Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (5 page)

Washington, like most of his colleagues in the army and the legislature, would have welcomed circumstances favoring an attack. But they did not exist. After the battle at Fort Necessity his force simply faded away, wrecked by desertions and unable to replace its losses by recruiting. He explained the impossibility of mounting an attack to Dinwiddie in clear and forceful terms: He did not have the troops needed for further combat, and the few that remained to him were in deplorable condition and short of everything—weapons, clothing, and food. The men, he told Dinwiddie, were now “naked,” a description that was not exaggerated by much. The supplies to feed and support an army were also missing; his commissary had little flour and less meat and few prospects of gathering the supplies required in a campaign. Most of all he lacked men—in August he wrote that if he were ordered to get under way, “I will [march], if not more than ten men follow me (which I believe will be the full amount).”
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Comments of this sort from Washington had circulated throughout the colony in August and September. He may have been an inexperienced commander, as he sometimes confessed, but he had a feel for the political realities that underlay public policy and military action in Virginia. His awareness of the need for the public’s support led him to make a gloomy assessment of the possibility of taking the field soon after the defeat at Great Meadows. He also explained his discontent in person and in writing to members of the House of Burgesses and the Virginia Council. His judgment about what was to be done after the battle at Fort Necessity was clear, and his analysis was quite explicit and direct. It was also correct, as others, even those hot for assaults on the French, came to see. Neither the political leaders in Virginia, aside from the governor, nor those commanding the military forces in Virginia were prepared in military terms for a fresh attempt to take the Ohio. After rebuffs of his requests for money to support further
military operations, Dinwiddie agreed to await better weather and a changed attitude in the legislature.
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But Dinwiddie also resolved to reorganize the army at his disposal by dissolving the Virginia Regiment and putting its officers and men into ten independent companies, each to be commanded by a captain. He explained to British officials that recent history of “disputes betwn the Regulars & the Officers appointed by me” had convinced him to make this change.
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He did not say that Washington’s complaints had played a major part in this decision, though there is little doubt that they had. Washington had also figured in tensions between regular forces from other colonies and the Virginia Regiment since the beginning of the crisis over the Ohio. He and Captain James Mackay, of the South Carolina Company, had managed to cooperate at Fort Necessity before their defeat, even though they had set up separate camps there, each with its own organization—separate sentries, separate passwords, and separate lines of command. But Washington and his officers resented being treated as inferior to the regulars. Mackay, a captain, had refused to accept the orders from Washington, a lieutenant colonel. Mackay’s commission and those of his officers were from the king; Washington and his officers had been commissioned by the governor. In the rank-conscious army, this difference mattered, and the government in England approved of it. Colonel Washington regarded it as unfair, and the injustice of it all came home to him when he came to understand that British regulars expected that orders they gave to colonials, even those with a higher (colonial) rank, were to be carried out. Captain Mackay in this system would command Colonel Washington.

Colonel Washington, full of bitterness, resigned his commission in late October when Dinwiddie, attempting to resolve conflicts, announced the dissolution of the Virginia Regiment and the creation of the new Virginia independent companies. Washington would not accept the reduction in rank and all that it implied about the place of Virginia in the empire.

Resignation of his colonelcy, he told friends, should be understood as an intention to give up military life altogether. Whether he was really convinced that he was through with the military is not clear. There is evidence in his actions that his decision was firm, for he now leased Mount Vernon from his brother Lawrence’s widow, Ann Fairfax
Washington, who was to remarry soon afterwards. As 1754 ended, Washington began preparing himself as a planter.
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Washington was twenty-two years old and of much promise. Nothing could have prepared him for the plunge he had taken into military life. He emerged from the defeat at Great Meadows unbroken but also unwilling to remain a soldier unrecognized by the British establishment. For a few months a planter’s life seemed to beckon. Whether he was ready for such a life is unclear, though at times he seemed prepared for anything.

In fact he was still largely unformed. Flaws in his judgment had appeared in the campaign against the French, and nothing in his limited experience in conventional tobacco planting suggested that he was ready to act as an estate manager. To be sure, he had a range of abilities that reassured men who had served with him. They not only respected him; they liked and admired him. He obviously had character, and though his performance in the military campaign of 1754 did not match his talent, he had, in fact, grown as a military leader—and a man.

But his sense that he was still something of an outsider or, perhaps, if not an outsider, a man on the fringe of Virginia society, remained. Coupled with his natural reserve, this sense reinforced his quiet drive and will, and was to remain an underlying condition that helped shape his mind and feeling in the years ahead.

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The Making of a Soldier

Washington had hardly entered his new life when the British government changed everything. In February of the new year, Edward Braddock was sent to America as the army’s commander. Braddock had no special qualifications or record justifying his appointment other than his friendship with Prince William, the Duke of Cumberland—the son of George II and the captain general of the army. He did have administrative ability, had headed British forces on Gibraltar, and knew his way around the two worlds of politics and military affairs, and no one else seems to have craved appointment to the American command.
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Once in America, Braddock learned that George Washington probably knew more about the Ohio Country than anyone else and that he had earned the affection and regard of many in Virginia. Washington’s reputation recommended him for Braddock’s immediate task: recapturing the Forks of the Ohio and driving the French out of the country. It was a mission with which Washington sympathized, and though he could not participate as an officer in the British army or as a colonel of the Virginia Regiment, he volunteered his services. He would serve without pay, he told Braddock, who made Washington a part of his military “family,” as the staff of generals in the eighteenth century was often called.
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Washington could not help Braddock solve one of his most difficult problems: how to get his army of two regiments plus companies from Virginia to the Ohio Country. Braddock had trusted the governors of Virginia and Maryland to provide the wagons, horses, and forage for them. By April he had assembled an army of about thirteen thousand men, most of them in camp at Frederick, Maryland. He expected to find around two hundred wagons (there were twenty); twenty-five
hundred horses (there were two hundred); and forage for the horses (there was almost none, the animals being turned out at night into fields and woods to fend for themselves). Not surprisingly, many wandered away. Braddock and his officers responded in anger that the expedition to take Fort Duquesne could not go forward; it seemed at an end before it started. News of this impending fiasco had made its way to the Pennsylvania General Assembly and to Benjamin Franklin, who paid a visit to Braddock just at the moment when all was to be given up. Franklin promised to supply wagons, horses, food, and forage; how he did this is another story, but he kept his word, and Braddock, with the army suitably supplied, began to move on Fort Duquesne.
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Washington soon took the measure of his leader and fellow officers. Braddock’s chief of staff, Captain Robert Orme, impressed him, as did Thomas Gage, an officer he would face twenty years later when both were generals. The officers were the only ones, besides a company of Virginians, to whom he accorded respect. Though Washington recognized that the army was large for colonial wars, he soon lost confidence in its ability to get itself into battle. It crawled rather than marched as the June days passed one after another. Some days it managed to move only two miles. There were two reasons for this glacial progress. One was the bloated character of the army itself, consisting as it did of infantry, artillery, wagons, and a mass of supernumeraries—camp followers, including many wives and others of no discernible abilities, servants, and a mound of luggage, much of which would have no redeemable value in battle. The second reason for delay was the need to construct roads to carry this mass westward. The army possessed pioneers, as men who built roads and structures were called, but Braddock had not been able to recruit or hire men of great skill and energy. Then there were the horses. Franklin had performed wonders, but even he could not procure the number needed, and many, according to unhappy officers who examined them, lacked sufficient strength to pull heavy caissons and wagons.
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When discontent reached a near-breaking point, Washington advised Braddock to cut out a fighting force and compel the troops to leave behind most of their luggage and their artillery for a dash forward. A lean army could make it to Duquesne before the French there received reinforcements, which everyone with Braddock assumed
were coming. Braddock accepted this counsel, and on June 17 some twelve to thirteen hundred men and officers, Braddock with them, left some six thousand behind, with orders to follow with due dispatch.

This flying force, not including Washington, who had recommended it, reached the Monongahela in early July. Washington had been ill, probably with dysentery, but he joined Braddock on July 8. He had been too feeble to ride, and the cart he rode in gave him agonies as it jolted over the road constructed by the pioneers.

Early on July 9, seven or eight miles from Duquesne, Braddock sent Thomas Gage forward with an advance party. He followed with the bulk of the infantry, trailed in the rear by his baggage party. Gage led his advance group out of camp early in the morning. Only a few hundred yards from the second ford of the Monongahela, he struck a combined force of French and Indians. Altogether, some nine hundred men—around 100 French regulars, 146 Canadians, and 637 Indians—had left Duquesne under the command of Captain Daniel-Hyacinthe-Marie Liénard de Beaujeu, a brilliant French officer who had rallied a collection of Iroquois and other Indians, who joined him despite suspicions of French weakness. The French in Duquesne under the command of Captain Claude-Pierre Pécaudy, sieur de Contrecoeur, had not known until July 6 that the British were close by, but the Indians, whose military intelligence surpassed that of both sides, had heard much about their enemy’s advance. In particular they had received notice that the British force was large and that it had brought big guns.

When Contrecoeur and Beaujeu learned that the British attack was imminent, they naturally turned to their Indian allies, who had no good reason to welcome the English. But the Ohio Indians had not gathered in numbers in Duquesne, and the few there resisted calls to fight the British. Beaujeu appealed to the remainder in terms that challenged their honor, if contemporary accounts can be trusted. The Indians joined him, and on July 9 the battle was fought.
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The first exchange of fire occurred when Gage’s advance party ran into the Indians on ground rising from the river. Both sides were surprised by this convergence, but the British fired before the French could get into any sort of fighting position. In all the confusion, the British got off three volleys, the third of which killed Beaujeu. His second-in-command, Captain Jean-Daniel Dumas, then took over, averting an early panic that apparently seized the Indians. This opening
favored the British—just about the only good surprise the day held for them.

Recovering themselves, Dumas and his men began to use the cover the woods afforded. Though the area was filled with trees, there was not much brush, and the Indians moved swiftly down the slope on both sides of the rough British column. Historians of the engagement that followed usually argue that the British advance force collapsed in panic almost immediately and in pulling back crowded together with the main body. Certainly they were confused by the Indians’ movement in front and along both flanks, and the advance party, in retreat, blundered into the main body coming forward. Contemporary accounts suggest that these soldiers tended to bunch up, in fact to form a tight mass that made it impossible for those at its center to fire effectively at the French and Indians around them. But fire they did—to disastrous effect, for their shots often struck soldiers on the periphery. Several of the Virginians and perhaps the regulars as well attempted to shoot from behind trees. In their confusion, the commingled advance group, the main body, and soon the rear guard shot at their fellows who had taken shelter behind trees or were shooting at the Indians from such positions.

Braddock, Washington, and other British officers made their way into the thick of the swirling center. Braddock soon received a bullet “in the shoulder, & into the Breast,” reported Washington, who escaped without a scratch, though “I had four Bullets through my Coat and two Horses shot under me.” Nothing that he tried could avert the catastrophe that followed. Three hours of confusion compounded by the fear of Indians—every member of Braddock’s army had undoubtedly heard stories of scalping and other mutilations—the screams of the dying and the attackers alike, and the inability to fix the enemy, who seemed almost supernatural in his ability to hide and then spring out from trees and holes in the ground, were enough to drive the British into a mad effort to escape. Washington blamed the “English soldiers.” They “broke & run as Sheep before the Hounds, leaving the Artillery, Ammunition, Provison, and every individual thing we had with us a prey to the Enemy, and when we endeavour’d to rally them in hopes of regaining our invaluable loss, it was with as much success as if we had attempted to have stop’d the wild Bears of the Mountains.”
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