CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Reckonings

Many changes followed upon the revival of English fortunes in 1758. James Abercromby, the least competent officer ever to serve as British commander in chief in America, was recalled to Britain and promoted to the rank of lieutenant general. Jeffery Amherst, having proven himself both competent and cautious, was named as the new commander in chief of His Majesty’s forces in North America. James Wolfe, the rash but lucky hero of Louisbourg, so disliked the prospect of serving under Amherst that he took leave to go back to London, where he used his reputation as a hero and every political string he could pull to gain himself an independent command in the coming year’s campaigns. John Bradstreet, arguably the sole military genius the war in America had produced, published an anonymous pamphlet extolling his role in the destruction of Fort Frontenac and excoriating Abercromby for failing to follow up on the victory by launching an expedition (with Bradstreet, of course, in command) to seize the remaining French forts on the Great Lakes. Promoted to colonel in reward for his success at Fort Frontenac, Bradstreet found he could not escape the post of deputy quartermaster general for the more glorious commands he coveted. Thus he remained at Albany, longing for the recognition and reward he feared would never be his, his health decaying under the combined stress of drink, thwarted ambition, and the unremitting demands of complex and burdensome duties.

Teedyuscung, who returned to the Wyoming Valley after the Treaty of Easton, never received the reservation that was supposed to compensate his people for the fraud of the Walking Purchase, because Sir William Johnson’s inquiry into that transaction (unsurprisingly) exonerated both the Penn family and the Iroquois of wrongdoing. He had always been a heavy drinker; now, despondent, he spiraled ever more steeply into alcoholism. In the spring of 1763 he would die at the hands of an arsonist who torched the house in which he slept. Not long thereafter large numbers of white settlers began to move into the valley, displacing the Indian population.

Israel Pemberton opened a store at Britain’s new post at the Forks of the Ohio, Fort Pitt, as soon as possible in the spring of 1759, in order to supply the region’s Indians with trade goods at fair prices. This was less a venture aimed at realizing profits than an aspect of his larger philanthropic concerns. He would watch with growing apprehension as native leaders, including Pisquetomen, grew more and more alienated by the surge of white settlers into the Ohio country, unrestrained by a British crown that seemed heedless of the promises that had been made in its name at Easton. Pemberton’s steadfast commitment to the welfare of native peoples earned him the enmity of thousands of Indian-hating frontiersmen of the sort who almost certainly murdered Teedyuscung. By 1763 Pemberton was the most reviled public figure in the province.

George Washington, who led the First Virginia Regiment as the advance element of Forbes’s army from Fort Ligonier to Fort Duquesne, resigned his commission at Christmas 1758 and returned to Mount Vernon, looking forward to life with Martha Custis, the rich and handsome young widow who had recently accepted his proposal of marriage. He had, he believed, fulfilled his duty to the colony. In gratitude, the electors of Frederick County, perhaps including some of those who had threatened to blow his brains out in 1755, elected him to the House of Burgesses. Washington now had two goals: to establish himself as a gentleman tobacco planter and to regain his health. The former he believed he could accomplish, as he had accomplished so much already, by diligence and self-discipline. The latter worried him more: the dysentery that had plagued him at least since Braddock’s expedition had grown worse late in the campaign, weakening him until he feared he might never recover. Yet the very fact that his life had repeatedly been spared—most recently in the last days of Forbes’s expedition, when part of the First Virginia Regiment had mistaken members of the Second Virginia Regiment for the enemy at dusk and the two had opened fire on each other, with Washington between them, shouting the order to cease fire—may have given him hope that the Providence he believed had preserved him might yet have some purpose for him to fulfill.

John Forbes, on the other hand, knew at the end of the campaign that his own health was broken beyond recovery. He had been so weak and in such physical distress during the last phases of the march that he could neither walk nor ride; he had been able to move forward only on a litter slung between two horses, his pain dulled by drugs. Once the army had reached its objective, he remained only long enough to give the desolated site of Fort Duquesne the new name of Pittsburgh, to order the construction of a small fort to shelter a two-hundred-man winter garrison there, and to invite the local Indian leaders to a conference to cement their new alliance with Britain. On November 26, “being seized with an inflammation in my stomach, Midriff and Liver, the sharpest and most severe of all distempers,” he turned the command over to Bouquet, who evacuated him to Philadelphia. That Forbes survived the six weeks’ journey across Pennsylvania with winter coming on testified to the toughness of spirit that had brought him through the campaign. That he survived six weeks more after his arrival in Philadelphia attested, at least in part, to his determination to inform the new commander in chief about what was at stake in Pennsylvania and the west.

Relations with native peoples were critical, he wrote: Amherst must not “think trifflingly of the Indians or their friendship,” for Britain’s hold in the Ohio depended upon having Indian relations “settled on some solid footing.” Indian affairs had almost always been misunderstood, “or if understood, perverted to purposes serving particular ends.” Among those who understood Indians but sought to exploit them in a self-interested way, two offenders stood out: “Sir William Johnstone [Johnson] and his Myrmidons” on one hand, and “the Virginians & Pensilvanians” on the other, “as both are aiming at engrossing the commerce and Barter with the Indians, and of settling and appropriating the immense tract of fine country” around Pittsburgh. Amherst, Forbes stressed, must take a strong hand in dealing with all these potential sources of disorder. If Amherst neglected to protect the Indians’ interests, and particularly if uncontrolled white settlement occurred west of the Alleghenies, chaos could easily engulf the region, and the interior of North America would be lost to the crown.

There is nothing to indicate that the commander in chief paid any attention to the concerns that the dying Forbes voiced with such clarity and fervor. In the early months of 1759 Jeffery Amherst was coming to terms with his new responsibilities, concentrating on plans to sustain the momentum Britain had achieved in the recent campaigns and carry on to conquer Canada. To a greater degree than he ever understood, a shift in Indian alliances that grew out of Forbes’s campaign of 1758 would make that goal attainable. But Amherst knew little of Indians, and cared less. One day he would pay a heavy price for those attitudes, but the day of reckoning would not come until 1763. When it did, no one in America would be more astonished than he.