Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  It was a madly ambitious plan approved by men studying maps in London unaware that their ignorance of American geography, politics, and military capacities had foredoomed it to failure. Indeed it was less one plan than two, each of which contradicted the other. Its projected expeditions against Crown Point and the Nova Scotia forts had simply been appropriated from a scheme that Shirley had concocted the previous fall. He intended them as cooperative intercolonial campaigns that, like Louisbourg in 1745, would yield both military victory and a rich harvest of political patronage. When he had proposed these ventures to the ministers, he did not know what plans they were making for Braddock; when the ministers approved his plans in December, they had not fully worked out the implications of what they had set afoot.

  Seeing that the Crown Point and Nova Scotia expeditions would primarily use provincial soldiers—troops paid by their own colonies, who enlisted for specific campaigns and terms of service not exceeding one year—the ministers evidently understood Shirley’s plans as complements to the expeditions that would employ regular regiments to seize Forts Duquesne and Niagara. But the two provincial expeditions would consume men and matériel, making it much more difficult to recruit enough colonists to fill the ranks of both the understrength 44th and 48th and the reactivated 50th and 51st Regiments; the sheer number of simultaneous campaigns would strain the ability of the provinces to provision them all. It was inevitable that recruiters, quartermasters, and commissaries from the various armies would compete for men, arms, shelter, clothing, and supplies; that expenses would therefore be driven up, preparations would be retarded, and the prospects that any expedition could succeed would be proportionally diminished.3

  The men who had studied the maps in London, moreover, had seen rivers and lakes and roads as open corridors for the advance of the expeditions. According to their plans, Braddock would follow Washington’s road toward the Forks, then ascend the Allegheny to French Creek and Lake Erie, in order to meet Shirley at Niagara. Shirley could make his way from Albany to Lake Ontario via the Mohawk and Onondaga Rivers, then paddle on to Niagara. Except for a couple of short portages, Johnson’s provincials and Indians would be waterborne on the Hudson, Wood Creek, Lac St. Sacrement (Lake George), and Lake Champlain, all the way from Albany to Crown Point. But no map in London showed that Washington’s road was a wretched track through heavy forest, every mile of which would have to be widened and graded to allow Braddock’s supply wagons and artillery carriages to pass; or that its route afforded little forage for the horses and cattle on which his troops would rely for transport and food. No one in a clean, well-lit Whitehall office could easily have imagined the degree to which rivers could be choked with dead-falls or subject to great seasonal variations in flow, or how evidently short portages could turn into killingly difficult stretches of rough and swampy terrain. None of the planners foresaw the difficulty of hiring or building the thousands of boats and wagons that would be needed to carry men and supplies; nor did they evidently conceive that the military inexperience of commanders like Shirley and Johnson would prove an obstacle. Nor, finally, did anyone think that it might be difficult to persuade Indians to guide the troops through woods that so few English colonials knew. If such things troubled the staff officers at Whitehall, they kept their worries to themselves, for they planned the campaigns as if they were reviews to be conducted in Hyde Park.

  Braddock marches to the Ohio, 1755. This detailed campaign map was part of a set of six plans and maps published in 1768, along with a pamphlet by Captain Robert Orme, one of General Edward Braddock’s aides. It shows the route of march from Fort Cumberland, on the north branch of the Potomac, across the Allegheny divide into the Youghiogheny (“Yoxhiogeny”) drainage, the Monongahela Valley—and disaster. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  Braddock clearly had no idea that the plans he was outlining at Alexandria were impossible to execute. Shirley and Johnson and the governors did and tried to tell him so—to no particular purpose. When the governors unanimously protested that a common defense “Fund can never be established in the Colonies without the aid of Parliament,” Braddock brushed them off. They simply had to do it, and soon; he would be drawing on discretionary funds until the provinces paid up. When Shirley and Johnson advocated delaying Braddock’s own expedition until Niagara—the strategic choke point on the supply line for Fort Duquesne and all its supporting posts—could be captured, Braddock refused to consider the option. He admitted that their arguments had force but considered himself bound to proceed according to the instructions he had received from Cumberland’s hand. Nor would he alter his route to the Ohio, despite the fact that an approach through Pennsylvania would be a hundred miles shorter than one that started in Virginia. His instructions ordered him to proceed “up the Potomach River, as high as Will’s Creek,” and he would do so. Braddock was by no means a stupid man, but he was not a particularly flexible one either, and he was above all loyal. He had risen high in the service of his king not by virtue of his creativity, but his ability to follow orders. Nothing he had heard at Alexandria inclined him to forsake lifelong habits of obedience.4

  But nothing the other participants in the conference had heard at Alexandria enabled them to forgo their own preexisting habits of belief and behavior, either, much less their old alliances and attachments. Shirley and Governor Morris of Pennsylvania left Alexandria together, traveling to New York to begin preparing Shirley’s campaign against Niagara by contracting for the expedition’s supplies. Their arrangements made excellent sense. Morris had superb business contacts in Philadelphia, the provisions capital of North America; Shirley had equally good relations with Bostonian merchants like Thomas Hutchinson; both had connections to powerful English merchant houses. Now, at New York, they joined forces with a firm headed by Morris’s nephew, Lewis Morris III, and Peter Van Burgh Livingston. The connections thus forged gave Governor (and now General) Shirley the ability to contract for the supplies he needed in all of the major North American markets as well as in London. Even more important, Shirley’s ability to award supply contracts gave him patronage to strengthen his political allies in all three of the major northern provinces.

  It was a magnificent arrangement, and one that could not have been better calculated to enrage the lieutenant governor of New York, James De Lancey—for bad as it was that the De Lancey family’s firm was being cut out of the contracting bonanza that the Niagara expedition would bring, it was worse that all the contracts to be let in New York would benefit De Lancey’s mortal enemies, the Livingston-Morris faction. Shirley, typically, had used a military expedition to create commercial advantages for his friends and patronage resources for himself, while at the same time dealing a blow to a political rival. For the moment De Lancey and his kinsman William Johnson were powerless to respond. Both, however, were men who knew how to nurse a grudge, and they would do what they could to show William Shirley that he had been too clever by half.5

  For his part, Johnson had urgent business to transact in the Mohawk Valley, and after conferring with Lieutenant Governor De Lancey hastened back to his estate, Mount Johnson. From there he directed preparations for the Crown Point expedition and opened negotiations with the Iroquois, on whose cooperation much would depend in the summer’s campaigns. As usual, great delays attended the arrival of Onondaga’s representatives; indeed it was not until June 21 that Johnson kindled the fire for a great conference, attended by over a thousand Iroquois chiefs, warriors, and dependents. The superintendent had three goals. First, he hoped to obtain Onondaga’s commitment to send warriors to aid Braddock in his expedition against Fort Duquesne. Second, he needed to secure Mohawk support for his own expedition against Fort St. Frédéric. Finally, he intended to do everything he could to insure that Shirley’s expedition against Niagara would have no Iroquois aid whatever.

  By brilliant diplomacy Johnson secured his every objective at the conference. The Iroquois for their part wanted two conc
essions from the new superintendent—London’s repudiation of the fraudulent land cession Lydius and Woodbridge had negotiated for the Susquehannah Company at the Albany Congress, and a reduction in the size of the grant that Conrad Weiser had simultaneously secured from Chief Hendrick. Johnson readily agreed, and on July 4 the conference adjourned. As usual in diplomatic encounters between the Iroquois and the English, more had been said than accomplished. The Iroquois promised to go to Braddock’s aid and accepted the arms and presents that would have enabled them to do it—had not the lateness of the season and the great distance to be traveled prohibited their warriors’ departure. Johnson himself, thanks to his long personal connection with the Mohawks, fared better: two hundred warriors would accompany his provincial army against Crown Point.6

  Braddock lingered briefly at Alexandria to attend to a few organizational details after the conference broke up, then rode off to catch up with his army. He found it on April 22 near Frederick Town, Maryland, in the midst of “a fine Cuntry, Plenty of Corn and Milk,” mainly “inhabited by the Germans.” There he also met two ambitious colonials, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Washington had declined the opportunity to serve as a commander of Virginia provincials in order to join Braddock’s expedition as a “volunteer”—a gentleman serving without pay in a junior officer’s capacity, in the hope of either being commissioned in the field or obtaining his commander’s patronage. Because Washington came with Dinwiddie’s endorsement and because he knew the Ohio Country better than any other gentleman in Virginia, Braddock invited him to join his official family and serve as his aide-de-camp.7

  Benjamin Franklin was another story. He had ostensibly come to Frederick Town in his capacity as deputy postmaster general for the colonies, to arrange for the efficient exchange of dispatches between the army and the coastal cities. In fact, the real purpose of his trip was that the Pennsylvania Assembly—concerned that Braddock “had conceived violent prejudices against them”—had chosen him as the man likeliest to smooth out relations between their province and the general. Luckily, Braddock’s deputy quartermaster general, Sir John St. Clair, had been unsuccessful in hiring wagons and horses in the Virginia and Maryland countryside. Franklin seized the opportunity to ingratiate himself and his province by offering to procure 150 wagons with teams from southern Pennsylvania.

  Braddock, whose expedition could not move without draft animals, teamsters, and wagons, was relieved to meet at least one cooperative American and advanced the Philadelphian several hundred pounds. Franklin quickly composed two broadsides and appealed to his acquaintances throughout the Pennsylvania backcountry to call together meetings and read the announcements. One broadside specified generous terms of payment for animals, wagons, and service as a teamster; the other announced that “Sir John St. Clair, the hussar, with a body of soldiers, will immediately enter the province” to seize whatever horses and wagons the army needed, if they were not promptly subscribed. The latter was not even a half-truth, but it worked a gospel wonder: within three weeks 150 wagons and teams, along with perhaps 500 packhorses, had arrived in Braddock’s camp at Wills Creek. At the same time a train of 20 packhorses arrived from Philadelphia, each animal staggering under a load that included a half-dozen cured tongues, two smoked hams, two gallons of Jamaica rum, two dozen bottles of good Madeira, sugar, butter, rice, raisins, tea, coffee, and other items. They were gifts to the junior officers of the 44th and the 48th Regiments, forwarded by a grateful Pennsylvania Assembly, at Franklin’s suggestion. Braddock continued to entertain his doubts about American legislatures in general. Benjamin Franklin, however, had removed from his mind all reservations about Pennsylvania’s.8

  CHAPTER 9

  Disaster on the Monongahela

  1755

  THE TEAMS AND WAGONS that converged throughout May on Wills Creek and Fort Cumberland—the new fort-and-barracks complex that rose on the Maryland bank of the Potomac, opposite the old Ohio Company storehouse—gave Braddock what he needed to begin his expedition against Fort Duquesne. For three weeks after Braddock’s arrival, the fort buzzed with activity. Companies of provincial troops from Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina marched in to join the force, artillery and stores arrived, recruits drilled, and Braddock attended to every detail of preparation, down to ordering medical examinations for the camp women (sixty to a regiment) “to see who was Clean and proper” to accompany the expedition. Indeed, the only detail that Braddock neglected during these weeks of preparation was the one that mattered most: Indian affairs.1

  Soon after his appointment as superintendent, William Johnson had made George Croghan his deputy and ordered him to bring what support he could to Braddock. Accordingly, Croghan had organized forty or fifty refugee Mingos—remnants of Tanaghrisson’s band, who had been living near his trading post at Aughwick—and brought them to Wills Creek. He had also sent a messenger to the Ohio Country with wampum belts to invite the Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingos to meet with the commander in chief at Fort Cumberland. Eventually six chiefs appeared: a group that included Scarouady, the Oneida who had succeeded Tanaghrisson as half-king, and Shingas, the leading war chief of the Ohio Delawares. It was a delegation of great weight, but Braddock failed to grasp its importance. In a few days’ time he managed to alienate them permanently, as well as most of the Mingos whom Croghan brought from Aughwick.

  Braddock could understand Indians only as exotics, and troublesome ones at that. His dismissive remark to Franklin—“it is impossible that [savages] should make any impression [on disciplined troops]”—made it clear that he did not fear Indians as enemies; his actions now demonstrated how little he valued them as allies. First, believing that the women who had accompanied Croghan’s Mingos would prove a disruptive influence on his troops, Braddock summarily ordered them back to Aughwick. When they left, most of their husbands, sons, and brothers went with them, never to return. In treating with the Ohio chiefs, however, Braddock blundered even more seriously. Despite the lack of enthusiasm they had previously shown for the British, the Ohio Indians still hesitated to ally themselves fully and finally with the French. In fact they would have liked nothing more than to see the French out of the valley. If the British were willing to cooperate in removing them, the Ohioans would have welcomed their aid, and their trade—provided only that the British refrain from trying to assert direct control over the region. Shingas indicated his own willingness to help the British in the most direct possible way by presenting Braddock with a detailed plan of Fort Duquesne. Captain Robert Stobo, held hostage there since the previous July, had drawn the diagram in secret; Shingas himself, at considerable personal risk, had smuggled it out of the fort.

  Braddock either did not understand what this gesture of goodwill meant or did not care. When the Delaware chief stood before him and asked the only question that mattered to the Ohio Indians—“what he intended to do with the land if he Could drive the French and their Indians away”—Braddock summoned all his considerable reserves of arrogance, and replied, “that the English Shou[l]d Inhabit and Inherit the Land[. Up]on which Shingas ask[e]d Genl Braddock whether the Indians that were Friends to the English might not be Permitted to Live and Trade Among the English and have Hunting Ground sufficient To Support themselves and Familys as they had no where to Flee Too But into the Hands of the French and their Indians who were their Enemies (that is Shingas’ Enemies). On which Genl Braddock said that No Savage Should Inherit the Land.”

  The next day, hoping for a change of heart, the chiefs approached Braddock again and asked him to reconsider. “And Genl Braddock made the same reply as Formerly, On which Shingas and the other Chiefs answered That if they might not have Liberty To Live on the Land they would not Fight for it, To which Genl Braddock answered that he did not need their Help and had no doubt of driveing the French and their Indians away.” That ended the conference. Shingas and the other Ohio chiefs returned to the valley with news that so “much Enraged” the tribes there that “a Party of them went
Immediately upon [hearing] it and Join’d the French.” Almost no Indians remained with Braddock. When on May 29 the first elements of his army marched from Fort Cumberland, his force was more than 2,200 strong but included only the Half King Scarouady and 7 other Mingo warriors.2

  The general, of course, did not know that Johnson had not even begun to treat with the Iroquois for support, and he still expected to receive the reinforcement of about four hundred Cherokee and Catawba warriors that Governor Dinwiddie had promised to procure. Why Dinwiddie should have thought he could produce them remains a mystery, since he knew well enough that the Catawbas and Cherokees were inveterate enemies of the Iroquois whom Johnson was supposed to recruit. Braddock, in his blunt, self-assured way, was too naive to understand the tensions of Indian-white relations in North America, let alone the character of relations between the various Indian nations. His naïveté would cost him dearly. But when his army marched out of Fort Cumberland— “the Knight [Sir John St. Clair] swearing in the van, the Genl cursing & bullying in the center & their whores bringing up the rear”—Braddock had no doubt that he had prepared for this expedition as fully as any man could.3