheless sustained heavier casualties than the raiders and lost their priceless draught horses. Bouquet and Forbes were both deeply troubled by an episode in which the enemy showed such apparent contempt for the odds against them.46
By October 23, Washington and his men had covered the fifty miles to Loyalhanna, a post soon renamed Fort Ligonier in honor of the British Army’s commander in chief and Forbes’s patron, Sir John Ligonier. This “sudden” march from Raystown gave Washington the opportunity of assessing the controversial connecting road for himself, and the experience only confirmed his dire predictions: “I can truly say that it is indescribably bad,” he wrote to Governor Fauquier. Indeed, only the providential discovery of an alternative pass over Laurel Hill had enabled the wheeled transport to get through. General Forbes and his escort caught up on November 2. As Washington now recognized, with the bulk of the army pushed forward to Loyalhanna, the campaign’s crisis was fast approaching; on November 5, he conceded to Fauquier that the time for harping upon difficulties was now past.47
The very next day, however, Washington was casting doubts on the viability of any further advance. That evening, following an interrupted conversation with Bouquet, he sent him his “crude thoughts” on that head. Washington’s letter highlighted the risks involved in moving against Fort Duquesne with no guarantee of adequate supplies and of the potentially disastrous consequences of a clash in the woods. A renewed offensive would consume provisions needed to garrison Loyalhanna, he argued, perhaps leading to the abandonment of that post and its artillery. As for a battle, even if the enemy was routed, recent experience suggested that the Anglo-Americans’ own losses would be “perhaps triple.” If it was certain that the enemy’s defeat would prompt an immediate evacuation of their fort, or if adequate supplies could be stockpiled, then they shouldn’t hesitate to advance—“but one or the other of these we ought to be assured of,” Washington warned.48
Washington’s bleak analysis articulated the concerns of other senior officers. On Saturday, November 11, Forbes summoned a council of war including Bouquet, St. Clair, and all his colonels. The case against a further advance, which included those reasons already emphasized by Washington, carried the day. The council concluded: “The risks being so obviously greater than the advantages, there is no doubt as to the sole course that prudence dictates.”49
Forbes’s campaign seemed set to end ignominiously at Loyalhanna after all. But a chance event the next day, November 12, changed everything. Seeking to repeat their success of a month before, the French at the Forks sent a strong party to reconnoiter Forbes’s camp and rustle his livestock. The general countered with a force of 500 men, including Washington and his Virginians. According to a report published soon after in the Pennsylvania Gazette, Washington “fell in with a number of the enemy” about three miles from Loyalhanna, attacked them, and took three prisoners—“an Indian man and woman, and one Johnson, an Englishman (who, it is said, was carried off by the Indians some time ago from Lancaster County).” Hearing the firing, Lieutenant Colonel Mercer went to Washington’s aid. Approaching at dusk, and seeing the two captured Indians, Mercer’s men mistook their fellow Virginians for the enemy; Washington’s made the same mistake, upon which “unhappily a few shot were exchanged.” Recounting this episode some thirty years later, Washington remembered things rather differently, being adamant that he had gone to help Mercer. In Washington’s recollection, the encounter was also far deadlier and more traumatic than the cursory newspaper coverage suggested; indeed, it had placed his life “in as much jeopardy as it had ever been before or since.” The uncontrolled spasm of “friendly fire” was checked only by Washington’s personal intervention. Using his sword to knock up the leveled muskets, he “never was in more imminent danger by being between two fires.” Captain Bullitt, the hero of Grant’s Defeat, later claimed that he stopped the firefight, which had resulted from Colonel Washington’s mistake. Whatever the cause, Washington did not exaggerate the risks: Forbes reported two officers and almost forty men killed or missing.50
The capture of the renegade Johnson offered compensation. In exchange for his life, he gave vital intelligence, revealing that Fort Duquesne was virtually bereft of Indian support. There were several reasons for this swift erosion of tribal manpower. Glutted with glory and plunder won in their destruction of Major Grant’s command, western warriors from the Great Lakes had promptly left for their distant villages, taking their captives with them; these included young Ensign Gist, who set out with his Wyandot captors on 15 September, loaded with “about fifty pound of plunder . . . got chiefly from the Highlanders”; the party only reached their village near Detroit after trekking and paddling for almost a month.51
In addition, the Indian conference at Easton, engineered by the dedicated Pemberton and Post and attended by representatives of the Six Nations, the Delawares and Shawnees, had convinced the wavering Ohio tribes that their best interests now lay with the British, not the French. Last, but not least, the capture of Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario by a force detached from Abercromby’s mauled Lake George army in August under Colonel John Bradstreet shut off the supply of Indian trade goods from Canada via the St. Lawrence River; France’s influence among the tribes had always hinged more upon economic reality than sentimental attachment, so such shortfalls in everything from vermilion face paint to gunpowder mattered. Washington’s New York friend Joseph Chew reported this “glorious stroke” while nursing a hangover, “having sat up late last night and finished several bottles to the health of Colonel Bradstreet and his army.”52 Taken together, these three factors stripped Captain Lignery of Indian support. Armed with this intelligence, instead of digging in at Loyalhanna for the winter, Forbes resolved to push on and seize his objective.
The final advance was made by 2,500 “picked men,” accompanied by just “a light-train of artillery” and unencumbered with baggage or even tents. This select force was divided into three brigades. Washington, who had been forgiven his earlier subterfuge, commanded the 3rd Brigade. It was composed of his own 1st Virginia Regiment, plus artificers, North Carolinians, Marylanders, and “Lower County” troops from Delaware, some 720 in all. Although nominated the 3rd Brigade, Washington’s actually formed the army’s 1st Division. With Bouquet and Colonel Montgomery commanding the other two brigades, Washington was the only provincial officer to be given such heavy responsibility: at long last, he was receiving the kind of recognition that he believed his efforts deserved.53
As Forbes’s army edged closer to its objective, so the threat of ambush increased. For the final fifty-mile phase of the advance, therefore, it was agreed that fortified camps should be established at far shorter intervals than before, just a few days’ march apart. Some 500 Pennsylvanians were sent on ahead of Washington’s brigade to construct the first secure base; this spearhead force was commanded by Colonel John Armstrong, an experienced frontier fighter renowned for leading a long-distance raid that had torched the Delaware town of Kittanning on the Allegheny River above Fort Duquesne in September 1756.
Equipped with felling axes, Washington’s brigade was to hack a rough road along the trail that Armstrong’s men had blazed. On November 15, in bone-chilling cold and steady rain, his artificers began to hew their way through the dripping forest. Driving their cattle with them, Washington’s men advanced some six miles before making camp on Chestnut Ridge. Reporting his progress to Forbes, even now Washington couldn’t resist reminding the general of the advantages of the old Braddock Road: it was “in the first place good, and in the next, fresh,” so offering the best communication between the “Middle Colonies” and Fort Duquesne should the army be fortunate enough to take it.54
Negotiating tough terrain in depressing, wintry weather, the army’s progress was painfully slow. Despite laboring “from light ’til light,” Washington’s exhausted brigade covered only another six miles before it was necessary to halt again. From his temporary camp on November 17, Washington sent Forbes a letter that provides further evidence of his strong paternalism toward the men of his regiment. Sergeant William Grant had been confined at Loyalhanna on a charge of behaving insolently toward two officers of the 2nd Pennsylvania Regiment. The sergeant was tried by a general court-martial, but, as the sentence was not known when the 1st Virginia Regiment marched out, Washington hoped that Forbes would look into the matter “and forward him if it is found consistent . . . as he is a very fine fellow, and as desirous of coming on as I am to have him do so.”55 Given his own attitude toward Pennsylvanians, Washington may have approved of his sergeant’s response when Ensign Edward Biddle and Lieutenant Jacob Kearns interfered while he was arguing with a sutler over a bill for rum, threatening to send him “to the Devil that instant”: Grant had presented his musket at the ensign and then threatened to blow the lieutenant’s brains out. Given the provocation, and as the night was too dark for Grant to identify the pair as officers, he was acquitted.56
By late morning on November 18, Washington’s men had reached the base already established by Armstrong, known as “New Camp.” While his brigade halted to slaughter bullocks and dress their rations, axmen started work to clear the next stage of the route. Washington moved on, now taking the lead from Armstrong, who stayed behind to hold the camp with his Pennsylvanians. A rapid march covering ten to twelve miles brought Washington to Turtle Creek. There, during November 20, he built a second fortification, “Washington’s Camp.” Besides the men of his own brigade, Washington now commanded elements of the other two, about 1,500 men altogether—his largest field command prior to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.
While Montgomery’s brigade cut the road connecting the first two camps, Washington’s worked to clear the path to the third and final base. Known as “Bouquet’s Camp” and some ten miles from Fort Duquesne, it would provide the jumping-off point for the assault. By November 23, Forbes and all three of his brigades were assembled there. Now so close to his prize, Forbes had no intention of stumbling into the kind of chance encounter that had wrecked Braddock’s campaign. Next day he gave orders for his army’s final march, employing a formation intended to allow a swift and effective response to attack. Despite claims by historians that this followed the plans recently drawn up by Washington, it clearly owed more to the drills devised and practiced by Bouquet back at Raystown camp; indeed, weeks after receiving Washington’s suggestions, Forbes was still undecided about the best formation to adopt and urged Bouquet to “have something cut and dry” to propose.57
Rather than marching one behind the other in the single column proposed by Washington, the three brigades were ordered to advance abreast, with each split into four parallel columns, like the prongs of a fork. By shortening their lines of march, these could rapidly deploy into an extensive firing line that the enemy would struggle to overlap. In addition, there were flanking parties of the “best gunmen,” while “Indians and light horse” probed in front and drums beat at the head of each column to avoid confusion; this exact formation is illustrated in a drawing among Forbes’s papers in the National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh. Paper plans were one thing, moving men through the dark and disorienting forest quite another: despite all the elaborate precautions, as one officer reported, when they moved forward, “it was a matter of vast difficulty to keep the narrow columns from intersecting.”58
In the event, Forbes’s brigades never faced the ultimate test of combat in the woods. Nor were his gunners obliged to bombard Fort Duquesne with shot and shell. Rather than stand their ground, the garrison demolished the fortifications, then withdrew to the north in hopes of returning to fight again when the odds were better. On November 24, as they shivered at Bouquet’s Camp, Forbes’s troops heard the thud of a distant explosion. That evening their Indian scouts reported a great pall of smoke hanging over the Forks; a few hours later they claimed that the French had gone after burning everything; light troops sent to investigate confirmed their reports.59
When Forbes and his army reached the Forks on the morning of November 25, 1758, they found charred and smoking ruins. It was a dismal scene, made ghastly by the unburied bodies of Major Grant’s men slain more than two months before, which still strewed the ground around for miles about, “so many monuments to French inhumanity.” They were given a decent burial, along with the skulls and bones of Braddock’s soldiers, killed in 1755 and left lying above ground ever since like some backwoods Golgotha.60
Forbes, who had joined the advance in his horse-borne litter and who was now sicker than ever, renamed the abandoned strongpoint Fort Pitt in honor of the minister who’d sent him there. For all its sense of anticlimax, the conquest marked the end of three years of warfare on the Virginian frontier and was widely recognized as a remarkable achievement. Reporting the destruction of that “terrible fort . . . that nest of pirates which has so long harbored the murderers and destructors of our poor people,” Henri Bouquet had no doubt where the credit lay: “After God the success of this expedition is entirely due to the General,” he wrote. Forbes had engineered the Treaty of Easton, which “knocked the French in the head”; he had secured “all his posts . . . giving nothing to chance”; and, not least, he had refused to yield “to the urging instances for taking Braddock’s Road, which would have been our destruction.” Washington was chief among those who had lobbied for that route, but he too acknowledged Forbes’s achievement. In a letter to Governor Fauquier, he paid tribute to the indefatigable Scot’s “great merit”; many years later he remembered his old commander as “a brave and good officer.”61
With winter fast closing in, it was resolved to install a garrison at Fort Pitt, including part of Washington’s long-suffering Virginia Regiment under Colonel Hugh Mercer of the Pennsylvanians; like Forbes and so many other soldiers fighting for the Ohio Country, Mercer was a Scot who had begun his career in medicine. Now a loyal subject of King George, he had once been a rebel in the Jacobite army of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Mercer had come to America in the wake of the Young Pretender’s bloody defeat at Culloden in 1746. Ten years later, he had distinguished himself as a captain of Pennsylvanian troops during Colonel Armstrong’s celebrated attack on Kittanning. A former insurgent, in time Hugh Mercer would become one again.62
Washington himself had no intention of wintering in the wilderness. The eradication of Fort Duquesne had restored peace to Virginia’s frontiers, “which was the principal inducement to his taking arms” in the first place. In addition, the ailments that plagued him during the previous autumn and winter had returned. His health, which “had been declining for many months . . . occasioned by an inveterate disorder in his bowels,” now grew so poor that he decided to resign his command, and this time in earnest.63
Before riding back to Virginia, Washington’s last regimental duty was to organize clothing and supplies for his men left behind at Fort Pitt. That done, the twenty-six-year-old formally resigned his colonel’s commission. On New Year’s Eve, the officers of the Virginia Regiment implored Washington to reconsider his decision and lead them on for another campaign that would surely bring the entire American war to a victorious conclusion. Their “humble address” testified to Washington’s popularity and to the esprit de corps he had instilled within his regiment. They expressed sadness at the “loss of such an excellent commander, such a sincere friend, and so affable a companion.” If anything, the loss to their “unhappy country” was even greater than their own: when it came to military experience, allied to “patriotism, courage and conduct,” Washington was irreplaceable and uniquely qualified to uphold “the military character of Virginia.”64
Washington was clearly touched by his officers’ sentiments. On January 10, 1759, he replied that their affectionate and public declaration of approval for his conduct in command of Virginia’s troops was “an honor that will constitute the greatest happiness of my life, and afford in my latest hours the most pleasing reflections.”65
But Washington did not intend to change his mind. Four days earlier he had married Martha Custis, turning his back on the military career that he’d always craved and had pursued during four hard, frustrating, and sometimes bloody years. Now a family man, Washington traded his dreams of martial distinction for the reality of peaceful domesticity as a gentleman planter. Writing from Mount Vernon some months later, he assured his longtime London correspondent, the merchant Richard Washington: “I have quit a military life, and shortly shall be fixed at this place with an agreeable partner.”66
In 1759, there was nothing to suggest that George Washington’s decision to exchange his sword for a plowshare would not be final.