But it proved to be true: as horrified as people in the colonies were by the scope of Braddock’s defeat, newspapers grasped at the reports of Washington’s steadfastness under fire. Robert Orme, Braddock’s aide, perhaps single-handedly sealed a reputation with a quote that was picked up in many publications: “Mr. Washington had two Horses shot under him and his Cloaths shot thro’ in several Places, behaving the whole Time with the greatest Courage and Resolution.” The French threat to the colonists was real, and palpable. People needed something to rally around. Letters, even more than newspapers, were the means by which information was conveyed. From South Carolina to Massachusetts, people wrote of “the merit of Washington,” saying that he “ought to be distinguished and taken notice of.” The man who had been reviled following the disaster at Fort Necessity was now, in the wake of yet another disaster, branded a hero.
Governor Dinwiddie offered Washington command of the entire Virginia Militia. His mother insisted that he reject it. Washington replied to her more sternly than he had in the past: “it would reflect eternal dishonor upon me to refuse.” He accepted, with the idea in his mind that now, finally, he would receive what his inflamed sense of honor demanded: a royal commission.
He traveled to Fort Dinwiddie—a hastily assembled jumble of stockades in the town of Winchester—and assessed the situation of the region. It could scarcely have been more grim. Ohio Country Indians had taken Braddock’s defeat as a signal that in the war between the French and English the English were the weaker party. As it appeared to the colonists, many tribes threw their lot with the French, or else determined that, with Braddock’s army having fallen back, they could freely attack the hundreds of small farms scattered throughout the region, from Pennsylvania into Ohio and throughout Virginia, pushing back against the westward encroachment of colonists. Washington was particularly piqued by the irony that in carrying out their attacks the Indians were using the road that Braddock’s army had created. Soon the same road was crowded with bloodied settlers—survivors of Indian raids—trudging east to safety.
The immediate problem regarding being given command of the Virginia Militia was that there was no Virginia Militia. It had been an ad hoc thing, pulled together as occasion demanded, with great difficulty. Washington had to create the army he was to lead. He himself had had no formal military training. So, as he had done in copying out the “Rules of Civility” at age sixteen, he educated himself, poring over a British military manual published a decade earlier called A Treatise of Military Discipline, which gave him details on “How the Companies are to draw up in Battalion,” “How the Officers are to take their Posts in the Rear by Beat of Drum” and “Method of sending for the Colours,” and outlining the different procedures for “Parapet Firing,” “Street Firing” and “Running-Fire, or Feu de Joye.”
Always a stickler for dress, he personally designed the uniforms for his army (officers would be in blue trimmed with scarlet and silver). He handpicked his officers from the best families, being a great believer in the natural leadership abilities of “persons of quality,” and gave each one instructions on recruiting common soldiers to fill out the ranks. These were mostly farmers and itinerants. They got drunk; they drifted off into the woods. With Indians continuing to rain terror down all around them, and with the threat of being inundated by the French army, Washington came to insist on severe discipline. He ordered vicious floggings as punishment. He had a gallows built as a deterrent to desertion. It didn’t do the trick, so, with the rest of the army watching, he had two serial deserters hanged. He preferred the gallows to a firing squad, he told Dinwiddie, because it “conveyed much more terror.” The soldiers also got to see friendly Indians coming into camp carrying enemy scalps, for which Colonel Washington paid them: a practice that simultaneously reduced the number of enemy combatants, reinforced ties with friends, and impressed the common soldiers with the seriousness of the situation.
While he was busy ordering construction of a series of defensive stockades in Maryland, western Virginia and Pennsylvania, Washington clashed with a Maryland officer named John Dagworthy over who outranked whom. Washington, a colonel, was clearly above Dagworthy, who had the rank of captain; but Dagworthy had a Royal commission, which, he held, made him the superior officer. This was the issue that had dogged Washington’s career. Dagworthy was pushing precisely the button that would send Washington into a fit.
He was so furious that he temporarily removed himself from the war. Putting his personal quest for honor ahead of everything else, he decided now was the time to force the British to give him a royal commission. He got Governor Dinwiddie to allow him to travel to Boston, where he would appeal to Massachusetts governor William Shirley, who was at that moment acting as head of British armed forces.
It was Washington’s first trip through the colonies. He was seeing America in something like its totality for the first time. He knew that his fame had preceded him, and he was determined to build on it. In his quest to win recognition as an officer of the British army, he would put on a proper show. He traveled in full military regalia, with a retinue of four officers and attendants, and had his men sport his colors and his family coat of arms. He arrived in Philadelphia, the largest city in the colonies, in style, parading through the streets on horseback, sword at his side. At six feet two inches, he towered over the men he traveled with, offering those he passed in the streets a physical presence that matched what they had heard about his courage at Braddock’s side. He meanwhile marveled at the sights and sounds of a northern city, with its energy and industry. He was something of a shopaholic, and the experience here was unlike anything available in Virginia; he spent more money than he had, on new clothes, saddles and jewelry.
New York seemed even more exotic. The shops around the fashionable district of Hanover Square exuded French elegance; the same area was also home to the opulent city mansions of Albany’s patricians and other wealthy families. Taverns along the waterfront looked out on a harbor alive with sailing vessels. The streets teemed: bonneted Dutch housewives jostled German Jews and African slaves. British soldiers were everywhere.
Washington danced at balls and conversed at parties. He would have noted that stylish young New York gentlemen affected London mannerisms, crying, “Split me, madam!” or “Damn me!” He gambled with urban card sharps—and lost money to them. He was the guest of the Robinsons, one of the province’s great families; he became interested in his host’s sister-in-law, Polly Phillipse. He took her to see a European wonder, the “Microcosm or the World in Miniature,” a kind of planetarium that played music while the heavenly bodies swept by in their orbits and mechanical figures enacted grand and comic scenes. Washington must have felt like a bumpkin as he gazed at this example of what technical wizards on the Continent were capable of; he went back a second time to see its show.
Heading further north, he traveled through the tranquil, riverine landscape of Connecticut. He rode well east of Albany, where Abraham Yates was working furiously to try to contain the depredations of British soldiers, and eventually reached Boston. The newspaper announced his arrival, calling him “a gentleman who has deservedly a high reputation of military skill, integrity, and valor,” while also noting that “success has not always attended his undertakings.”
The trip succeeded in giving Washington a greater sense of the American colonies, and it gave the American colonies a greater sense of him. But it failed in its chief objective: Governor Shirley did not make him a British officer. Not only that, he decided to put Horatio Sharpe, the governor of Maryland, in command not only of that colony’s militia but of Virginia’s as well. Washington despised Sharpe.
He grumbled all the way home. Instead of going overland the whole way, he decided to take a water shortcut across Long Island Sound at New London. It was here, a few miles from the Stanton house, that he more or less crossed paths with Venture. He continued on to New York, where he paid another visit to Polly Philipse. Riding from there to Philadelph
ia, he could hardly sit in the saddle, for the dysentery struck again; he was forced to spend several days in the city, not taking in sights but recuperating.
When he got back to his post at Winchester, his anger at being snubbed and underappreciated vanished, for he encountered a town filled with refugees from the Indian raids, backwoods people with hollowed, stricken visages who harangued him with stories of children murdered and homes burned. The spectacle cracked open his customary “Roman” facade; he was so moved that he wished himself into a Christ-like role, writing to Dinwiddie, “If bleeding, dying! would glut [the Indians’] insatiate revenge—I would be a willing offering to Savage Fury, and die by inches to save a people!” There was no question now where his duty lay: he would throw himself anew into the defense of his homeland.
But he hadn’t forgotten his rebuff in Boston. Shortly after his return he got the news that Governor Shirley had been replaced as head of the army by the Earl of Loudoun. Washington sat down and wrote a meandering, pouting letter to Loudoun, trying yet again to get the royal commission that he coveted nearly to the point of distraction. Certainly, he wanted to ensure that his region of the country, which he feared Loudoun would neglect in his focus on taking Canada, would be fully defended; but he also wanted the general to see that soldiers of the American colonial militias were the equal of British troops.
Loudoun gave Washington no more satisfaction than he gave to Abraham Yates. In fact, as with Yates, he riled him further. Far from promoting colonial officers into the ranks of the regular army, he planned to import British officers to command the provincial militias, essentially demoting men such as Washington.
Washington tried to rechannel his mounting frustration to a productive purpose when he learned that a new expedition to the Forks of the Ohio was being mounted; he hoped to play a significant role in it. A new British general—John Forbes—would lead the march. Washington dashed off a letter to an officer he had served with on Braddock’s campaign, who he hoped would recommend him to Forbes.
Along with other Virginians, Washington was angered to learn that the new expedition to the Forks would proceed not via the road Braddock’s army had hacked northward from Fort Cumberland but westward from central Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin and other Pennsylvania leaders, communicating directly with officials in England, had continued to push the cause of a military road through their colony, with the idea that it would make Pennsylvania a commercial corridor. The Pennsylvania route was a blow to the financial hopes of Virginia’s Ohio Company.
Given the desperate situation of his homeland, though, and his own quest for honor, Washington still wanted to be part of the Forbes expedition. The army turned out to be much larger than Braddock’s—larger than any operation ever mounted in North America—with nearly 7,000 troops. The summer of 1758 was a hot one, and progress through the wilderness was slow. Diseases swept through the army as the summer advanced. Forbes himself was struck ill and had to be hauled over miles of difficult terrain in a makeshift bed strung between two horses. The army built simple forts along the way, at Raystown and Ligonier, as defensive works and supply stations. Washington spent most of the summer to the south, at Fort Cumberland, organizing men and supplies and awaiting orders to proceed. In September, the advance party of the army approached Fort Duquesne and—just as had happened with Braddock’s army—were ambushed by the French and Indian forces, who had not waited to be attacked but come forward to surprise them. The advance party was routed; Forbes paused to ponder the situation.
Finally, in late November, a plan was put into action. Washington was ordered north to Raystown. Forbes carved out three brigades to march on the fort; Washington was given command of one. They advanced by night—and were utterly bewildered at what they found. As Washington himself reported to Francis Fauquier, who had replaced Robert Dinwiddie as lieutenant governor of Virginia, “The enemy, after letting us get within a day’s march of the place, burned the fort, and ran away (by the light of it) at night. . . .” The English troops, steeled for a hard battle, strolled into the undefended fort. The sudden, bloodless taking of it, Washington noted, “has been a matter of great surprise to the whole army.”
The explanation for the French decision to abandon the Forks lay 400 miles to the northeast, where William Johnson, whom Braddock had named Superintendent of Indian Affairs, had been working with great diligence. Following a series of British successes in Canada, Johnson, in July, had gathered leaders of the Iroquois and other tribes at his estate northwest of Albany, and gotten them to agree to a shift of allegiance. The Iroquois would henceforth back the English, and they would instruct their allies in the Ohio Country to do the same. In October, following from this breakthrough, colonial and Indian officials gathered at Easton, Pennsylvania, and signed a treaty in which the English and colonials agreed to cede back to the Indians certain lands and promised not to establish new settlements or outposts west of the Allegheny Mountains, and in exchange ten nations of Indians agreed they would not fight alongside the French. The French, faced with an increasingly difficult fight in Canada as well as a formal shift in Indian allegiances, thus made a strategic decision to abandon Fort Duquesne.
As far as General Forbes was concerned, a victory was a victory. The English now had what they had long coveted: control of the Forks of the Ohio, and thus of the way west. He ordered a new structure built on the site, which would be called Fort Pitt, after William Pitt, the mentor of George Sackville, who, on becoming Secretary of State, had engineered a turnaround in the British conduct of the war. Forbes likewise decreed that the area between the rivers around the site of the new fort would be called Pittsburgh. Then Forbes, who had studied medicine, and who had diagnosed his own condition as “the bloody flux” (aka dysentery), promptly died.
Pacing amid the smoking ruins of Fort Duquesne, Washington pondered the swift change of events. The Easton treaty didn’t just end the threat of Indian invasions; it meant, essentially, that the war in his part of America was over. Though he was surely relieved for the sake of the local population, Washington’s sharpest concerns were for himself. His bitterness ran deep: there would be no Royal commission. Loudoun, who had given both him and Abraham Yates such cold treatment, had been recalled to London as part of Pitt’s shakeup, but the affronts hadn’t come from one individual. They came from a system, one that, Washington now realized, did not and never would consider him to be worthy of the degree of honor that he felt was his due. Four years earlier he had cast the war against the French in soaringly patriotic terms, as an occasion for “the heroick spirit of every free-born Englishman to assert the rights and privileges of our king,” a chance to win honor and glory by saving “from the invasions of a usurping enemy, our majesty’s property, his dignity, and lands.”
That heartfelt patriotism was now all but dead in him. His anger at the British system had reached its peak. He resigned from military service. He was done with war, done with seeking honor in arms, which, for all his effort, had eluded him. He made his way to his home at Mount Vernon. He wrote his brother that he hoped to find “more happiness in retirement than I ever experienced amidst a wide and bustling World.”
As George Washington retired from the fight against the French in North America, George Sackville found himself astride his horse on a forested hillside above the Prussian town of Minden, gazing down onto another classic scene of European warfare. Column upon column of English infantrymen and their German allies—vivid in their scarlet and gold uniforms topped with tricorne hats and armed with muskets and bayonets—maneuvered into positions against equally uniform lines of French adversaries. He was in command of the allied cavalry. With the grunts and whinnies of horses sounding around him in the morning fog, he awaited his orders. It was August 1, 1759; depending on the outcome of what promised to be a stupendous battle—involving nearly 100,000 men—the war of empire between Britain and France, which had been started five years earlier by the blunders of an inexperienced colonial officer in Nor
th America, might end here.
Sackville had worked assiduously for four years to reach this moment: he was now the highest-ranking man in the British army. After successfully dodging the effort to send him to America to head the troops there—and seeing General Braddock succumb to precisely the fate he had most feared—he had ducked yet again when, following Braddock’s death, leaders tried to enlist him a second time for the American role. They eventually picked Loudoun, and Sackville then maneuvered for the post he really wanted: Secretary of War. He lined up the necessary political backing, only to have his bid rejected by the king. Sackville was angry, but he could not have been surprised. George II had two excellent reasons for denying him the office. For one, it would unnecessarily stir up Irish outrage to have Sackville—whose name in Ireland was now synonymous with English arrogance—added to the cabinet.
The second reason had to do with British politics. Technically, power was split between the two parties: the Whigs and the Tories. The Tory Party had emerged in the previous century in support of the Stuart monarchy; its members rallied to withstand attempts by Parliament to strip the monarchy of most of its powers. The Whigs, meanwhile, generally backed Parliament and the idea of a constitutional monarchy; they advanced liberal political thinking, and took the writings of John Locke on political philosophy as a touchstone. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, these distinctions between the parties had faded. Politicians now divided themselves in terms of loyalties: those who supported George II, the ailing septuagenarian monarch, and those who backed his grandson and heir apparent, the Prince of Wales, who was also named George. The two Georges were utterly different, and they detested one another. Where the king was aggressive, impulsive and famous for his string of mistresses, the younger George was cautious and moralistic. (He once chastely remarked that “the conduct of this old King makes me ashamed of being his grandson.”) The Prince of Wales openly worked against his grandfather’s policies, and a kind of shadow government formed around him; his London mansion, Leicester House, was known as the Young Court.
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