Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  Many important figures in the British government read the pamphlet. And now counted among those leaders was George Sackville. After recovering from his battle injury, Sackville had gone right back into the fight against France on the European continent in 1747, once again serving under the Duke of Cumberland, son of George II. He was as ferocious and single-minded as before; the Duke praised him for his “gallantry,” and gave him the honor of proceeding across the battlefield (with “a French trumpet and an English drum”) to the opposing French officer and negotiating terms by which the French would surrender.

  Afterward, in 1751, Sackville headed back to Ireland, accompanying his father on his second stint as Lord Lieutenant. But this time, the personalities of the two men fully asserted themselves: the mild-mannered Duke of Dorset took a back seat and allowed his unstoppable thirty-five-year-old son to run the government in all but name.

  Bringing his battle-honed decisiveness to bear, George Sackville made a quick decision to completely upend the recent course of affairs. Over the previous two decades, under the leadership of the hugely popular politician Henry Boyle, the Irish had taken several steps toward self-government, which successive English viceroys in Ireland had allowed. Sackville committed himself to aggressively reversing the trend—against the better judgment of his father, who knew that tact was needed in handling the Irish. He focused on the issue of Irish tax revenues. There was a surplus, which the Irish parliament intended to use; Sackville insisted instead that it be turned over to England. Sackville recalled vividly how the same issue was spun by Irishmen, including his mentor Jonathan Swift, during his first years in Dublin. He would now put his foot down and make the Irish remember that they were subjects of the British crown.

  Boyle, the longtime Speaker of the Irish House and as skillful and wily a politician as Sackville was headstrong, protested the move in a way that would be copied by American subjects a decade later, as an unjust instance of taxation without representation. It was Irish money, raised by taxing the Irish people; it should be theirs to do with as they saw fit. Under Boyle’s leadership, virtually all political factions in Ireland united in outrage against the English overlords. Sackville tried to maneuver by quietly offering Boyle a massive bribe: a pension of 1,500 pounds a year plus a peerage, if he would back down. Boyle was seventy years old; after a lifetime in politics, he knew exactly how to play this. “If I had a peerage, I should not think myself greater than now that I am Mr. Boyle,” the Speaker declared, making the matter public and receiving cheers from the masses. As for the bribe, he said, “I despise it as much as the person who offers it.”

  Satiric poems were pasted on the streets of Dublin, lampooning Sackville and his father. Ballads sprouted. Angry crowds denounced father and son, and there was near-rioting in the Irish parliament. Meanwhile, a commemorative medal featuring a bust of Henry Boyle appeared. Decades later the affair was still talked of as the true beginning of Irish unrest over English rule. The matter brought such an avalanche of scorn on Sackville’s father, in whose name it had all been done, that he quietly ended his public career.

  Whatever he may have felt for the suffering he caused his father, George Sackville returned to London and found that the Irish commotion he had stirred had had something like the opposite effect on his own reputation. England was building an empire; empires did not grow of their own accord and they didn’t rise to greatness by coddling the people they conquered. Many in England thought it was dangerous to grant a colonized people the kind of freedom the Irish had been allowed. What an empire needed was men of grit: men like Sackville. He received a military promotion, to the rank of major-general. He stood for, and won, a seat in Parliament, where he gave a series of forceful speeches. “Nobody stands higher,” the politician and gossip Horace Walpole wrote of him. “Nobody has more ambition and common sense.”

  By 1754, when George Washington’s journal was published in London, George Sackville was a rising star in politics and the military. In both arenas, his great and special hatred was for France. Whenever the subject of French machinations on the world stage came up, his great gibbous eyes gleamed. French politics, as far as he was concerned, consisted of years of duplicity followed by sudden pushes for territory at the expense of Britain. If he ever needed a reminder, there was the French bullet still lodged in his chest. With this colonial militiaman, George Washington, reporting that 1,500 French soldiers were massing in the wilds of the Ohio Country, at the back door of the thirteen colonies, threatening British expansion in America, George Sackville understood better than anyone what was coming.

  Throughout the spring of 1754 newspapers all over the colonies picked up the story of Washington’s winter mission into the Ohio Country. While Americans began to acquaint themselves with the name of Washington, and with the increasingly threatening actions of the French, those in New York also had the chance to read an advertisement:

  Run Away from George Mumford of Fisher’s Island, the 27th Instant, four Men Servants, a white Man and Three Negroes, who hath taken a large two-mast Boat, with a square Stern. . . . The White Man named Joseph Heday . . . The Negroes are named Fortune, Venture and Isaac; Fortune is a tall, slim comely well spoken fellow. . . . Venture had a Kersey dark colour’d Great Coat . . . he is a very tall Fellow, 6 feet 2 inches high, thick square shoulders, large bon’d, mark’d in the Face, or scar’d with a knife in his own country. Isaac is a Mustee, a short Fellow, seemingly clumsy and stiff in his Gate. . . .

  Whoever takes up and secures said Run-aways, so that their Master may have them again, shall have TWENTY POUNDS, New-York Currency, Reward and all reasonable charges paid, or equivalent for either of them; or secure the Boat, that the Owner may have her again, shall be rewarded by GEORGE MUMFORD.

  Venture gave no one the chance to claim the reward. Instead, after several days of hiding out, and after long and careful consideration of his situation, he took action himself. Reasoning that Heday would have made for the village of Southampton, he hired two local men to track him down. They did what was asked of them, and returned with the Irishman.

  Heday came back cowed and sheepish, an altogether different man from the one on Fishers Island who had bragged about the great adventure of escape. Venture was in command now. He ordered Heday, Fortune and Isaac into the boat, and steered a course for Fishers Island. The other three put up no fuss. At the plantation, George Mumford was greeted by the curious sight of the giant African whom his son had brought into their lives as a boy, and who had run off from him, returning of his own free will and bringing his compatriots with him, as though he had been sent out to capture them. But Venture didn’t try to put such a spin on things. He confessed to Mumford that they had all made a break for it, that Heday had been “the ringleader of our revolt,” and that after Heday had in turn betrayed the rest of them he, Venture, had come to his senses and decided the most practical course was for him to bring them all back and put them at their master’s mercy.

  George Mumford was sixty-five years old, hardened by years as a slave ship captain and driver of slaves on his plantation. He had seen a lot, yet he had never encountered such a thing as this. Dealing with Joseph Heday was easy: Mumford was sick of him, but also wasn’t about to let him go. He turned him in to the authorities in New London, Connecticut, and he wound up in prison there. Venture was another matter. Mumford would have to ponder what course to take with him.

  Some newspaper accounts of Washington’s Ohio Country journey highlighted the French menace. Other writers did a bit of homework and discovered that Washington’s name was tied to the Ohio Company, and suggested that in his journal he overstated the threat from the French in order to get military support for a financial scheme from which he and his friends would benefit. It enraged Washington to have his honor besmirched, though he could not deny that the publication of the journal of his trip could only support the cause of the Ohio Company and its backers.

  In Williamsburg, meanwhile, he found the atmosphere chaotic. Th
e government had voted to muster an army of volunteers to defend Virginia’s borders, and farmers were scrambling to sign up after being promised land in exchange for their service. And he found that he was now something of a celebrity. The attention pleased him, but he expected it to yield tangible results. He wanted a raise and a promotion.

  As had happened with Sackville, while some prominent people in Virginia were critical of Washington’s aggressiveness, this same quality did indeed earn him a promotion—to lieutenant colonel. But his most ardently held wish, to become a regular officer in the British army, was thwarted again. The commission was still only in Virginia’s militia. And when the Virginia General Assembly voted to grant him a very modest reward of 50 pounds for his work, he responded with indignation. “I was employed to go on a journey in the winter (when I believe few or none would have undertaken it),” he wrote to his brother Augustine, “and what did I get by it? My expenses borne!” The prominent qualities of his youthful self—seething ambition and an acute sense of being slighted—were on full display.

  But he had little time to stew, for Dinwiddie asked him to lead the new “army” back into the wilderness to assess the movements of the French. It was a mission that required caution, cunning and restraint: he had 160 untrained recruits, and the latest report said the French were already at the Forks of the Ohio, building a redoubt they were calling Fort Duquesne, with a force of 1,000 seasoned soldiers. Washington’s best move would be to make his presence known and otherwise await reinforcements. He was, in any event, not to provoke but “to act on the Difensive.” But the prime motivation of a Virginia planter—the pursuit of honor—was a fire raging in Washington’s psyche. He allowed himself to believe that impossible odds could be translated into great glory. He marched his men through the gnarled and mountainous wilds of Maryland and western Pennsylvania, retracing the route he had just followed. He had sent word to Tanacharison, and the Half King and a contingent of Indian warriors met up with him. Almost at once the two men fell to arguing about tactics and goals. Washington couldn’t figure out what game the Indians were playing, whose side they were truly on, English or French. It seems not to have occurred to him that they were on their own side. But he needed them now, so he settled for whatever help they would provide.

  Indian scouts informed him that a party of French soldiers had left the Forks and were headed toward them. Fifty miles south of the Forks, they learned the French party—35 men—was on the other side of a heavily wooded hill. Rather than try to evade them, Washington headed up the hill with 40 of his men and a group of Indians; they marched all night, and at dawn reached the top of a ravine. The French soldiers were camped just below, nestled in a deep cleft in the rocks. The Indians slipped around to block the path out of the ravine, and the Americans took positions on top.

  What happened next would be the subject of intense dispute. A shot sounded in the early morning air; it was followed by fifteen minutes of musket fire. Washington’s men easily routed the enemy, killing ten of them and losing only one of their own. For a moment, Washington must have thought that he had won a great victory, surprising a war party that was attempting to surprise him.

  Then chaos erupted again. According to one of the French soldiers, as the leader of the French, Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville, stepped forward, Tanacharison cried out to the man in French and with familiarity—“Tu n’es pas encore mort, mon père” (You aren’t dead yet, father)—split his head open with a tomahawk and rinsed his hands with the man’s brains. The rest of the Indians took this as a signal to scalp the other French victims.

  Washington was stunned—whatever knowledge he had of the Iroquois and the role they perceived for themselves vis-à-vis the two European powers, he was certainly not used to seeing Iroquois justice graphically meted out; if there was a message in this action, Washington was unable to fathom its meaning. When he got control of his nerves and of the situation, he learned that a letter Jumonville had been carrying, which was to be delivered to English authorities, was a declaration that the Ohio Country was French territory. The French contingent, in other words, had not been an attack party, but had been a mirror image of the diplomatic mission he had led a few months earlier.

  Washington couldn’t accept that his men had killed a diplomatic messenger. He was convinced the letter was a cover for warlike intentions. He believed he had taken part not in a massacre but in a battle—his first battle—between Europe’s two colonizing empires. And he had frankly enjoyed the experience. He later wrote to his brother, “I heard the Bullets whistle, and believe me, there was something charming in the sound.”

  Nevertheless, he realized that when word got back to the main French contingent at the Forks they would come for him. He decided to retreat to a wide meadow and have his men build a palisade fort in the center of it. From here, they would hold off the attackers.

  Tanacharison—who later described Washington as “good-natured” but inexperienced, and complained that he treated the Indians not as allies but like “slaves”—thought this an idiotic plan, and said so. Some reinforcements arrived—Washington’s army now totaled 400 men—but they were still drastically outnumbered. “Fort Necessity,” as Washington named it—as if to buttress his argument with Tanacharison that he had no choice but to fight here—was primitive, and horribly exposed. Before the French arrived, Tanacharison and the rest of the Indians disappeared into the forest.

  The French, when they came, were strong and well disciplined. As if they needed more impetus to attack, their leader was the brother of Jumonville; on the way to meet the Americans, they had passed the site of the massacre and looked with horror on the man’s desecrated body. When they attacked the pathetic little fort, however, it was not with fury but with precision. The French soldiers took positions behind trees and rocks and picked off the horses that were corralled outside, then aimed for the men inside. When more than a hundred of his men lay dead or wounded, Washington agreed to a surrender.

  Chapter 5

  WORLD ON FIRE

  Protocol required that George Washington’s surrender be in writing. The French wrote the capitulation document. Washington signed it.

  Later, in an attempt to avoid disgrace, Washington tried to transfer blame for the diplomatic storm that followed onto his old fencing coach, Jacob van Braam, the Dutchman whom he had once again brought along to translate. In the hours after the battle, as a steady rain fell and the night deepened, he sent Van Braam to the French and the man brought their terms back to Washington, first shouting them over the wind and rain, then, after another parley, on paper. Washington later insisted that he thought the description of the battle that he put his name to said that his men had caused the “death” of the French leader Jumonville. In fact, the French word was “assassination,” which made Washington’s conduct seem considerably more reprehensible. Van Braam’s French was probably not entirely fluent; still, Washington took no blame himself as leader, but declared that he was “deceived by our interpreter.”

  It mattered because of the tumble of events that ensued. Washington’s capitulation—his admission, the French said, that an English colonial officer had opened fire and killed a party of messengers in a time of peace, “assassinating” its leader—was the excuse that France had been waiting for, an excuse to go to war with Britain over territory. It could have been another event, in America or Europe, since both countries were moving headlong in that direction. But as it happened, the series of missteps by an inexperienced provincial officer, whose signature carried the official weight of the British Empire, meant that, for the first time, an event in North America would trigger a war in Europe.

  Once again, important men in London took note of the doings of George Washington. They may have been preparing for war anyway, but this time they were not impressed by the amateurism he had exhibited in their name. A British pamphleteer wrote that the articles of capitulation that Washington signed “were the most infamous a British Subject e
ver put his Hand to.” Lord Albemarle, a general and England’s ambassador to France, spoke for many in the British hierarchy when he wrote that “Washington and many such may have courage and resolution, but they have no knowledge or experience in our profession. Consequently, there can be no dependence on them.” Someone got hold of a copy of Washington’s letter to his brother, in which he bragged about finding the whistle of bullets to be a “charming sound,” and it was published in London Magazine, to snide reactions. (King George remarked, “He would not say so if he had been used to hear many.”) Horace Walpole, who had heaped praise on George Sackville, portrayed Washington’s actions as foolishness with global consequences: “The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.”

  England prepared for war. Politicans gave speeches. Among the most vigorous were those of George Sackville, who, despite the inelegance with which Washington had conducted himself, exulted at the chance to go at the French once again. The king appeared before Parliament and declared that for “the Protection of Our Possessions in America” he was sending troops there, as well as encouraging “the several Colonies there, to exert themselves in their own Defense.”

  Who would lead the British troops in America? The heads of both parties were just now fawning over Sackville. He was widely seen as a hero of two great battles in Europe, and both sides looked to him as a man of wisdom and strength, particularly in military affairs. He was a logical choice to cross the ocean to America and tackle the detested French in the wilds of Pennsylvania and the Ohio Country.