Empires at War

by Jr. , William M. Fowler

  Contrecoeur and Beaujeu agreed that the fort was as good as lost. Their best course of action was to fall back toward Lake Erie in order to cover the approach to Niagara, their most vital fort. With fewer men and inferior weapons they could not defeat the enemy, but with the element of surprise a quick blow might delay him. Beaujeu therefore devised a plan to take all the available troops—about three hundred men—and to lay an ambush for the English, while Contrecoeur remained behind to prepare the evacuation. Neither officer believed that the French could actually stop Braddock. Beaujeu's gallant mission was to buy time, not to win a battle.

  On the evening before he planned to march, Captain Beaujeu walked to the nearby Indian encampment. For more than two decades Beaujeu had served and fought with Indians. He knew them well; he likely spoke their languages. He understood that they would never stand and fight within a doomed fort; would they, however, join him in a quick attack?

  As he entered the camp, Indians of a dozen nations crowded close about him. "Here were Delawares from the Susquehanna . . . , and Shawanoes from Grave Creek and the Muskingum; scattered warriors of the Six nations; Objiwas and Pottawattamies from the far Michigan; Abenakis and Caughnawageas from Canada; Ottawas from Lake Superior . . . , and Hurons from the falls of Montreal and Lorette."3 Beaujeu beseeched the chiefs to join him. Their spokesman replied: "What Father do you wish to die and sacrifice us? The English are more than four thousand men, and we are only eight hundred and you wish to go and attack them! You see at once that you have no sense. We must have till tomorrow to decide."4

  In the morning Beaujeu and his men made their confessions to the post chaplain, Father Deny Baron. At mass Beaujeu knelt before Father Baron and received the sacrament. He was naked to the waist. Only the light color of his skin and an officer's gleaming gorget hanging from his neck distinguished him from the Indians gathered outside the fort. After the final blessing, the captain and his men drew their powder and ball and marched toward the gate. As he passed the Indian encampment, Beaujeu paused to ask if the chiefs had made their decision. "We cannot march," they told him. Beaujeu shouted back, "I am determined to go and meet the enemy. Will you let your Father go alone?" As the Indians murmured among themselves, a runner burst through the crowd and announced breathlessly that the English had forded the Monongahela and were approaching the fort, marching in close formation. Hearing the news, a Delaware called out that they would "shoot um down all one pigeon."5

  The news stirred the camp. "You see my friends," Beaujeu challenged the excited warriors, "the English are going to throw themselves into the lion's mouth. They are weak sheep who pretend to be ravenous wolves. Those who love their father, follow me! You need only hide yourselves in the ravines which line the road, and when you hear us strike, strike yourselves. The victory is ours!"

  Beaujeu judged his audience well. Unlike disciplined European troops who would charge blindly to their own death if ordered by their officers, these fighters needed to be persuaded by rhetoric and leadership that victory was at hand. War whoops sounded. Warriors rushed toward open kegs of flints, powder, and shot and filled their powder horns and bullet pouches. Within minutes nearly 650 Indians joined Beaujeu and his men and headed down the path toward the English. There was no time for a plan. In any case the Indians would never have listened. It was a French and Indian mob.

  Beaujeu's intelligence was correct. The British line of march to the fort had crossed the Monongahela twice, first at the upper ford and then again at the lower. The scout had only seen the first crossing. Braddock's light horse crossed first, closely followed by the advance guard made up of grenadiers, a detachment from the Forty-fourth Regiment, and half of the independent New York company commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage.6 As had been the case during the entire march, the soldiers followed sound tactical doctrine. Flanking parties went out. Once the riverbanks were secured, artillery was brought up to cover the main force. As soon as Gage's men were over the embankment, St. Clair's engineers arrived to slope back the steep riverbank and widen the path for men, wagons, and artillery to pass. While the advance guard pushed ahead, the main body, with Braddock leading, crossed the river. Not far ahead Gage's men secured the lower ford for the second crossing. Thus far, aside from a few sightings of Indians, the enemy was nowhere to be seen. By noon on July 9 the men reached the second ford and waded across. Braddock ordered the colors broken out, and the band struck up the "Grenadiers March." Close to his goal, Braddock told Gage to forge ahead and make camp about three miles from Duquesne. The rest of the column would catch up, bivouac for the night, and then march to the fort in the morning.

  As the British made their way through the forest with clocklike precision, Beaujeu and his mixed force hurried toward them. The captain had planned to catch the enemy at the second ford, but the Indian conference at the fort had delayed him, and Braddock was safely across. In the distance Beaujeu could hear the sound of drums and fifes and the noise of axes felling trees. Grenadiers, four abreast, marched steadily forward. Two hundred yards in front of the British column rode a small detachment of horsemen, and on either side flanking parties slashed their way through the undergrowth. Behind the advancing wedge trudged St. Clair's engineers, clearing the road for the main body. A quarter of a mile back from them, Braddock rode with the main column. Harry Gordon was with the engineers, supervising the road clearing. Perhaps it was the midday sun glistening off Beaujeu's gorget that first caught his eye, but in an instant Gordon saw the Frenchman crashing out of the forest with what seemed to be a horde of men cascading behind him. One horseman at the front turned his mount and yelled back to the advance guard, "The Indiens was upon us."7 Scattered firing broke out, war whoops echoed, and Beaujeu waved his cap in the air, directing his men to move left and right into the underbrush. As quickly as they had appeared, the French and Indians disappeared into the wood.

  Gordon and his engineers fell back. An officer ordered the grenadiers to fix bayonets and form up in street-firing ranks. They fell in on a four-man front several ranks deep and began firing ahead. After the front rank volleyed, it stepped aside, and the second and third ranks advanced and fired in turn. For years these men had trained in this tactic, and they behaved instinctively and admirably. On the third volley Beaujeu took a ball in the head and fell dead. Captain Jean-Daniel Dumas took command. Whether by instinct or by order, Dumas's men divided like a tuning fork and came down under cover along the flanks of the grenadiers, felling them one by one.

  Gage tried to rally his men and advanced against the hidden enemy. The soldiers fired blindly into the woods, cutting down men in their own flanking parties who were struggling to get back to the road. Within minutes most of Gage's officers were either wounded or dead. Command disintegrated, ranks broke, and soldiers scurried rearward. Those who remained fought with fierce tenacity, "having only death" before them.8

  Shortly after hearing the fire, Braddock impetuously ordered Colonel Ralph Burton forward with eight hundred men while the convoy escort, about three hundred men, stood in place by the wagons facing outward. At the rear, one hundred men under Sir Peter Halkett fixed bayonets and awaited orders. The road was barely twelve feet wide, and Burton's men had to struggle to maneuver by wagons and artillery. Jittery men and nervous horses collided. As Burton drew close to the firing, engineers and grenadiers came tumbling down the road toward them. Having driven back the flanking parties on the English right, the French had taken nearby high ground and were firing into the English ranks. All was confusion. A wounded St. Clair screamed, "For God's sake [take] the rising ground on our right."9 Braddock ordered Burton up the hill on the right flank. The colonel waved his grenadiers forward and then fell from his saddle, hit by enemy fire. The men "retreated very fast."10 Washington, still weak from a bout with dysentery, approached the embattled general and asked permission to take men into the woods to dislodge the attackers. Braddock refused. He would not scatter his force. His men were trained to stand together, deliver fire, and a
dvance with the bajronet. Yet soldiers running back and fresh reserves moving forward met and tangled on the narrow road in a twisted mass of falling redcoats.

  Halkett left his men in the rear and rode forward. Officers were special targets, particularly those on horseback. A blizzard of shot swept him off his saddle, and when his son James rode to his father's side, he too died in a hail of fire. Braddock's personal secretary, William Shirley Jr., son of the governor, died on the road. With the exception of Washington, every officer on Braddock's staff went down, either killed or wounded.

  Braddock was in the heat of the action the whole time. Miraculously, the general survived. Four horses were shot out from under him. For nearly an hour and a half he rode amid the disintegrating ranks, applying the flat of his sword to the backs of men, ordering them to form up. By mid afternoon, with nearly half his force wounded or dead, Braddock gave the order to withdraw. The men needed no encouragement, and as the drums sounded the signal they wasted no time retreating down the road. Braddock was on his fifth mount when a ball tore through his right arm and lodged in his side. The wound was mortal.

  When the men of the rear guard saw the look of defeat on the faces of their comrades coming down the road, they tore "the gears from their Horses and galloped quite away."11 Washington was disgusted at what he saw. "Sheep pursued by dogs" was his description of the British rout.12 Betraying his own personal biases, Washington praised his fellow Virginians and the gallant British officers but condemned the enlisted men as cowards.

  Back they fled, abandoning wagons, artillery, and the dead and wounded. According to one British officer, the French and Indians "pursued us butchering as they came as farr as the other side of ye River; during our crossing, they shot many in the Water, and dyed the stream with their blood, scalping and cutting them in a most barbarous manner."13 No one paused at the river's edge. They jumped in and splashed for the opposite bank. Dumas and his men did not pursue them. There was no need; victory was complete. Collecting spoils left on the battlefield rather than hunting down frightened soldiers became the focus of their attention.

  Hundreds of bodies littered the bloody road. Every fallen British soldier was scalped and his body stripped. Tons of equipment that had been hauled through the wilderness fell to the French. Braddock's defeat delivered more arms, powder, ball, and cannon to Dumas than Governor Duquesne could have sent him in an entire year. Thanks to the booty left on the road, the French could easily arm their Indian allies.

  By evening, Dumas and his soldiers were back at the fort, where the strains of a Te Deum could be heard from the chapel. Outside, Indians celebrated by dancing, feasting, and torturing their prisoners. After mass the French officers sat at their mess and examined a special prize: Braddock's dispatch box, which included his secret instructions. The British plans to attack the French posts were laid bare. Within hours Contrecoeur's most trusted men were carrying these documents to Quebec.14

  On the far side of the Monongahela, exhausted and frightened soldiers began to regain their composure. Relieved that the enemy had not pursued them, the remnants of Braddock's mauled army stopped to rest in scattered groups. Washington reported, " [I] had four Bullets through my Coat, and two Horses shot under me." He was near Braddock when the general fell, and he helped to lift him onto a cart to carry him to safety. Fearing that the worst might not be over, and that the French might continue their advance, the dying general ordered Washington to ride ahead and summon Dunbar. For the moment, Braddock's fear of further attack was groundless. Through the night his tattered army filed down the road so laboriously carved out only a few days before. By evening of the following day, July 10, some soldiers had reached the banks of the Youghiogheny River, nearly forty miles from the scene of the disaster. It had taken Braddock's troops weeks to march to Duquesne in good order, but less than two days to retreat in disorder. Once across the Youghiogheny, they walked another few miles. By dark the tattered remnants, Braddock included, had arrived at the farm of Christopher Gist, where they were greeted with smoldering ruins. But Dunbar was only six miles away. Late the next morning, July 11, relief arrived.15

  As his life ebbed, survival, not victory, was Braddock's objective. He ordered Dunbar to organize the withdrawal to Fort Cumberland, fifty miles to the east. For the next two days the surgeons tended the wounded while burial parties went about their grim work. Supplies that had been left in Dunbar's care were thrown into bonfires so they would neither delay the retreat nor fall into enemy hands. On the thirteenth Braddock resigned his command to Dunbar. The colonel gave the order to break camp and begin the sad march east. Barely one mile down the road, Braddock died. He was quietly buried under the road that he had built. After a brief service, his men marched solemnly over the grave to obliterate any signs of the burial site.

  Dunbar and his troops reached Fort Cumberland on July 21. The retreat did not end there. Leaving a force of provincials to hold the garrison, Dunbar took the remainder of the army and marched to Philadelphia. Braddock's defeat and Dunbar's withdrawal left western Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland at the mercy of the French and Indians. Colonials cursed Braddock and Dunbar with almost as much vehemence as they damned the French and Indians. Officers who had been present at the disaster, including Washington, rushed to defend themselves and heap blame on the dead general. Nearly thirty years later Washington had a different, more judicious view of those events and his commander: "He was brave even to a fault and in regular Service would have done honor to his profession. His attachments were warm, his enmities were strong, and having no disguise about him, both appeared in full force. He was generous and disinterested, but plain and blunt in his manner even to rudeness."16

  News of Braddock's disaster on the Monongahela arrived in London in mid-August. Those dispatches joined others recently delivered that chronicled another British failure—this one at sea.

  On February 12, 1755, Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, commander of the Home Fleet, had hoisted his flag on Terrible at Spithead. Two days later, thirty-five ships of the line were ordered to prepare for sea, and a "hot press" swept the streets for seamen. For the moment, however, no attempt was made to blockade the French coast. That costly mistake gave the French a chance to send forces to the West Indies and Canada.17 As Hawke's captains filled their forecastles and took in stores, spies reported that the French were preparing to sail from Brest. Realizing what delaying the blockade may have cost them, the Admiralty rushed to close the gate, but a French convoy was already at sea. Their only choice was to dispatch a flying squadron in the hopes of intercepting the French. On March 18 the cabinet hurriedly issued secret orders dispatching a naval force to sail "directly to Nova Scotia" to "fall upon" and "prevent French ships from going into or landing any forces on the continent of North America." Admiral Edward Boscawen was in command.18

  Known below decks as "Wry-necked Dick," a nickname he earned by his habit of cocking his head to one side, Boscawen had been in the king's service for nearly thirty years. Never before, however, had he been in such a delicate situation. His orders were to attack a nation with whom England was ostensibly at peace. Braddock's orders, at least, made the pretense that the general was acting in the name of his king to reclaim land illegally occupied. Knowing that a French convoy was ahead of him carrying troops and supplies for Quebec, Boscawen hoped that his fast warships could overtake it. A tough voyage across the Atlantic drove his squadron to a position several degrees north to a landfall at Cape St. Francis near the entrance to Conception Bay, Newfoundland. Boscawen tacked southward toward the Cabot Strait to scour the approaches to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

  Dunkirk, under the command of Captain Richard Howe, was in the van. On June 7 Howe stopped and questioned an English "banker" hand-lining for cod. The fisherman reported that he had seen a large Frenchman go by crammed with soldiers. Howe reported this to the admiral, and the next day they sighted four large vessels bound west. Howe set out in pursuit, with the rest of the squadron following, but by m
idday a heavy fog closed in and forced the English to shorten sail. When the fog lifted the next morning, Boscawen spied three Frenchmen to windward. The admiral hoisted French colors, and the three unsuspecting Frenchmen approached him. Light winds kept them from meeting, and as night settled in, Boscawen waited patiently for morning, when he would spring his trap.

  At first light on June 9, the closest French vessel signaled Boscawen. Not knowing French codes, the admiral gave the wrong reply, and the French ran for it. Howe gave chase and came within hailing distance of the rearmost French ship, Alcide. He ordered the vessel to heave to and await his admiral. Alcide's captain, Toussaint Hocquart, rightly refused to obey the order and then asked if England and France were at peace or war. Howe hollered back "Peace, Peace."