Bradstreet had no sooner reached Albany than he began to press Abercromby for permission to return to Lake Ontario with a new and larger force, one with which he could take Fort Niagara and perhaps conquer other western posts as well. Fort Frontenac’s condition suggested that the garrisons on the lakes had been stripped bare and would fall easily before vigorous attacks. With the lake fleet destroyed, even the slightest pressure in the west would oblige the French “to abandon their settlements, forts, and possessions on lake Erie, the streights of lake Huron, and the lake Superior; their trade and interest with the Indians inhabiting those countries, must consequently decay, and if a proper use is made of these advantages, may be utterly taken from them.” What he envisioned was nothing less than the conquest of an empire stretching eight hundred miles into the North American interior, from the Thousand Islands to Thunder Bay: a scheme that Abercromby thought grandiose. Made cautious once more by Bradstreet’s success, he dispatched the colonel to Lake George, where he could supervise the fulfillment of the conditions of prisoner exchange he had worked out with the seigneur de Noyan.10
Bradstreet, incredulous that Abercromby could let so great an opportunity slip away, obeyed his orders but also wrote furiously to his English patrons to urge the commander in chief’s recall and composed an anonymous pamphlet to publicize his own role in the taking of Fort Frontenac. An Impartial Account of Lieut. Colonel Bradstreet’s Expedition to Fort Frontenac,to which are added a few reflections on the conduct of that Enterprize . . . by a volunteer on the Expedition, however, was not only an exercise in self-aggrandizement, for the principal argument it made to its intended (British) audience was that the time was ripe for seizing “the dominion of the lakes” from the French. “Had any one measure been taken by [Abercromby],” Bradstreet wrote, “our advantages might have been multiplied almost beyond imagination”; a change in command was obviously in order. Nor was Bradstreet the only officer to complain of Abercromby’s timidity in following up the raid on Cataraqui. Captain Charles Lee was recuperating from a wound he had suffered in the attack at Fort Carillon but still capable of working himself into a rage at the “blunders of this damn’d beastly poltroon (who to the scourge and dishonour of the Nation is unhappily at the head of our Army, as an instrument of divine vengeance to bring about national losses and national dishonour).” Taking care to instruct his sister to give the letter and its enclosures to the parliamentary agent of the 44th Regiment, Lee described Bradstreet’s victory and its likely consequences. “If our Booby in Chief had only acted with the spirit and prudence of an old Woman,” he wrote, “their whole Country must inevitably have this year been reduc’d.”11
Letters like Lee’s, passing reliably along the lines of family, clientage, and influence that tied writers on the colonial periphery to recipients with access to ministers at the core of British politics, destroyed the hapless general’s chances of retaining his command. And yet, lethargic as he was, to judge him solely by the condemnations of his critics would be to miss his real significance in shaping the campaigns of 1758. For Abercromby did, after all, decide on July 13 to permit Bradstreet to undertake his mission to Cataraqui, despite the fact that nothing in Pitt’s instructions authorized him to do so. And ten days thereafter he made a second unauthorized decision that would prove equally consequential in destroying France’s hold on the Ohio Valley.
CHAPTER 28
Indian Diplomacy and the Fall of Fort Duquesne
AUTUMN 1758
WHAT JAMES ABERCROMBY did on July 23 took a kind of courage that was none the less real for being expressed in the form of an administrative mandate. On that day he authorized Brigadier General Forbes to negotiate directly with the Ohio Indians, even though such negotiations violated the protocols of Indian diplomacy. Forbes and Governor William Denny of Pennsylvania had been making overtures to the western Indians through Teedyuscung since the spring, and these efforts had set them at odds with the Crown’s Indian superintendent, Sir William Johnson; Johnson’s connections to the Iroquois had made him deeply averse to approaching the Ohio Indians directly. By giving Forbes permission to act independently of Johnson, Abercromby opened a diplomatic channel that would otherwise have remained blocked. Doing so, however, required him to undercut a man with formidable access to the centers of power in Britain. Abercromby’s decision thus gave Forbes the opportunity to neutralize the Ohio Indians, but only at the price of adding Sir William Johnson’s name to the lengthening list of his enemies.
Perhaps no British commander in North America had ever needed Indian allies more than John Forbes; probably no officer ever tried harder to obtain them; and certainly none had a worse time getting and retaining them. Charged with succeeding where Braddock had failed, Forbes knew very well that the lack of Indian allies had doomed the expedition of 1755. Sir William Johnson had seemed either unwilling or unable to deliver Iroquois warriors to his army, so Forbes had turned southward in the hope of recruiting Cherokee auxiliaries. But the Cherokees came so early and in such large numbers—as many as seven hundred had arrived by mid-May—that Forbes had difficulty arming, equipping, feeding, and finding functions for them all. Moreover, he had no experience of his own in managing Indian affairs and neither Johnson nor Edmund Atkin, the Southern superintendent, sent anyone to help him. Within a month Forbes was complaining that “the Cherokees are most certainly a very great plague,” and that while he had done everything he could “to please them, . . . nothing will keep them.” The Indians understood him no better than he did them. Impatient with Forbes’s slow progress and offended by what he interpreted as Forbes’s efforts to reduce his warriors from allies to subordinates, the Cherokee leader Attakullakulla, or Little Carpenter, tried to withdraw from the expedition, only to find himself under arrest as a deserter. Forbes eventually understood his mistake and released the chief, but the Cherokees had taken permanent offense. Before the summer was out virtually all of them had gone home, taking along the expensive arms and presents with which Forbes had tried to induce them to stay.1
If Forbes was no more culturally sensitive than any of the other British commanders, he was virtually unique among them in that he grasped the strategic importance of the Indians and—notwithstanding his missteps and frustrations—never ceased to seek accommodation with them. Thus even as he was having such trouble in dealing with the Cherokees, he also entreated Governor Denny to fulfill the promises Pennsylvania had made to Teedyuscung at the Easton Treaty of 1757. Houses for the Delawares must at all events be built in the Wyoming Valley, Forbes wrote, in part because “he [Teedyuscung] has the Publick Faith for the making of such a Settlement,” and in part because Forbes wanted to use Teedyuscung’s eastern Delawares to guard the “Back Settlements this Summer.” But most of all Forbes needed to keep communications open with Teedyuscung because the eastern Delaware chief controlled the only channel through which he could send messages to the western Delawares and hence the other Ohio Indians. As early as the beginning of May he was trying to set “a Treaty on foot . . . between the Shawanes, the Delawares, and the people of this province [Pennsylvania]” in order to deprive the French of allies before his army arrived at Fort Duquesne. Arranging this treaty was a task to which Forbes applied himself with no less determination than to building the road itself. In the end it would prove an almost equally herculean undertaking.2
In June, while Forbes’s commander in the field, Colonel Henry Bouquet, was leading the expeditionary force westward from Carlisle to begin building the road and its supporting forts, Forbes himself was seeking by all possible means to employ Teedyuscung as a conduit to the Ohio Indians. He relied on allies of a most unconventional sort to promote these contacts, for he had established a close working relationship with Teedyuscung’s friend and patron, the pacifist merchant Israel Pemberton, founder and leading light of the Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures. It was Pemberton who advised him that Teedyuscung had sent wampum belts and messenger
s to the western Indians following the 1757 Easton conference, but that the Iroquois had done everything to thwart these contacts and to prevent direct negotiations that might lead to peace. Pemberton, likewise, explained the urgent need of the Ohio tribes to hear directly from the Pennsylvania authorities before they would agree to any change in their allegiance. As always in Pennsylvania, however, the very need for governmental action created formidable barriers to obtaining it. 3
Pemberton and his colleagues in the Friendly Association, as promoters of peace initiatives based on concessions to Indian interests, had never found much favor with Pennsylvania’s proprietor and his appointees. Proprietary authorities (including, of course, the governor) generally opposed any measures likely to reduce income from the sale of lands, or, worst of all, anything that would call into question the validity of previous purchases from the Iroquois—especially that most flagrant of frauds, the Walking Purchase, which both the Quakers and the Delawares wanted to see invalidated. The previous year’s treaty at Easton, establishing peace between the province and the eastern Delawares, had been possible only because Governor Denny, in a most ungovernorly way, agreed to set aside the Penn family’s interests and accede to Teedyuscung’s demands for aid, trade, land, and an inquiry into the Walking Purchase. But Denny could go only so far without jeopardizing his job, and everyone—the Quakers of the Friendly Association, the antiproprietary leaders in the Pennsylvania Assembly, Forbes, and particularly Denny—knew it. They also realized that the interlocking interests of the proprietor, the Iroquois, and Sir William Johnson, none of whom wished to promote the independent standing of the Delawares or any other Iroquois client group, would inevitably delay and frustrate efforts to negotiate with the Ohio Indians.
In view of all this, and of his anxiety over the desertion of the Cherokees, Forbes asked Abercromby for the authority to conduct Indian diplomacy without waiting for Sir William to take action. By the time Abercromby’s reply of July 23 arrived the negotiations were already under way, for Forbes had already taken Pemberton’s advice and asked Denny to pursue contacts, through Teedyuscung, with the Ohio nations. These efforts had borne fruit early in July, when Teedyuscung had conducted two western Delaware chiefs to Philadelphia, where Denny assured them that Pennsylvania was indeed eager to end hostilities. The emissaries from the Ohio Country were both sachems of great stature; one of them, Pisquetomen, was the elder brother both of Shingas and of Tamaqua, the former the preeminent Delaware war leader, and the latter a civil chief inclined to seek accommodation with the English. Because there could be no doubt that the appearance of such representatives offered real hope of peace, Denny appointed a personal envoy to return with them to the Ohio Country carrying his invitation to attend a treaty conference in the fall.4
The man whom the governor asked to undertake the perilous journey to the west was a brave and shrewd Moravian proselytizer, Christian Frederick Post. This Prussian-born cabinetmaker had come to Pennsylvania in 1742 as a disciple of the religious visionary Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf; soon thereafter he began to act as a lay missionary, a calling for which his genius for learning Indian languages and his ability to understand Indian cultures made him uniquely suited. By 1748 he had taken up residence among the eastern Delawares in the Wyoming Valley, learned their language, and married into the community. All this made him the perfect ambassador to send to the western Delawares, but even so his life would have been worthless in the Ohio Country without Pisquetomen’s guarantee of safe conduct. As it was, the French learned of his presence and his mission as soon as he entered the region but could do nothing to stop him.5
By the middle of August, Post and Pisquetomen had reached Tamaqua’s town of Kuskuski on upper Beaver Creek, a tributary of the Ohio that joins the river about twenty-five miles below the Forks. There, on August 18 and 19, Post addressed the assembled chiefs and warriors of the Delaware, assuring them that the English wished to make peace. Thereafter, in towns down Beaver Creek and on the Ohio practically to the walls of Fort Duquesne, Post repeated his message to Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo leaders while the Indians protected him from French attempts to capture or assassinate him. Everywhere he went, his hosts expressed real interest in ending hostilities but seemed convinced that if they abandoned the French, the English would repay them by entering the Ohio Country and seizing their lands. Post tried to reassure them by pointing out that the English had undertaken military operations in the west only after the French had established forts there, and by reading to them the provisions of the 1757 Easton agreement that offered aid, and presumably guaranteed land, to Teedyuscung’s people in the Wyoming Valley. These facts, he argued, could be taken as proof that the English did not intend to colonize beyond the Alleghenies, but only to expel the French and then revive the trade that the Ohio tribes desperately needed. 6
The Ohioans remained skeptical. “It is plain,” they insisted, “that you white people are the cause of this war; why do not you and the French fight in the old country, and on the sea? Why do you come to fight on our land? This makes every body believe, you want to take the land from us by force, and settle it.” Yet no matter how skeptical of British intentions, the Indians could hardly mistake the rapid weakening of the French hold on the Ohio or ignore the fact that Forbes was advancing with a kind of deliberateness and power that Braddock had never shown. Thus despite their misgivings, the western Delaware chiefs decided to send Post back with a message for Denny, Forbes, and their “brethren” in Pennsylvania:
[W]e long for that peace and friendship we had formerly. . . . As you are of one nation and colour, in all the English governments, so let the peace be the same with all. Brethren, when you have finished this peace, which you have begun; when it is known every where amongst your brethren, and you have every where agreed together on this peace and friendship, then you will be pleased to send the great peace belt to us at Allegheny. . . . Now, brethren, let the king of England know what our mind is as soon as possibly you can.7
On September 8, Post, Pisquetomen, and a bodyguard of warriors set off for the English settlements. After two perilous weeks spent dodging scouts sent out from Fort Duquesne to intercept them, they arrived at Teedyuscung’s town of Shamokin, on the Susquehanna. There they parted company, as Pisquetomen traveled on to Easton where he would represent his people in the coming peace talks while Post headed for Forbes’s headquarters to report what he knew of French strength in the Ohio Country.8
Post finally found the general at Raystown, within Fort Bedford’s palisade. Forbes was delighted to meet a man of such “ability and Fidelity” and so gratified to have reliable information on the enemy that he made him a personal reward of fifteen pounds sterling. But it was clear to Post that he had found a man sick and staggering under the duties of command. In addition to suffering from his painful skin condition, Forbes was in the midst of “a long and severe attack of a bloody flux”— dysentery—that left him so debilitated he could travel only “in a Hurdle carried betwixt two Horses.” Forbes was, in his own words, “quite as feeble as a child” and forced to spend much of his time “in bed wearied like a dog.” Yet to a remarkable degree he managed to keep up with his duties, issuing orders to Bouquet, sending weekly reports to Abercromby, pelting governors with demands for aid, and hurrying supplies forward to the expeditionary force.9
Post found the general burdened by cares and worries enough to dishearten a healthy man. The two Virginia colonels, Washington and Byrd, had been insisting throughout the campaign that Forbes would never reach Fort Duquesne before the end of the year if he held to the plan of building his road across Pennsylvania; he must shift his forces southward and use the Braddock road if he hoped for success. Forbes, convinced that their preference for the Braddock route grew from land-speculating interests in the Ohio Country, had lately found it necessary to reprimand them for having “showed their weakness in their attachment to the province they belong to” above “the good of the service.” Because Forbes did not val
ue such “provincial interest, jealousys, or suspicions, one single twopence” he had been feeling anxious ever since word had come back from the roadhead that the last mountainous stretch, Laurel Ridge, would prove extremely difficult to cross. He feared in his heart that Washington and Byrd might have been right, and that the expedition might not reach the Forks before winter after all. 10
Nor was the difficulty of building the road by any means the worst news to have found its way back to Forbes’s headquarters. He had also recently learned that on September 11 Bouquet, acting on his own authority, had detached a large force to reconnoiter toward Fort Duquesne from Loyalhanna, where the bulk of the army was busy constructing Fort Ligonier. Bouquet and Major James Grant, the officer to whom he gave command of the eight-hundred-man detachment, had hoped to end the campaign with a quick coup de main, despite Forbes’s orders that they avoid all such risky ventures. The result of their boldness had been a coup of another sort, for early on the morning of September 14 a large party of French and Indians surrounded Grant’s force near the Forks. In what nearly became a small-scale reprise of Braddock’s defeat, a third of the British and American troops under Grant’s command were killed, wounded, or captured. The remainder saved themselves as best they could: some by fighting their way out in an orderly retreat, others by throwing down their equipment and running away. Grant himself—after Bouquet, Forbes’s most experienced field officer—had been taken prisoner and sent to Canada.11
The news of Grant’s defeat depressed Forbes all the more since it substantiated Post’s report that the French and Indians at Fort Duquesne were still strong enough to defend the Forks; but most of all it aggravated him, because Bouquet and Grant had gotten into the predicament by ignoring his orders. It was bad enough to be saddled with provincials who lacked discipline and devotion to the common cause, but holders of the king’s commission should not need to be taught their duty. In a stinging rebuke to Bouquet, Forbes wrote that he had rested secure, and plumed myself in our good fortune, in having the head of the army advanced, as it were, to the beard of the enemy, and secured a good post well guarded and cautioned against surprise. Our road almost completed; our provisions all upon wheels, and all this without any loss on our side, and our small army all ready to join and act in a collected body whenever we pleased to attack the enemy, or that any favorable opportunity presented itself to us.
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