by Ron Chernow
Early on the morning of July 9, Braddock’s advance force, which had grown to some fourteen hundred men, began to ford the Monongahela River in three groups. (The spot stands near present-day Braddock, Pennsylvania.) Each section was led by an officer who was to reappear in the American Revolution. The first party to cross was spearheaded by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage, the son of a viscount and an officer much admired by young Washington. The second party was led by Captain Horatio Gates, said to be the illegitimate offspring of a duke’s housekeeper. The last group to cross in the early afternoon was the five-hundred-man contingent led by Braddock himself, escorted by the weary Washington. All three groups crossed the river without the slightest intimation that a party of nine hundred soldiers from Fort Duquesne lay poised to attack on the other side.
As at Fort Necessity, the French and their Indian allies practiced a terrifying form of frontier warfare that unnerved the British. Letting loose a series of shrill, penetrating war whoops—“the terrific sound will haunt me till the hour of my dissolution,” a shaken British soldier later said—the Indians swooped down suddenly and opened fire on the startled British.24 Before British grenadiers could fire a retaliatory round, the enemy had melted nimbly into the woods. For a short interval, it seemed they had vanished. Then it became clear that they had split into two wings and encircled the British, releasing a hail of bullets from behind trees and well-protected elevated positions. The impressive miter caps of the grenadiers made them tall, conspicuous targets. In the rear with Braddock, Washington heard the ensuing panic, which he still couldn’t see. The vanguard of British troops, he recollected, “were so disconcerted and confused” by the “unusual hallooing and whooping of the enemy” that they soon fell “into irretrievable disorder.”25 The British soldiers had never encountered this North American brand of fighting. “If we saw five or six [of the enemy] at one time,” said one soldier, “it was a great sight and they [were] either on their bellies or behind trees or running from one tree to another almost by the ground.”26 Even as officers tried vainly to subdue the hysterical fears of their men, the latter threw down their muskets and fled helter-skelter. All the while, Indians scalped and plundered the British dead in what became a veritable charnel house by the river.
As Braddock and Washington rode toward this scene of helpless slaughter, panic-stricken redcoats streamed back toward them. After Braddock sent thirty men under Captain Thomas Waggener to climb a hillside and secure a high position, British troops fired at them in the smoky chaos under the mistaken assumption that they were French, while British officers fired at them thinking they were deserters. All thirty men under Captain Waggener were killed by French or British fire. For Washington, who had warned Braddock repeatedly about the unorthodox style of wilderness combat, the situation grimly fulfilled his worst premonitions. Braddock had clung to the European doctrine of compact fighting forces, forming his men into platoons, which made them easy prey for enemy marksmen. Washington now urged Braddock “before it was too late and the confusion became general” to allow him “to head the provincials and engage the enemy in their own way,” Washington recalled years later. “But the propriety of it was not seen into until it was too late for execution.”27 Scholars have noted that Washington probably saw the superiority of Indian fighting methods much more clearly in retrospect than he had at the time.
Braddock handed Washington two directives: to send another party up the exposed hill and to retrieve two lost cannon. With exceptional pluck and coolheadedness, young George Washington was soon riding all over the battlefield. Though he must have been exhausted, he kept going from sheer willpower and performed magnificently amid the horror. Because of his height, he presented a gigantic target on horseback, but again he displayed unblinking courage and a miraculous immunity in battle. When two horses were shot from under him, he dusted himself off and mounted the horses of dead riders. One account claimed that he was so spent from his recent illness that he had to be lifted onto his second charger. By the end, despite four bullets having torn through his hat and uniform, he managed to emerge unscathed.
One close observer of Washington’s heroism was a young doctor and future friend, James Craik. Handsome, blue-eyed, and urbane, Dr. Craik had studied medicine in Edinburgh and was the illegitimate son of a wealthy man in western Scotland. He watched Washington’s exceptional performance that day with unstinting admiration: “I expected every moment to see him fall. His duty and station exposed him to every danger. Nothing but the superintending care of Providence could have saved him from the fate of all around him.”28
Even before the battle, Washington had suffered his fill of British condescension from Braddock. Now he was further embittered by his conviction that the Virginians had fought courageously and died in droves, while British regulars had fled to save their skins. “The Virginians behaved like men and died like soldiers,” he insisted to Dinwiddie. By contrast, “the dastardly behavior of the English soldiers exposed all those who were inclined to do their duty to almost certain death . . . at length, in despite of every effort to the contrary, [they] broke and run as sheep before the hounds . . . And when we endeavored to rally them in hopes of regaining our invaluable loss, it was with as much success as if we had attempted to have stopped the wild bears of the mountains.”29
So many intrepid British officers were killed or wounded—nearly two-thirds of the total—that it led to a complete collapse of the command structure. Among the wounded were Braddock’s two other aides-de-camp. When Braddock was felled by a bullet that slashed through his arm and pierced his lung, only Washington was left to tend him. Braddock had fought with more valor than wisdom, having four horses shot from under him. Washington stretched out the general in a small cart and shepherded him back across the Monongahela. Henceforth Washington received orders from an intermittently lucid Braddock who lay groaning on a stretcher. “I was the only person then left to distribute the general’s orders,” Washington said, explaining that it was difficult to do so because of his own “weak and feeble condition.”30
One order required Washington to relay a message to a Colonel Dunbar, whose division lay forty miles in the rear, to come forward with supplies, medication, and wagons to assist the moaning legions of wounded soldiers. By now Washington had been on horseback for twelve excruciating hours, yet he gathered up the energy to ride all night and execute Braddock’s command. Thirty years later the horror of that night—the black woods, the ghastly cacophony of sounds, the unspeakable heaps of corpses—was still engraved on his memory. “The shocking scenes which presented themselves in this night’s march are not to be described,” he said. “The dead—the dying—the groans—lamentations—and cries along the road of the wounded for help . . . were enough to pierce a heart of adamant.”31 At this point, the fatigue experienced by the sleepless Washington must have been intolerable.
By his reckoning, three hundred soldiers died on the British side, with another three hundred wounded (the true number likely approached one thousand casualties); at least two-thirds, he thought, had been victims of friendly fire. He fulminated against the British soldiers as “cowardly regulars” who had shot down the men ahead of them, even if they happened to be comrades, and was outraged that the British had been routed by an inferior enemy force of nine hundred men.32 “We have been most scandalously beaten by a trifling body of men,” he complained to brother Jack.33 In comparison, French and Indian casualties—twenty-three dead and sixteen wounded—were minuscule.
On the night of July 13, a shattered Braddock lay dying two miles from the Great Meadows, when he said memorably of his shocking defeat, “Who would have thought it?”34 He praised his officers even as he damned his men, saying that “nothing could equal the gallantry and good conduct of the officers nor the bad behavior of the men.”35 Braddock displayed high regard for Washington and recommended that his body servant, Thomas Bishop, find future employment with him. He also gave the young Virginian a red silk sash and a pair of
pistols that the younger man always treasured. Washington oversaw Braddock’s burial, a task that fell to him by default as the only officer left standing to issue orders. After his men dug a trench in the road and lowered the blanket-wrapped body, Washington held an impromptu Anglican service by torchlight. Afraid that Indians might unearth the body and desecrate it, Washington had his wagons ride repeatedly over the grave to hide the freshly turned earth and “guard against a savage triumph . . . thus died a man whose good and bad qualities were intimately blended,” he wrote.36 This stratagem worked, and the French and Indians never located Braddock’s grave.
One suspects that Washington knew that his fond hope of a Royal Army commission had been buried along with the general. The following year Dinwiddie speculated that if Braddock had survived, “I believe he would have provided handsomely for [Washington] in the regulars.”37 Nonetheless Washington’s reputation grew in defeat. As he trotted homeward in late July, clutching his bullet-riddled hat as a battle souvenir, he knew that his well-publicized bravery had enhanced his image in the colonies. The governor of North Carolina congratulated the twenty-three-year-old “on your late escape and the immortal honor you have gained on the banks of [the] Ohio.”38 An admiring correspondent in Philadelphia informed him that Benjamin Franklin had paid tribute to his heroism and that “everybody seems willing to venture under your command.”39
Perhaps the most gratifying response came from the rich, adoring family at Belvoir. The young war hero was lionized by William Fairfax, while Sally Fairfax sent him a sweet bantering note, cautiously cosigned by two friends, that chided him for not rushing to see her. “After thanking heaven for your safe return, I must accuse you of great unkindness in refusing us the pleasure of seeing you this night,” she wrote. “I do assure you nothing but our being satisfied that our company would be disagreeable should prevent us from trying if our legs would not carry us to Mount Vernon this night. But if you will not come to us, tomorrow morning very early, we shall be at Mount Vernon.”40 An unabashed affection for Washington emerges from these Fairfax missives. Much more than merely a young favorite, he had been virtually adopted by the family, which expected great things from him.
In Braddock’s crushing defeat, Washington had established an indelible image as a fearless young soldier who never flinched from danger and enjoyed a special intimacy with death. He had dodged so many bullets that he might have suspected he would escape the ancestral curse of his short-lived family. To Jack, Washington speculated that he was still alive “by the miraculous care of Providence that protected me beyond all human expectation. I had 4 bullets through my coat and two horses shot under and yet escaped unhurt.”41 In a stupendous stroke of prophecy, a Presbyterian minister, Samuel Davies, predicted that the “heroic youth Col. Washington” was being groomed by God for higher things. “I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto preserved [him] in so signal a manner for some important service to his country.”42
Washington’s derring-do even fostered a lasting mystique among the Indians. A folk belief existed among some North American tribes that certain warriors enjoyed supernatural protection from death in battle, and this mythic stature was projected onto Washington. Fifteen years later he encountered an Indian chief who distinctly recalled seeing him at the battle by the Monongahela and told how he had ordered his warriors, without success, to fire directly at him. The chief had concluded that some great spirit would guide him to momentous things in the future.
Perhaps the most enduring influence of Braddock’s defeat was the altered colonial view of British power, formerly deemed to be invincible. “This whole transaction gave us the first suspicion that our exalted ideas of the prowess of British regular troops had not been well founded,” said Benjamin Franklin.43 Although Braddock had led the biggest British force ever to undertake an operation in the colonies, it had ended in a resounding failure. Washington had witnessed something hitherto unthinkable for loyal colonials: the British Empire could be defeated on a distant continent. For all of Braddock’s derision of colonial troops, they had shown much more courage than the vaunted British regulars. It had been trained British soldiers who all too often had killed their brethren with misplaced fire. Washington was still imbued with the professional standards of the British military, but he had been exposed to the forest warfare perfected by their adversaries and had learned lasting lessons. One report published after the battle told of Washington urging Braddock to split up his troops while the general “obstinately persisted in the form of a field battle, his men standing shoulder to shoulder.”44 Braddock’s defeat spawned a new awareness of the futility of European military practices on American soil, which later emboldened Washington and other colonists to believe that a ramshackle army of rough frontiersmen could defeat the world’s foremost military machine.
CHAPTER SIX
The Soul of an Army
THE DISGRACEFUL DEFEAT of Edward Braddock exposed the vulnerability of western Virginia to attack. Every time the Indians staged a raid in the Shenandoah Valley, terrified British settlers streamed back across the Blue Ridge Mountains to the safety of older settlements. By mid-August 1755, the assembly in Williamsburg voted forty thousand pounds to protect the colony from such threats, and Washington’s name was bandied about as the favored candidate to command a newly reconstituted Virginia Regiment. Evidently the mere prospect that Washington might be appointed elicited stiff resistance from Mary Washington, for George sent her a terse note, justifying his impending decision and holding his blazing temper in check, if barely. After his customary “Honored Madam,” he went on: “If it is in my power to avoid going to the Ohio again, I shall. But [if] the command is pressed upon me by the general voice of the country and offered upon such terms as can’t be objected against, it would reflect dishonour upon me to refuse it and that, I am sure, must, or ought, to give you greater cause of uneasiness than my going in an honourable com[man]d.”1 One notes the pointed rebuke tucked into that word “ought.” Everyone in the colony seemed to cheer on George Washington as a bona fide hero except his own mother.
The same day Washington wrote to his mother—one suspects he already knew of his appointment—Governor Dinwiddie offered to make Washington, twenty-three, not only the colonel in charge of the Virginia Regiment but the supreme commander of all military forces in Virginia. In a measure of Washington’s growing self-confidence, he bargained aggressively for a better deal, including the power to name field officers and recruit soldiers, plus an expense account of one hundred pounds yearly. As would be apparent later on, Washington was always reluctant to assume responsibility without the requisite powers to acquit himself honorably. As he put it, “No person who regards his character will undertake a command without the means of preserving it, since his conduct is culpable for all misfortunes and never right but when successful.”2 His hesitation at this moment of meteoric ascent also banished any appearance of an unseemly rush to power. Developing a mature instinct for power, Washington began to appreciate the value of diffidence, cultivating the astute politician’s capacity to be the master of events while seeming to be their humble servant. Two weeks later, on August 31, 1755, a decent interval having elapsed, George Washington agreed to become commander in chief of all forces raised in Virginia. He was to remain extremely proud that the Virginia Regiment was the first to see service during the French and Indian War, a conflict not yet officially declared at the time of Braddock’s defeat.
Determined to look every inch the new commander, Washington opened an account with a London agent to purchase clothing and other luxury goods. He selected a merchant named Richard Washington, mistakenly believing they were related, and told him, “I should be glad to cultivate the most intimate correspondence with you.”3 To defray his expenses, he sent ahead three hogsheads of tobacco. Washington was launching a new role as a country squire, seeking a social standing commensurate with his newfound military renown. He also took his first step to buy on credit, providing a bill of exchange to
cover shortfalls in his account.
Among his first purchases, Washington ordered ruffles, silk stockings, and gold and scarlet sword knots to complete his elegant costume as commander. He had already sketched out uniforms for his officers, telling them in vivid terms what they should don: blue coats with scarlet cuffs and facings, scarlet waistcoats trimmed with silver lace, and “every one to provide himself with a silver-laced hat of a fashionable size.”4 From London, Washington also ordered two handsome livery suits, emblazoned with his coat of arms, for his servants. In several details, including the scarlet waistcoats and silver-laced hats, the livery suits matched the officers’ uniforms, making it clear that Washington planned to ride about in high style, accompanied by fancily dressed servants and soldiers.
As chief of the Virginia Regiment, Washington confronted an awesome task, having to police a frontier 350 miles long against “the cruel incursions of a crafty, savage enemy,” as he put it.5 He had to supervise fifty officers and a few hundred men and groused about “indolent” officers and “insolent” soldiers.6 As regimental commander, Washington received a comprehensive education in military skills, running the gamut from building barracks to arbitrating pay disputes. As he supervised every aspect of his operation, his phenomenal capacity for detail became apparent. A young man with a mission, Washington wanted to prove that he could transform colonial recruits into buffed and polished professionals on a par with anything England could muster. As always, he worked assiduously at self-improvement, perusing Humphrey Bland’s A Treatise of Military Discipline, a manual popular in the British Army.