Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (6 page)

The flight carried the mass of men back over the river to the camp
of the major body of the army. Colonel Thomas Dunbar of Pennsylvania, in charge there, decided against re-forming the herd that poured in on him. His group and the stragglers made their way to Philadelphia. There was no thought of resuming the campaign, thereby leaving the Virginians exposed, as Washington pointed out to men not disposed to listen.

The defeat of Braddock temporarily shook Washington’s self-confidence. His initial response was to ask again what he received by sacrificing himself to military service. He had lost two horses in the battle and was almost killed, as the holes made by musket balls in his coat attested. He was also still sick, and the pain reinforced his self-pity. Then there was another sort of pain: the humiliation felt at being beaten by an inferior force, some three hundred French and Indians. The defeat was “shameful,” even “scandalous,” he wrote his brother Augustine, and what was worse, it was a defeat “by a handful of men” who had not expected to do more than “molest and disturb our March; Victory was their smallest expectation.”
⁷
His surprise is evident in his resort to a kind of literary excursion in his account to a friend: “see,” he said, “the wondrous works of Providence! the uncertainty of human things! We a few minutes before, believed our numbers almost equal to the Canadian force, they only expected to annoy us: Yet, contrary to all expectation and human probability and even to the course of things, we were totally defeated, and sustained the loss of every thing.” Others shared his surprise at the defeat—Governor Dinwiddie, for example, wrote the Earl of Halifax in November that Braddock’s loss “appears to me as a dream, when I consider the Forces & the train of Artillery he had with him”—and in both America and Britain the public scorn piled up.
⁸

Washington, who felt the humiliation of the affair, did not join the critics of Braddock. His restraint did not come from a sense of responsibility for the disaster; he had given advice to Braddock, of course, but he had not shared command. In fact he had fought bravely and seems to have led the rescue of Braddock when bullets cut him down. Turning on Braddock would not have been an honorable act, and then there was his concern for British officers, among them Captain Robert Orme, who were present and were comrades as well as colleagues.
Orme, an officer in the Coldstream Guards, served as Braddock’s principal aide-de-camp and found a sympathetic friend in Washington. The two men liked each other and, if their letters can be trusted, talked with a candor unusual between regular and provincial officers. Orme mounted a defense of Braddock before leaving America for home, and Washington, though not so vehement in his assessments, agreed that Braddock should not be blamed for the defeat.
⁹

He did not spare the regular British enlisted men. The Indians had overpowered everyone, according to all accounts of the battle, but the Virginians had never given way to panic. The regulars had lost their nerve and, flummoxed by the Indian skill and tactics, had run away, giving up despite the bravery of their officers, including their commander, who, refusing to run, lost his life. They resembled nothing so much as “sheep before hounds.” The loss of battle tore at him, but it freed whatever penchant he had for invective, and the words “shameful” and “cowardice” filled his letters about the British loss—he would always hold that the loss itself was British rather than Virginian.
¹⁰

Washington’s pride was at stake in the days following the battle, and he appears to have been divided in his feelings about continuing a military career. His disposition to give it up, however, arose from more than the sense of humiliation; an awareness of self-interest also had a part, though he may have exaggerated this to convince friends who wanted him to remain in the army. He knew that they would react with sympathy when he listed his losses, such as the two horses killed in the battle, and the low returns that came to him as regimental commander—little pay and impaired health. He had also complained for months about the miseries of recruiting men who hated the thought of military service. Their lack of discipline once enlisted and their propensity to desert before, during, and after combat troubled him. The picture he painted for himself, his friends, and observers seemed to suggest that he was finished with military life.
¹¹

Yet within two months he accepted command of the Virginia Regiment, shortly after it was offered by Governor Dinwiddie at the end of August. He had not contrived a dilemma in his conversations and letters about the Braddock campaign; rather, he had revealed a variety of emotions, including a mild revulsion from further military service. What he really felt seemed unclear, even to him.

His deepest attachments, however, were to the army and the idea of
command. Dinwiddie did not fully understand Washington’s attitudes, and when Washington responded favorably but with certain caveats, the governor was relieved but also somewhat unhappy at having to accept these conditions. Washington’s principal requirement was that he be allowed to choose his own officers. The regiment ordinarily was composed of ten companies, each with a captain. These officers were crucial to the army’s success and in fact could make or break the regiment and its commander. Washington pointed this out to Dinwiddie, saying that his “honour” depended upon their “behaviour,” a statement based on experience. His use of the word “honour” recurred throughout his life and seems to suggest that what people thought about him governed his conduct. To be sure, he was always concerned about his reputation and guarded it carefully, but “honour” had deeper and wider meanings. When Washington referred to his “honour,” he was thinking of more than his standing with the public or his own kind, gentlemen or leaders in the army or Virginian society. All these relationships were important constituents of his place in the world. But “honour” lay deeper in his essential nature—his attachment to truth, honesty, and responsibility to others. The war forced a process that defined him, fashioning, in fact, what he was as a man. The process was in full action in 1755, and the next three years advanced it. What grew most in his character was his personal strength, a disposition to hold to his certainties, all summed up in a profound sense of “honour.”
¹²

Taking up his assignment as commander of the Virginia Regiment, he plunged into problems he had become familiar with in the previous two years. The first was basic: how to command a regiment that had few officers and almost no men of ability and experience. In the fall of 1755 he chose, with the help of the governor and others, the captains who were to head the regiment’s ten companies. Recruiting soldiers for these companies proved to be a problem that defied solution. He tried during the next three years to solve it in several ways, the principal one an appeal to the governor and the legislature for money to lure men into his army and to pay them after they joined. This was a reasonable course of action that ran up against official inaction. Whether Washington understood the absence of public support for the militia is not
altogether clear. He certainly recognized that Virginians did not wish to serve without compensation; he himself had complained occasionally about his own pay, but when men who had not been paid deserted, he rarely explained their action as arising from their financial needs.

To him, irresponsible conduct in the ranks—refusal to obey orders in a timely way, surly responses to orders, slovenly appearance, or sloppy handling of weapons, including firing them off when not in battle, among other unacceptable aspects of conduct—all were evidence of some lack of personal worth and not simply responses to the misery of military life. And when his troops ran away from camp or, worse, from battle, he may not have understood that the circumstances of their lives in the army drove their actions, not a lack of courage.
¹³

At some level, he did of course understand that these underlying conditions of a soldier’s life—training, pay, and food, shelter, and arms—had much to do with their performance. He was never indifferent to his soldiers’ welfare, but he was impatient with their failures. To his credit, he was also impatient with his own, even though he generally demonstrated confidence and strength in his leadership.

The men under his command in these years were not satisfactory soldiers. Judging from his orders, Washington told his officers of his dissatisfaction and almost immediately laid down requirements for training intended to prepare men for battle. Accurate shooting appeared in his scheme of training, as did moving troops in and out of favorable positions for combat. (Before much time for preparation passed, he evidently gave up on the possibility of fielding an army capable of accurate fire if it recruited unqualified men.) What he most desired was men practiced in handling weapons. Find marksmen, he instructed recruiters; there was not much time to train men unaccustomed to shooting. He needed men who could kill Indians who fought from behind trees—“bush fighters,” a term that frequently entered his letters and orders from 1755 on.
¹⁴

Washington’s desire to have a disciplined and skilled regiment was not shared by his troops. The regiment in 1755 was a skeleton force. Neither adding to their number nor training them proved successful, though he never eased up on either task. Early in his service as commander of the regiment, he wrote that his orders were obeyed only “with my drawn sword” and that inhabitants along the frontier
sometimes threatened “to blow out my brains.” Undoubtedly, there was some rhetorical excess in his accounts of getting compliance to his orders, but not much.
¹⁵

There was no excess at all in his accounts over several years of his troubles with Captain John Dagworthy, the leader of the Maryland troops. Dagworthy had been with Braddock’s forces in their disaster and had been left behind by Colonel Dunbar when he led the remnant of the defeated to Philadelphia. Dunbar ordered Dagworthy to Fort Cumberland, in Maryland, with small numbers of Maryland and Virginia soldiers. Dagworthy took his assignment seriously, perhaps with the sense that he had authority over the entire area of the Maryland and Virginia western settlements. The Virginians, especially Washington, defined the borders of power differently, and though Washington thought that Fort Cumberland was badly located, he believed his own claim to command there, as elsewhere, should not be challenged. What made matters worse at this time was Dagworthy’s claim to a royal commission, which would make him more than Washington’s equal. (Washington’s commission was from Dinwiddie, a colonial governor.) Indeed, Dagworthy saw himself as a commander of the whole force, Virginians as well as Marylanders. The dispute over command was to linger for many months, and brought into focus for Washington his need of a commission as a king’s officer.
¹⁶

He had entertained such thoughts, of course, long before Dagworthy fouled the lines of command. Several of his officers in the Virginia Regiment shared his desire; holding a royal commission offered many advantages, among them higher pay and membership in an army certain of support of all kinds. There was also the matter of prestige. Whenever the two sorts of armies met—regulars and colonials—the regulars used every means to assert their superiority, and the colonials suffered in the fashion of inferiors everywhere. Neither group concealed its feelings, which sometimes led to foolish actions, as Washington had discovered at Great Meadows the year before.

If conflict with Dagworthy had not existed, Washington’s nerves would not have been so ragged, but he would still have agitated for a change in the status of Virginia’s regiment. He had hoped for a new policy when he took command in August, and in early 1756 Dinwiddie gave permission for an appeal to the commander of all British forces in America, Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts. Washington
rode to Boston in February and received a sympathetic but cautious hearing. Shirley obliged him by agreeing that Captain Dagworthy’s authority did not extend to command of the Virginia Regiment but did not agree to issue a royal commission to Washington.
¹⁷

By this time concern over incursions by French-inspired Indians had again appeared, and Washington had little opportunity to persuade anyone else of his need for a commission from the Crown. Indeed, the immediate and persistent menace of the Indians proved intractable to all efforts to meet it. At no time in 1756 or 1757 did the Indians undertake an operation with a large concentrated force; instead they relied on small attacks, usually by less than fifty warriors. Such attacks were made at about the same time or within a few days of one another, by scattered and widely separated bands, hard to discover and harder to oppose with organized force because of the skill and speed of the attackers.

In April 1756, Washington thought that the frontier, as he called the edge of settlements in the West, was near collapse, and he predicted that unless the depredations of the Indians were eliminated, “the Blue-Ridge will soon become our Frontier.” The fighting qualities of the Indians had drawn his respect, and he wrote Governor Dinwiddie that, “however absurd it may appear, it is nevertheless certain that five hundred Indians have it more in their power to annoy the Inhabitants, than ten times their number of Regulars. For, besides the advantageous way they have of fighting in the Woods, their cunning and craft are not to be equaled; neither their activity and indefatigable Sufferings: They prowl about like Wolves; and like them, do their mischief by Stealth.”
¹⁸

Washington never believed in fighting the Indians on their terms, but the tactic he favored—a major expedition in force against Fort Duquesne, an important base for Indians—could not be undertaken until 1758, when General John Forbes, by then the British commander, collected a major army. Forbes would gather in that year a fairly large number of soldiers and would be unencumbered by the suggestions and demands of a colonial legislature. Washington was well supplied with such burdens, principally from a governor and a House of Burgesses. At times he could count on troops from Pennsylvania and Maryland to lend support, but these times were brief, and the soldiers were under their own commanders.