Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (8 page)

For the next two months, little was accomplished in pulling Virginia’s forces together or in creating a strategy that would provide a coherent defense against Indian raids on western settlers. Loudoun undoubtedly had much on his mind besides Virginia and Maryland. South Carolina seemed open to invasion by both the French and the Indians, and the colonies to the north required attention if the French were to be defeated.

Rather than confine his attention to Virginia, he now looked to the problems of all the southern colonies and ordered reinforcements for South Carolina, including a large contingent from the Virginia Regiment
under Lieutenant Colonel Adam Stephen, Washington’s second-in-command. He also ordered the placement of those remaining at Fort Cumberland in the scattered frontier forts. Fort Cumberland was to be turned over to Maryland forces under Captain Dagworthy, who now, by assuming its command, unintentionally did something that pleased Washington.

Instead of protesting against the scattering of the companies of his regiment, Washington followed the new arrangements carefully and urged on their chiefs, all officers who in a sense were responsible to him. He knew of course that the transfer of units of the regiment was temporary, and no doubt he also recognized that opposition to Loudoun would not advance the process of making Virginia’s officers and himself regulars in the British army. He also seemed to allow himself to think again about leaving military service altogether. In these spring months, he shipped a small amount of tobacco—grown at Mount Vernon—to England, using a British firm as his agent. He also took more interest in the family’s plantation, though he had little time to act as a planter.

He gave much more of his time to the affairs of the regiment. He pointed out to Dinwiddie that the power to convene courts-martial had lapsed, and he argued that it should be renewed immediately. The practice of the country people of abetting deserters was also troubling, and he looked for measures that would discourage or even prevent it. There was a natural sympathy between the small farmers and unwilling soldiers, and Washington strove to alter it by pointing to the army’s need for men who remained on duty, not running away, if it was to defend settlers against Indian raids.
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These were matters that defied solution, but as persistent as they were, the need to keep friendly Indians on the colonial side was even more important. There were several tribes that had aligned themselves with the British; most important were the Cherokees and the Catawba in the Carolinas. There was also a scattering of others who preferred the British to the French; most in recent years had drifted westward as settlements of the Americans had gradually filled up lands that once were rich hunting grounds. The lives of all Indians were not easy, and the demands on them by the British and the French further complicated this. They had learned early on that neither European power kept its word, and they had responded for years with a mixture of
defection and loyalty. Neither course proved satisfactory but their choices were limited.

Along with most white colonials, Washington regarded the Indians as “savages”—a word he used to describe them for many years—but he recognized their political skills. The Indians assumed their positions in the struggle according to how it would serve their interests, a way of judging that Washington shared. Both French and British Indians negotiated their allegiances carefully and with force. They knew that they were needed, and they did not disguise their motives. Washington did not expect anything else and he proved himself as demanding a party as the Indians in all the negotiations. The hand he held was often empty, however, and he pressed the governor and legislature to keep up support of the Indians. Their needs, especially those of the Creeks and the Catawba, came down to food, arms, and clothing—demands similar to those of the Virginians he led.
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For several weeks in midsummer 1757, the French-led Indians were especially prominent in his mind. For on June 14, Captain Dagworthy wrote from Fort Cumberland that he had received a report from six Cherokees that the enemy Indians were on the move from Fort Duquesne to attack in considerable force. This, Dagworthy’s report implied, was not a small raid but a major effort to destroy the enemy and to capture Cumberland and other key points. Dagworthy’s reports about this attempt suggested that the invading force included French troops and artillery. Washington wrote his superiors—Governors Dinwiddie and Horatio Sharpe, among others—and began establishing a defense appropriate to the threat. He also considered taking some countering action but did not have time to do anything before he learned that Dagworthy was the victim of a faulty translation of the Indians’ report. There was not an expedition of the enemy coming down on them, and Dagworthy had reached conclusions based on incomprehension of the Indians’ language.

Washington had never thought well of Dagworthy, but he restrained himself and made no comment on his old adversary’s unreliability, instead writing letters to those who had shared his alarm that the Indians were preparing an all-out attack. Perhaps there was a kind of charity in his restraint; he had appealed to the governor for help
in dealing with the Indians before Dagworthy’s folly. He had become convinced of his own “incompetency” in understanding them; someone else and different methods were needed. Washington’s clarity of mind and his willingness to learn from evidence were implicit in his suggestions on how to establish a new relationship with the Indians. He described his plan to John Robinson as “exactly agreeable to the french policy of treating them.” The French “have a proper person appointed to the direction of these affairs; who makes it his sole business to study their dispositions and the art of pleasing them.” Such a person would have the power to negotiate with them and “reward them for every piece of service; and, by timely presents … obtain very great advantages.” The reason for confining the relationship with the Indians to one person was to escape from present practice, which saw Indian affairs as “every bodies business,” with everyone attempting to please them, a situation in which “
one
promises
this
, and another
that
, and few can perform anything, but are obliged to shuffle and put them off, to get rid of their importunities.” The Indians, Washington pointed out, respond by accusing us of “perfidy and deceit” and give little service.
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Washington nominated Christopher Gist as the agent to the Indian tribes. Gist was a longtime trader with the Indians who held him in “great esteem.” He was “well acquainted with their manners and customs,” honest, indefatigable, and patient. The Indians would respond well to him, and, though Washington did not say so, it was obvious that he would as well. Gist had been with him in the Braddock expeditions.

Shifting some of the responsibility of supplying the Indians to Christopher Gist seemed a good, though partial, solution to the problem of keeping them in the friendly fold, but whatever was done in late 1757 could not conceal the mindless drift in British policy and operations. Governor Dinwiddie, who may have been ill at this time, felt helpless and tended to blame Washington for the failure to stop Indian incursions. Washington, who was still sick, did not feel helpless and wanted to take action. He had by this time pretty well given up the hope that the governor would find the men and supplies to allow an attack on Fort Duquesne, or even a lesser attempt to shut down the raids by Indians. He had retained this hope for more than two years, and repeated his requests for aid so often that they seemed to Dinwiddie
like demands. The two men were tired of each other, and when in September Washington asked for permission to leave Fort Loudoun for Williamsburg, in order to better explain himself, he received a flat denial accompanied by an accusation that he was ungrateful to the governor. The dispute between the two was old by this time and reflected little credit on either one. Dinwiddie seems to have suspected that Washington’s motives in asking for leave rested on little more than a desire to have a good time with his friends in Williamsburg. Washington denied the accusation and explained that he wanted to settle his accounts before the governor, who had recently resigned and left the colony for England. A few weeks later, in October, he added that, “among many other reasons,” he had wished to give “a more succinct account than I cou’d in writing the immovable determination of all the Settlers of this country” to leave the West in the face of the persistent Indian attacks. For, as he put it, “if we adhere to our destructive, defensive schemes, there will not long be one soul living on this side of the Blue-Ridge.”
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Washington was not the only figure of authority pleading for a greater effort to protect frontier settlements. John Robinson, from his post as Speaker of the House of Burgesses, also urged that the colony come to the aid of a suffering West. Dinwiddie was packing his bags for England at this time and awaiting a ship to carry him away, but he remained committed to holding the frontier. The means he favored did not differ from Washington’s, though he seems to have held more faith in the militia. What he never fully explained to his critics was that successive military commanders in chief in America failed to share the urgency felt in Williamsburg and the West. The British Empire was a creature of power, but both reluctant and, at this time, incapable of bringing it to bear in the southern colonies.
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By late summer Washington considered the possibility of securing the frontier almost lost, unless friendly Indians could be coaxed into taking a leading role in defense of Virginia. A buildup of the regiment would not occur, and he looked to Indians, in particular Cherokees, to furnish the reinforcement of the regiment, weakened by general neglect and a steady flow of desertions. The Cherokees were, he wrote Dinwiddie, a “brave people” who had “behaved nobly,” but when they appeared at Fort Loudoun, they found almost nothing in material support—weapons, food, and clothing, all items that they expected to
receive. How they were to be held in the British interest was a mystery he could not solve, and he expected them to return home. Some, he conceded, would find their way to the French.
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On the ninth of November, he was so sick that he went home. The regiment’s doctor reviewing his physical symptoms had bled him a week earlier and then twice again on the eighth. The next day, apparently convinced that failure merited repetition, he bled him again. Washington, who the week before had endured the bloody flux and high fever, now was “seized with Stitches & violent Pleuretic Pains.” The complications of this disorder “perplexes” the doctor according to Robert Stewart, temporarily Washington’s second-in-command in Adam Stephen’s absence. The doctor also recommended that Washington immediately change his “air” and go “to some place where he can be kept quiet.” Keeping quiet was not one of the attractions of Fort Loudoun. Washington reluctantly consented to leave for home when the doctor declared that he might not survive if he waited until the governor gave his permission.
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Dinwiddie soon learned of the seriousness of Washington’s illness and did not seek to punish him. That Washington had been sick for three months soon became known in Williamsburg. He did not offer excuses for his return, and when his condition was known, sympathy poured in. He wanted to be with his regiment, but five months of inactivity lay before him.

At Mount Vernon, Washington’s illness gradually came under control, though early in his stay he seems to have despaired of his life. Friends, including George Mason, his old friend and neighbor, urged him to rest and not rush back to the army. In February 1758, he set out to consult a physician in Williamsburg but turned back when the travel strengthened his illness. Much of his stay was spent in bed, where he may have brooded over Virginia’s troubles as well as his own. But by April his physical condition had improved and he returned to the army at Fort Loudoun. On his way back, he visited Martha Custis at White House, in New Kent County. This visit was a part of a quiet courtship, so quiet that few then or later understood its meaning.

He resumed command of the Virginia Regiment without the loss of a step—to his officers it must have seemed that he had never been away.
Washington, however, recognized that he had come back to a military charged with an order to drive out the French. William Pitt the Elder had taken office in Britain, and he wanted the war against the French accelerated everywhere in America. The Virginia legislature—Council and Burgesses—responded to the new circumstances by bringing a second regiment into being, and acting governor John Blair ordered Washington to fill the ranks of his regiment by recruiting.
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Washington saw the fresh activity as a chance to improve his own situation. His immediate commanding officer was Colonel—soon to be Brigadier—John Stanwix, an Englishman he felt comfortable with. To Stanwix and to Colonel Thomas Gage, a comrade from the Braddock expedition, he sent letters asking that they intercede with General Forbes, now the British officer running the American show. Washington was not looking for “military preferment,” he told Stanwix, but only to be “distinguished in some measure from the
common run
of provincial Officers; as I understand there will be a motley herd of us.” The letter to Gage used some of the same language and added that he did not consider his request “unreasonable,” when it was remembered “that I have been much longer in the Service than any provincial officer in America.”
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He was in fact looking for preferment, though perhaps he did not know exactly what shape it should take—nor can we be certain. A part of his wishes was surely that he and his regiment be made a royal regiment, a unit recognized as in the establishment. For himself, besides being a king’s officer, he craved the standing and respect his long service merited.