Conceived in Liberty (136 page)

The Virginians, incidentally, not only refused to be conscripted for the war; they also strongly resisted conscription of their goods and supplies by the military, as Colonel Washington soon found to his dismay.

If the Virginians themselves balked at squandering lives and properties for the invasive war for the Ohio, the citizens of the other colonies proved even more recalcitrant, despite the urging of their royal governors. The New York Assembly tardily questioned the assumption that the Ohio Valley was British territory, and the Quaker-run Assembly of Pennsylvania did much the same. Both refused to call up their militia. The Maryland Assembly also saw no invasion of British colonial territory in the French occupation of the Ohio. The New Jersey Assembly refused aid as well. Isaac Norris, the Pennsylvania Quaker leader, summed up much of colonial opinion when he noted, “The Ohio Company are endeavoring to engage all the colonies under the sanction of the King’s command to defend their lands upon that
river.” Only North Carolina voted substantial funds, and planned to enlist a military troop.

The grandiose plans of Dinwiddie and the Ohio Company were rudely shattered when, on April 17, 1754, Trent’s little band, at work on constructing the fort at the forks of the Ohio, surrendered to a formidable French force of one thousand men under Claude-Pierre Pécaudy de Contrecoeur. The French commander magnanimously allowed Trent’s men to return to Virginia with all their possessions, and then rapidly proceeded to build the formidable Fort Duquesne at the same site. Colonel Washington marched rashly into the valley and, after wandering around in some confusion, was, on July 3, quickly smashed at his Fort Necessity by a French force more than double his own. Once again, the French allowed Washington and his troops to leave the valley and return to Virginia. The English aggressors had been totally routed and English troops ousted from the entire Ohio Valley.

The British government had sent several companies of regulars to aid in the war. One company from South Carolina had been in the fray with Washington, but had deeply angered the Virginians by refusing to obey their orders or to cooperate in the necessary labors of the expedition, thereby causing friction between Virginia and the British.

The other aid arrived later and only added to the burdens of Virginia. Two companies of regulars from New York arrived without supplies. A regiment of colonials came from North Carolina, only to find that no one had money to pay them or had the necessary supplies. The harassed North Carolinians mutinied, and mass desertions followed during July and August, finally forcing Virginia to disband the regiment officially. Governor James Glen of South Carolina trenchantly criticized Virginia’s meddling in the Ohio Valley as well as British claims to the territory. Virginia troop morale was understandably very low and desertions continued unremittingly. Only Maryland sent a company of men.

One might rationally suppose that Governor Dinwiddie would be properly chastened by these defeats and forget about the whole Ohio adventure. But not Dinwiddie. Like all hard-liners everywhere, he was resolved to fight to the last life and bit of property of everyone else. In a frenzy, Dinwiddie sought at every hand to push war to the uttermost. The British government he urged to send more troops and supplies, and boldly recommended a parliamentary poll tax upon the entire American continent to finance the campaign. This would have involved the dangerous and highly provocative scrapping of the crucial principle that no colony could be taxed without the consent of its elected Assembly.

At home, Dinwiddie actually ordered Colonel Washington to reinvade Ohio less than a month after his rout, but fortunately a delay in raising funds by the House of Burgesses led him to cancel this scheme. In the fall
the lower house agreed to appropriate twenty thousand pounds for the war, and to levy an onerous poll tax to raise the money. The House refused to draft militia for fighting outside Virginia, but did agree to conscript all “vagrants” and to force them to fight for Virginian glory. Dinwiddie had still not given up the idea of a winter campaign to recapture Fort Duquesne, but the lack of interest by the other colonies finally forced him to abandon the plan.

Meanwhile, in late 1753, the New York government decided to call a joint conference of the Northern colonies, with the Iroquois and other Indian tribes, for the following June at Albany. As one of many conferences with the Iroquois and their followers, the idea was to try to mobilize the Indians for a general assault on French possessions in the Ohio Valley. It was the ineffable imperialist and warmonger Governor Shirley of Massachusetts who seized the occasion to try to unite the colonies into a league or confederation. Only when united under one central government could the full resources of the American colonies be mobilized by the Crown for an all-out assault on New France. The old imperialist dream of the Dominion of New England was now to be revived and extended to all the British colonies.

The delegates to the Albany Congress were in the main appointed by the governors, and largely taken from the councillors of their respective colonies. The Indian conference was supposed to be the only problem on the agenda, but under cover of these proceedings the delegates were persuaded by Benjamin Franklin, a delegate from Pennsylvania, to seize the occasion to propose a central government to rule over all the colonies and thus prosecute a far broader and more intensified war against the French. Franklin did this even though unauthorized to do so by Pennsylvania. This Plan of Union —largely Franklin’s—as approved by the delegates in July, urged the British Parliament to impose over all the colonies a central supergovernment, whose executive would be appointed by the Crown and whose legislature would consist of a grand council chosen by the respective colonial Assemblies. Executive salaries were to be provided by the Crown, thus bypassing the salary troubles that the royal governors had all had with the colonial Assemblies, and thus freeing the executive power from the checks and limits imposed on it by the representatives of the American public. Of particular significance was the taxing power, to be given to the president and the Council, and to be appropriated for the functions of the general government.

The Albany Plan, however, was a total dud. The independent and liberty-loving colonists had had enough trouble with royal prerogative embodied in the executive and judicial powers of the individual colonies. They had no desire for another supergovernment to add still another and greater engine of oppression. Rhode Island and Connecticut, now happily free of all royal officials, were especially vehement in opposition. The Connecticut delegates refused to sign the plan and the Connecticut Assembly attacked it
bitterly, denouncing it as “against the rights and privileges of Englishmen....” The Rhode Island legislature could not forgive its delegate Stephen Hopkins for signing the proposal. A large majority of the Boston town meeting voted against the plan, Dr. William Clarke perceptively denouncing it to Franklin himself as a “scheme for destroying the liberties and privileges of every British subject upon the continent.” In general, the respective colonies took no notice of the plan. Even Governor Shirley opposed it bitterly, not of course because the central government would be too powerful but because for Shirley it would be far too weak. In particular, the provision for an elected legislature was to Shirley viciously democratic and destructive of the royal prerogative. Shirley urged that Parliament tax the colonies and that the central legislature be all appointed by the Crown. Governor Morris of Pennsylvania also scented a dangerous republicanism in the plan, as well as the destruction of Crown authority. He also insisted that a union of colonies must permit absolute dictation over the army by the supergovernment. Discussion in England of the plan, and of the whole problem of imperial relations with the colonies, was cast aside by the immediate crisis of the rout of Washington at Fort Necessity.

Franklin’s desperate gamble on the Albany Plan stemmed from his fear that Virginia, with its vague and grandiose charter claims, would be able to conquer and keep control of the Ohio Valley land. Pennsylvania’s Quaker Assembly would prevent that colony from contesting the spoils, but a central supergovernment over the colonies would suffer from no such limits or scruples. Hence Franklin’s provision in the Albany Plan that the supergovernment have the power to abrogate existing colonial claims to the western lands, and to create there new governments and land grants. After it was obvious that the Albany Plan would fail, Franklin unsuccessfully tried again: this time to forestall Virginia by creating two new colonies in the upper Ohio Valley. In this plan, Franklin was joined by two of his associates at the Albany congress—Sir William Johnson and Thomas Pownall, secretary to the governor of New York and brother of the influential John Pownall, secretary of the Board of Trade.

With Henry Fox now war secretary and Henry Pelham dead, the English war party had been considerably strengthened, and Cumberland, Fox, Halifax, and Pitt managed partly to push and partly to circumvent Newcastle, and to induce Britain to agree to send two regiments of regulars to America under General Edward Braddock as commander-in-chief of the English forces on the continent. Britain was now committed even more heavily to aggressive war against New France. Braddock’s instructions were to capture the critical French forts south of the St. Lawrence, and Henry Fox trumpeted these aims in the press in order to provoke the French into a general war. In that way, Fox and Cumberland expected to use a conquest of the Ohio Valley, and limited aggression against Canada, as the back door to war against France on the continent of Europe.

But France, instead, proposed an armistice, which war-intoxicated England indignantly refused. In English plans everything was neatly blocked out: General Braddock would launch the main effort from Virginia and recapture Fort Duquesne. At the same time, Governor Shirley and Sir William Johnson would capture the key French forts of Niagara and St. Frederic (Crown Point) at the southern tip of Lake Champlain. Also at the same time, Admiral Boscawen was to patrol the Atlantic coast and intercept any French reinforcements for America. At a conference on April 14, 1755, Braddock and the leading royal governors hammered out their joint plan of campaign.

The tidy plans blew up very quickly. First, the French fleet, bearing reinforcements, was able to slip by the British ambush. But the biggest blow was the fate of Braddock’s expedition. Armed with twenty-five hundred men, mainly British and the rest largely Virginians, Braddock set out in early June for Fort Duquesne.

From the beginning, the Braddock expedition seemed ill-omened. As usual, such colonial Assemblies as Pennsylvania and Maryland balked at voting for any substantial aid funds. Indeed, Dinwiddie, incensed at the colonists’ indifference and their persistence in mutually satisfactory trading with the enemy, called on Britain to tax the colonies and to ban all exports from America. The first error of the expedition itself was the decision to march from Virginia, a far more difficult and rugged path to Duquesne than from Pennsylvania. But Virginia was favored not only as a reliable royal colony not plagued by Quakers or a proprietary, but also as a means of furthering the interests of the Ohio Company. Next, the lack of enthusiasm for the war by the American public was revealed in their indifference to supplying the troops. Braddock was moved to denounce the frontier populace of Virginia and Maryland in no uncertain terms. Only Benjamin Franklin, eager to serve the aggressive British war effort, was able to gull and wheedle the German farmers into providing supplies to the Braddock forces.

Arriving near Fort Duquesne on July 9, the mighty Braddock army was set upon by a French and Indian force of little more than eight hundred and was promptly cut to ribbons. General Braddock was killed in the fray and the demoralized British, under the command of Colonel Thomas Dunbar, fled back as fast as they could across the Alleghenies, destroying large amounts of provisions in order to speed their way. Dunbar did not stop until he had taken the army all the way to the snug safety of Philadelphia. Governor Dinwiddie, still indomitably eager for others to fight to the last man, again urged another early attack on Fort Duquesne, but Dunbar had had enough. Once again the British drive for conquest had been thoroughly crushed by the French.

Dinwiddie’s war frenzy, however, was again redoubled. Bitterly denouncing Dunbar’s retreat to safety, Dinwiddie was tireless in his efforts to continue and escalate the conflict. He had just succeeded in pressuring and
cajoling the Virginia Assembly into appropriating ten thousand pounds for the war. Now he reconvened the Assembly, which proved eager to pour good money after bad and granted another forty thousand pounds to be raised by an annual poll tax of one shilling. He also called up the Virginia militia, which he placed at the frontier under Colonel Washington’s command. But the liberty-loving people of Virginia showed no disposition whatever to give up their lives for the sacred cause of grabbing the Ohio land from the French. Nonviolent resistance greatly slowed the rate of conscription as well as the fighting élan of the troops. Washington complained long and loud of the laziness and indifference of the militia officers, especially of the recruiting officers themselves, who preferred carousal to enforcing conscription. Of particular significance is Washington’s report on the libertarian spirit of the militia and their dyed-in-the-wool resistance to the draft. “If we talk of obliging men to serve their country,” Washington lamented, “we are sure to hear a fellow mumble over the words
liberty
and
property
a thousand times.”
Liberty
and
property
were indeed increasingly becoming the watchwords of the era, and the colonial application was being made not only to the distant French but especially to “their” governments at home.

In Pennsylvania, as we have seen, the Assembly was stampeded after Braddock’s defeat into passing a militia law. However, Quakers were exempted from the draft, and the militia was formed as a people’s army with the officers democratically elected by the men of each company. In this democratic arrangement, the regimental officers were in turn chosen by the elected officers of the company. And finally, in a creatively libertarian provision, no officer or private in the Pennsylvania militia was to be subject to any articles of war unless he personally declared his consent to them in the presence of a judge.