America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (14 page)

Acknowledging that he lacked the experience to command, Washington accepted the post of second in command, but was promoted to lieutenant colonel. As James Thomas Flexner, one of Washington’s greatest biographers, admiringly put it, “Although only twenty-one, George Washington carried the manifest air of one born to command.” Yet, as Flexner also put it, he would find himself in “situations that proved both politically and militarily far beyond his depth.”10

In April 1754, Washington was ordered back to the Ohio Valley, leading the 159 troops and construction force that had been raised so far. As they moved west over the Allegheny Mountains, they built a | 107 \

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rugged wilderness road for their cannons and wagons, the first road constructed in the Ohio Valley. It was difficult, backbreaking work for which the men were poorly paid. They let Washington know of their unhappiness. The men knew that they were ill-paid soldiers in the employ of a distant king and that the chief beneficiaries of their labors would be the colonial gentlemen who ran the Ohio Company. Their unhappiness hinted at the festering class distinctions between the mostly Scots-Irish western backwoods settlers and the landed gentry of Virginia’s eastern planter class.

As Washington’s combined road crew and army slowly moved west, they met up with the construction crew that had been sent ahead to begin building the fort. These men reported that eight hundred French soldiers and their Indian allies had captured the unfinished English fort and ordered them back to Virginia. The French had begun to construct their own fort—to be named Fort Duquesne—at the same spot. About this time, the Half King appeared on the scene and told Washington that about thirty French soldiers were camped nearby in a hidden ravine. Washington also learned that Half King despised the French—they had supposedly boiled and eaten his father. This was the moment in which Washington made the fateful decision to attack the French, believing that it was an advance party of an invasion force. As James Flexner commented, “Overlooking the fact that England and France were not officially at war, forgetting that the French had not attacked the party at the Forks and that Dinwiddie had ordered him to warn all Frenchmen away before he engaged in hostilities, Washington allowed himself to be persuaded to use the Indian tactic of a surprise attack.”11

After the ambush, Washington must have quickly realized that he was responsible for the murder of an ambassador. With some eight | 108 \

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hundred Frenchmen not far off, Washington decided to retreat to the nearby meadow where he had left the bulk of his troops, about sixty miles south of Fort Duquesne, and quickly throw up a rudimentary defense. Built as much out of desperation as necessity, it was appropriately christened Fort Necessity. But the word
fort
implies something far more substantial than the simple, rugged structure Washington’s militiamen threw together. Washington’s Fort Necessity was little more than a small rectangular wooden shed for storing ammunition and supplies, surrounded by a circle of rough-hewn upright logs about seven feet tall.

Reinforcements under the command of a British army captain had arrived in the meantime. While Washington and the captain argued over who was in charge, the French drew closer. Outside the log palisade, trenchworks were dug and most of the approximately three hundred men now at Fort Necessity would be placed in these trenches rather than inside the fifty-foot-diameter circular compound, which could hold only about sixty men. When the Half King saw what he called “that little thing in the meadow,” he and his warriors beat a hasty retreat.

On July 3, about eleven hundred French and Indian troops, some of whom had recently been allied with the English, surrounded Fort Necessity. Commanded by the late Jumonville’s brother Captain Coulon de Villiers, the French and Indians took positions in the thick woods around the fort, unleashing a withering fusillade on Washington’s position. A night of driving rain soaked his ammunition and filled his trenches with water and blood, and the young colonel had little food for the troops. With ill-trained, poorly equipped men, many of them sick and all of them hungry, Washington’s position was hopeless. It was made worse when discipline among his troops disintegrated. Cer-

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tain that they would be massacred in retaliation for the deaths of the Frenchmen, Washington’s militiamen broke into the rum stores. “It was no sooner dark,” Captain Adam Stephens, one of Washington’s company commanders, later recorded, “than one-half of our Men got drunk.”

About midnight, Washington agreed to surrender Fort Necessity, the first and only time he surrendered in his military career. With his men low on ammunition as well, and fearing English reinforcements that might shortly arrive, Coulon de Villiers mercifully allowed Washington—the man he surely held responsible for his brother’s death a few weeks earlier—to march out of the fort and return to Virginia with his men and guns. Washington only had to sign a formal parole, a written agreement that he and his men would not fight again for a year. It was July 4, a date that must have carried a most unpleasant association for George Washington for many years to come.

What Washington did not know or perhaps did not understand was that the letter of parole said that Washington had “assassinated”

Joseph de Jumonville. In essence, Washington had signed a confession of murdering a French diplomat, which was cause enough for war. For the rest of his life, Washington would argue that he misinterpreted the agreement and completely disavow the charge.

Disconsolate in defeat, Washington returned to Williamsburg.

Trying to salvage the situation, Dinwiddie and William Fairfax convinced the Virginia burgesses to recognize Washington and his officers for “gallant and brave behavior.” The disaster at Fort Necessity was turned into Anglo-American propaganda—a heroic stand against the depredations of the French and their “savage” allies. If nothing else, Washington must have been learning from firsthand experience that even disasters could be useful if presented with the proper public face.

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During Washington’s absence, his niece Sarah, Lawrence Washington’s daughter, had died and her mother had remarried. Washington was able to lease Mount Vernon from his former sister-in-law, Ann, for fifteen thousand pounds of tobacco a year. When Ann later died, the house and estate became his.

When the burgesses failed to vote new taxes for another expedition against the French, Washington’s unit was disbanded and he resigned his commission. Disillusioned, he wrote to his brother, sounding more like a petulant adolescent with his nose out of joint than the heroic figure of American legend: “I was employed to go on a journey in the winter (when I believe few or none would have undertaken it) and what did I get by it? My expenses borne! I then was appointed with trifling pay to conduct a handful of men to the Ohio. What did I get by this? Why, after putting myself to a considerable expense in equipping and providing necessaries for the campaign—I went out, was soundly beaten, lost them all-came in, and had my commission taken from me, or in other words, my command reduced, under pretense of an order from home. . . . I have been on the losing order ever since I entered the service.”

z

i t m i g h t h av e all ended there—a bitter, complaining young colonial upstart who saw slights at every turn. But history had more in store for Washington.

In February 1755, British major general Edward Braddock arrived in Virginia to command a new campaign against the French, and it would be launched with an assault on Fort Duquesne. The choice of Braddock to lead the assault came, according to historian Fred Anderson, “not because he was an able tactician or even a particularly ex-

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perienced battlefield leader, but because he was a noted administrator and disciplinarian who was also politically reliable.”12 Sensing opportunity, Washington asked to join Braddock’s campaign in March, and Braddock agreed to allow him to serve as an aide-de-camp. Among the other officers in Braddock’s command were Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage, who would later command British forces in North America between 1763 and 1775 and face Washington in Boston, and Captain Horatio Gates, later to be a general with mixed success—and a thorn in General Washington’s side—in the Continental army.

Braddock had assembled the largest invasion force yet seen in North America to challenge the French, and he prepared to do it in the style to which he was accustomed. Ignoring the advice of colonial soldiers with experience fighting the French and Indians, Braddock rejected the use of Indian allies. He planned to bring an immense European-style army to bear on the French. More than two thousand soldiers and wagoneers—along with camp followers, the women who inevitably follow at the rear of most armies to cook, clean, and perform other nonmilitary “services”—set out. With twenty-five hundred horses and hundreds of wagons, Braddock’s force stretched out for more than six miles. As this large, slow-moving army snaked its way through hundreds of miles of virgin territory, the men had to hack a road through wilderness and forage for their food. They were constantly harassed by Indians, who had no difficulty finding the massed British troops in their bright red uniforms.

On July 9, 1755, disaster struck with a vengeance. The British had nearly reached Fort Duquesne. Bunched like commuters in bumper-to-bumper traffic, the ponderous British formation provided an easy target for the French and Indians, who launched their assault from the forest cover. In Washington’s own words, “We were attacked (very un-

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expectedly I must own) by about 300 French and Indians; our numbers consisted of about 1300 well armed men, chiefly regulars, who were immediately struck with such a deadly panic, that nothing but confusion and disobedience of orders prevailed amongst them. . . . The English soldiers . . . broke and ran as sheep before the hounds. . . . I luckily escaped without a wound, though I had four bullets through my coat and two horses shot under me.”

Out of a total force of thirteen hundred men, the British and Americans suffered more than nine hundred casualties. During the battle, Washington raced to the front and was able to organize an orderly retreat that was credited with saving many more lives. He also collected the wounded Braddock, who died three days later. Washington buried his body and had wagons roll over the grave so that the general’s remains would not be desecrated.

It was a disaster he would never forget. Thirty years later, Washington remembered the battle’s aftermath: “The shocking scenes . . .

the dead—the dying—the groans—lamentations—and cries along the road of the wounded for help . . . were enough to pierce a heart.”

Many of the British and American soldiers captured by the Indians were taken back to Fort Duquesne. There they were stripped and tortured by the Indians, screaming at the touch of red-hot irons, in the account of one eyewitness, before being put to death.

In spite of this devastating defeat, Washington’s stature was actually enhanced. His actions in rallying the survivors was hailed as heroic. Still only twenty-three, Washington would be given command of the newly created Virginia Regiment, charged with the colony’s defenses for the duration of the war.

Along with his increased fame in the colony, Washington acquired a new reputation. Following the strict British code of military disci-

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pline, Washington became known as a martinet for harshly doling out five hundred lashes for laziness or a thousand for drunkenness. He even boasted of building a gallows forty feet high on which to hang deserters. After executing two deserters, Washington wrote to Governor Dinwiddie, “Your Honor will, I hope, excuse my hanging instead of shooting them. It conveyed much more terror to others; and was it for example sake we did it.” Similarly harsh measures were applied to Indians attacking Virginia’s frontier. Washington had no objection if his Rangers left Indian scalps staked to trees. These were the rules of war in the eighteenth century, and Washington adopted them with ease.

Not only did the young colonel learn about command during this time, he would also be schooled in the politics of war. With the French threat fading as the bulk of fighting moved north toward the Great Lakes and Canada, Washington struggled constantly with the colonial legislature for funds to properly outfit his regiment. In Williamsburg, the House of Burgesses was controlled by landed men far more concerned with protecting their interests, property, and pocketbooks than with protecting clusters of backwoodsmen on Virginia’s western fringes. The gentlemen in Virginia’s colonial administration were more interested in equipping and training the militia that was charged with providing security against any slave insurrections, such as the one at Stono, South Carolina, in 1739. There, slaves encouraged by the Spanish in Florida had killed more than thirty whites before being hunted down and executed.

Although the heavy action in the war had moved north to the Great Lakes, New York, New England and eventually Canada, Washington was present when his Virginians—now outfitted in blue uniforms of Washington’s design—joined a large British force for an-

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other assault on Fort Duquesne in the fall of 1758. By the time they arrived, the French outpost was deserted and burning, abandoned by the outnumbered French. The British took it over, rebuilt it, and renamed it in honor of the prime minister who now led the war effort, William Pitt; the settlement nearby would eventually be named Pittsburgh in his honor as well.

Afterward, Washington returned to the battlefield where Braddock’s army had been so devastated. One of his officers described the scene: “Men’s bones were lying about as thick as leaves do on the ground.” Washington ordered his men to collect some 450 skulls and bury them. He then returned to Williamsburg and, late in 1758, resigned his commission.