Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  Newcastle believed that the only reasonable response to this unpromising state of affairs was to treat French actions in Europe and America as two aspects of a single policy. On the Continent he therefore proposed to strengthen what he called his “System,” a set of alliances intended to maintain the balance of power and thus to thwart French designs to impose a “universal monarchy” on Europe. Britain’s commitment to perpetuating a multilateral balance dated from the beginning of the century and had always centered on keeping France out of the Low Countries, where it could disrupt English trade and whence it could easily threaten an invasion from the superb harbors of the Netherlands. To minimize French influence in the Low Countries, Britain subsidized a variety of northern European Protestant states, especially in western Germany, allowing them to maintain armies that could be called into the field against France; it had also relied on maintaining a firm alliance with Austria, a Catholic power with strategically valuable territories in the Netherlands, and with dynastic interests opposed to France. Newcastle thus believed that Britain must offer new subsidies to strengthen the Low Countries, enabling them to refortify and rearm against a French invasion; rebuild friendly ties with Austria; and try to create alliances with Spain and Denmark, countries not yet firmly within the French orbit. These European strategies had their indispensable counterpart in Newcastle’s determination to resist all French efforts at expanding territorial holdings or influence in North America.3

  To make Europe and North America the two sides of Britain’s foreign policy coin applied what Newcastle saw as the most significant lesson of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, where France’s desire to regain Louisbourg had induced it to negotiate a status quo peace, despite the current preeminence of French armies in Europe. Moreover Lord Halifax, the government official most knowledgeable in American affairs, was adamant on the necessity of stopping French expansionism in the New World. As the man responsible for supervising (and hence corresponding with) all of the colonial governors, Halifax also was the first to be convinced that the French were pursuing a dual plan of aggression in America, seeking to wall in the British provinces both in the northeast, along the Nova Scotia frontier, and in the west, by extending direct control over the Ohio Country.

  Newcastle supported Halifax’s views on America in part because Halifax had once been Bedford’s political ally, and Newcastle was determined to weaken Bedford sufficiently that he would resign: a plan that proved successful in mid-1751. Equally as significant in Newcastle’s attention to winning over Halifax, however, was Newcastle’s concern with American affairs. The duke supported Halifax’s attempts to turn Nova Scotia into a bulwark against New France and the French settlements on Cape Breton Island. Newcastle’s backing made it possible to overcome Parliament’s reluctance to undertake expensive measures that included creating a new naval base (called, unsurprisingly, Halifax), augmenting its garrison, and fortifying the isthmus that connected Nova Scotia to the mainland—a course that committed Great Britain to ever-stronger measures in America. In 1750 the cabinet had authorized the use of force to resist French incursions in Nova Scotia. It thus marked no abrupt departure from a policy of responding militarily to French challenges in America when, in the summer of 1753, Halifax asked Newcastle to authorize measures that would counter the construction of French forts in the Ohio Country.

  Since late 1750 Halifax had been receiving anxious reports from the governors of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina, suggesting that France was determined to seize the Ohio Country. The most insistent warnings, and the most forcible arguments for armed intervention, had come in a series of letters from Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia—a man who happened to be not only the chief executive officer of the colony but a stockholder in the Ohio Company. We will probably never know whether his private interest in protecting the company’s claims or his sense that French control over the Ohio Country posed a threat to settlers in the Virginia backcountry (or for that matter some mixture of the two) motivated Dinwiddie to sound the call for intervention. What is clear, however, is that Dinwiddie’s warnings fell on ears already disposed to hear them. On August 21, 1753, the cabinet agreed that conditions in America were grave enough to warrant instructing all colonial governors “to prevent, by Force, These and any such attempts [to encroach on the frontiers of the British colonies] that may be made by the French, or by the Indians in the French interest.” A week later, Robert D’Arcy, fourth earl of Holdernesse (Bedford’s successor as Southern secretary) sent a circular letter to the governors instructing them to “repel Force by Force [within] the undoubted limits of His Majesty’s Dominions.”4 On that same day Lord Holdernesse also dispatched a special set of instructions to Governor Dinwiddie.

  It had been His Majesty’s pleasure, the Southern secretary wrote, to order thirty pieces of artillery sent to Virginia to improve its defenses. To make it clear under what conditions these could be used, Holdernesse elaborated upon “the spirit, and meaning” of “the royal orders.” “You are warranted by the king’s instructions,” he wrote, to repell any hostile attempt by force of arms; and you will easily understand, that it is his majesty’s determination, that you should defend to the utmost of your power, all his possessions within your government, against any invader. But at the same time, as it is the king’s resolution, not to be the aggressor, I am, in his majesty’s name, most strictly to enjoin you, not to make use of the force under your command, excepting within the undoubted limits of his majesty’s province. . . .

  . . . You have now his majesty’s orders, for erecting forts within the king’s own territory. —If you are interrupted therein, those who presume to prevent you from putting into execution, an order, which his majesty has an undoubted, (nay hitherto an undisputed) right to give, are the aggressors, and commit an hostile act. —And this is one case, in which you are authorized to repell force by force. Another is if you shall find persons not subjects to his majesty, not acting under his royal commission, presuming to erect fortresses upon the king’s land, and shall not upon your requiring them to desist from such proceedings, immediately forbear the continuance of them, the persevering in such unlawfull act, in disobedience of the requisition made by the king’s authority, is an hostility; and you are required by your instructions to inforce by arms, (if necessary) a compliance with your summons.5

  Given the state of knowledge of the American interior current within the British government, it seems unlikely that either Holdernesse or George II could have known whether or not the Ohio Valley fell within the undoubted limits of Virginia. Dinwiddie had his own opinion, however, and that would come to matter most.

  Within a year, these issues would prove to be of more than cartographic interest. Yet as summer turned to autumn in 1753, they were only one aspect of a matured policy by which Newcastle hoped to stop French adventuring short of war. At that moment other colonial matters required attention, too, and none more urgently than the deterioration of Indian relations on the northern frontier. The Board of Trade had recently learned that on June 16, a meeting between Mohawk representatives and the provincial council of New York had exploded in discord when an angry Hendrick, the Mohawks’ chief spokesman, informed Governor Clinton that “the Covenant Chain is broken between you and us.” Discontentment over the terms of trade that merchants were offering at Albany and the all-too-evident lack of interest on the part of the province in supporting the Mohawks in the previous war’s raids against Canada had already strained relations to the breaking point. Now the attempt by a speculative syndicate, the Kayaderosseras partners, to defraud the Mohawks of more than three-quarters of a million acres of their land had finally snapped Hendrick’s patience: “So brother you are not to expect to hear of me any more, and Brother we desire to hear no more of you.” 6

  Halifax did not need to be reminded that the Mohawks had long been the most reliably Anglophile of the Six Nations and indeed the only one that had offered its aid in the previous war. Accordi
ngly the Board of Trade ordered the governor of New York to convene an Indian conference to repair relations with the Indians and simultaneously dispatched a circular letter to the governors of the provinces from Virginia to New Hampshire inviting them to attend and take part in the negotiations. Availing himself, as he always did, of an opportunity to promote uniformity within the colonies, Halifax required “that all the Provinces be (if practicable) comprized in one general Treaty to be made in his Majesty’s name, it appearing to us that the practice of each Province making a separate Treaty for itself in its own name is very improper and may be attended with great inconveniency to His Majesty’s Service.”7

  Chief Hendrick (Theyanoguin, 1680?–1755). This engraving, sold in London in 1755, is the last of several English images of Hendrick and depicts him as an aged, scarred warrior holding a tomahawk in his right hand and a wampum belt in his left. The laced coat and ruffled shirt accurately represent his dress, at least on formal occasions such as the Albany Congress. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

  When the Board of Trade’s instructions arrived in New York, the acting governor, James De Lancey, set about organizing a conference for the following June, at Albany. Although the board had never before taken such a direct role or ordered the negotiation of “one general Treaty,” such meetings were far from unfamiliar in the colonies. Over the previous century there had been at least a dozen intercolonial congresses, in which the provinces had tried (and usually failed) to coordinate Indian policy and promote their collective security.8 Thus it might seem curious that, as a province facing an increasingly ominous French and Indian threat on its frontiers, Virginia would decline the invitation to send delegates to the Albany Congress. But the governor of the Old Dominion would choose not to ask the Burgesses to send delegates for reasons that were, in his view, eminently sound. Just before the board’s circular letter arrived, Dinwiddie had received Holdernesse’s directive of late August, assuring him that enough cannon, shot, and powder were being shipped to arm the fort that he and his partners in the Ohio Company planned to build at the Forks of the Ohio. Armed with instructions that he could interpret as authorizing him to proceed militarily against the French, Dinwiddie was prepared to shape his own frontier policy. Holdernesse’s promise of support had spared him the trouble of cooperating with Pennsylvania, and for that matter the vexation of consulting his own House of Burgesses, where members involved in other western speculative schemes would cast a cold eye on any action that might favor Ohio Company interests at the expense of their own.

  Even so, Dinwiddie did not move precipitately against the French in the Ohio Country for two reasons. First, he was a prudent Scot, inexperienced in military matters and more fussy than aggressive in temperament. Second, and more significantly, his political position within Virginia was too precarious to risk provoking any crisis that might require him to ask the House of Burgesses for money. Since the summer of 1752 Dinwiddie had been embroiled in a nasty dispute with the Burgesses over the fee of one pistole (a Spanish coin worth about sixteen shillings, or five-eighths of a pound sterling) to which he was legally entitled in return for setting his seal and signature on patents for lands granted from the king’s domain. It was not so much the size of “the pistole fee” as the principle of it that infuriated Virginia’s legislators. No previous governor had ever succeeded in collecting such a fee, and Dinwiddie was trying to do it on the mere basis of his executive authority, without so much as consulting the Burgesses—much less asking them to pass a law granting him the power to collect the money.9

  Trivial as it might seem, the pistole fee had ignited a political firestorm in Virginia. To allow the governor to collect it, the Burgesses argued, would be to authorize him to collect a tax—a levy to which they, as representatives of the freeholders of the colony, had not consented. Once the Burgesses invoked the Englishman’s right to freedom from arbitrary taxation, the dispute escalated into a constitutional confrontation between the powers of the prerogative and the rights of the subject. The pistole fee controversy would drag on until mid-1754, when it would be settled at last, in the governor’s favor, by a special Privy Council decision. In the meantime, and in the half-year or more after the decision that it took to sort out the political consequences of the controversy within Virginia, the governor and the Burgesses remained locked in a bitter, immobile embrace.10

  Thus in the fall of 1753 Dinwiddie could not have acted forcibly to remove French “encroachments” from the Ohio Country even if he had wanted to. Instead he decided to send an emissary to the region to acquaint the French with George II’s desire that they “desist” from constructing more forts and withdraw from the installations they had already built.11 The man Dinwiddie chose for this mission, Major George Washington, was an unlikely candidate in that he had no more experience as a diplomat than he had command of French; and he was, moreover, just twenty-one years old. Yet Washington, young as he was, had three important qualifications: a close connection with the Ohio Company, the hardihood to undertake the journey, and an obvious eagerness to go. His longing to see the west and to prove himself worthy of public trust was sufficient to overcome whatever doubts he may have felt when Dinwiddie offered him the mission. Like so many of his better qualities, Washington’s capacity for misgiving was something that would only develop with time.

  CHAPTER 4

  Washington Steps onto the Stage . . .

  1753-1754

  THROUGH THE untimely deaths of his father and older half brother, George Washington had recently become the master of substantial plantation holdings in the Northern Neck and gained a somewhat firmer social footing. His father, Augustine, had stood solidly enough within the ranks of the Virginia gentry but made no pretext of equality with the province’s grandees. Washington’s own connections with the greatest of the Northern Neck families, the Fairfaxes, had been strong enough to get him invited, five years before, to help survey Fairfax holdings in the Shenandoah Valley, and thus to begin acquiring the knowledge that had launched him on the complementary careers of surveyor and land speculator. Fairfax connections had also secured two modest public offices, as adjutant general of militia and as surveyor of Culpeper County, which conferred a modest income and, more important, a degree of public status. Yet however highly Thomas, Lord Fairfax, may have regarded the young neighbor with whom he rode to the hounds, Washington never really amounted to more than a protégé.

  His schooling had been haphazard, and much of what he knew beyond the basics that his tutors could provide—for example, his knowledge of surveying, of military tactics and strategy, of English literature, of polite manners—he had taught himself by reading. He had always been, and would remain, an eager self-improver; but he lacked polish, and he would lose his sense of social unease with agonizing slowness. Certainly he had not lost it at age twenty-one, when he was still recognizably related to the adolescent who practiced his penmanship by copying out dozens of maxims from a comportment manual. “When in Company,” one admonished, “put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usualy Discovered”; “Spit not in the Fire,” warned another, “especially if there be meat before it.” By 1753, the boy who had once found it necessary to remind himself to “Kill no Vermin as Fleas, lice ticks &c in the Sight of Others, [and] if you See any filth or thick Spittle put your foot Dexteriously upon it,” had grown to a towering height (six feet, two inches) and become a superb horseman. But he had yet to develop self-assurance to match his stature. Perhaps in compensation for the awkwardness he felt socially, and perhaps also in an attempt to govern a dangerous temper, Washington had already begun to cultivate a reserved, even aloof manner. He had few close friends and evidently wanted no more. Rather than companionship he yearned for public recognition, “reputation,” fame. Surely this ambition was what overrode whatever doubts he may have had when Dinwiddie asked him to carry the letter to the French, for to decline such a mission would have jeopardized his reputation as a public-spirited gent
leman. Moreover, the opportunity to see for himself a region in which he had lately acquired a speculative interest was too good to pass up.1

  Thus as soon as his instructions and the letter he was to carry to the French commandant at Fort LeBoeuf were complete, Washington left Williamsburg for the Ohio Country. At Fredericksburg he picked up Jacob Van Braam, a Dutch friend of the family who had once taught him fencing and who spoke French more or less reliably. At Wills Creek he hired the Ohio Company’s agent, Christopher Gist, to guide him into the valley, and retained four other backwoodsmen to accompany them as hunters, horse-wranglers, and bodyguards. 2 As the party descended the Youghiogheny to the Monongahela and the Ohio, Washington examined the country with a surveyor’s eye. He found that the Forks of the Ohio would indeed furnish an ideal site for a fort with “the entire Command of the Monongahela,” which would also be “extremely well designed for Water Carriage, as [the river there] is of a deep Still Nature.” Gathering intelligence as they went—from the refugee trader John Fraser at his new post on the Monongahela, from a group of French deserters at Logstown—the party learned that the French were in earnest about securing control of the valley. Perhaps even more disturbingly, they also learned that the Ohio Indians were anything but eager to help the English resist France’s designs. After considerable parleying with Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo chiefs at Logstown, Washington and Gist failed to secure a sizable escort to accompany them to their meeting with the French. When they left for Fort LeBoeuf on November 30, only Tanaghrisson and three other Mingos went along: hardly a large or diverse enough group to impress the French with the solidarity of Anglo-Indian interests in the west.