Ketiushund, a noted Indian, one of the chief counsellors, told us in secret, “That all the nations had jointly agreed to defend their hunting place at Alleghenny, and suffer nobody to settle there; and as these Indians are very much inclined to the English interest, so he begged us very much to tell the Governor, General, and all other people not to settle there. And if the English would draw back over the mountain, they would get all the other nations into their interest; but if they staid and settled there, all the nations would be against them; and he was afraid it would be a great war, and never come to a peace again.”23
The missionary agreed to carry this news, too. Somberly: for he could not guarantee that anyone would listen.
When Christian Frederick Post rejoined the army on December 4, he found that the Ohio world had changed forever. Forbes’s campaign was finished: the British controlled the Forks; a new fort was under construction a few hundred yards upstream from the blasted ruin of Fort Duquesne; the area was being called by a new name, Pittsburgh; Forbes himself was already being carried back to Philadelphia in a desperate attempt to save his life. 24 This is how it had all come to pass:
The Delaware raiders whose return to Kuskuski had caused such trouble for Post and his companions had set out on November 9 to carry off or destroy horses and cattle near Loyalhanna. They had undertaken this raid without much enthusiasm, at the insistence of François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery, the captain of la marine in command at Fort Duquesne, who hoped to create such havoc in the British transport service that Forbes would be unable to continue the campaign. It was a raid conceived in desperation. Lignery, a tenacious fifty-five-year-old officer who had been active on the Ohio since Braddock’s defeat, was a past master of hit-and-run warfare, but following Fort Frontenac’s fall he had begun to despair of his position. As his supplies dwindled and his scouts told him of the road-builders’ steady progress toward the Forks, he had launched raid after raid, hoping to keep the British off balance until the onset of winter forced them to abandon their expedition. But with each successful raid more and more of his Far Indian auxiliaries had taken their captives and trophies and returned home. Ironically, his greatest victory, the defeat of Grant’s reconnaissance party on September 14, had resulted in the departure of so many Ottawa, Wyandot, and other warriors from the pays d’en haut that soon thereafter he found himself with few Indians beside the local Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingos left to rely upon. Meanwhile the straitened state of his supplies compelled him to reduce the numbers of French and Canadian troops at Duquesne to a minimum. At the beginning of November he commanded a skeletal garrison of three hundred regulars and militiamen. Only a third of them were fit for duty.25
The raid on Forbes’s horses and cattle at the “grass guard” near Loyalhanna on November 12 was in fact a success, despite what seemed to Lignery the halfhearted participation of the Ohio Indians, for the raiders killed and seized more than two hundred animals before withdrawing. Warned that an attack was under way, Forbes ordered out two parties of five hundred men: one under Colonel Washington “to give them chace,” the other under Lieutenant Colonel George Mercer of the 2nd Virginia Regiment “to Surround them.” Night was coming on when Washington’s men finally ran three of the raiders to ground. Shortly thereafter, in the deepening dusk, Washington’s force collided with Mercer’s and the two formations opened fire on each other. Before anyone understood what was happening, two officers and thirty-eight men had been killed or wounded, a heavier toll by far than the raiders had exacted. Luckily the prisoners remained unharmed, and one of them, a Pennsylvania backwoodsman named Johnson whom the Delawares had adopted and who had joined the raid as a warrior, revealed the weakness of Lignery’s garrison. Forbes had been ready to abandon the campaign for the winter, but Johnson’s report convinced him to seize the chance that now presented itself. He ordered immediate preparations for an advance on the Forks. 26
With Washington’s Ist Virginia Regiment and detachments of Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina provincials in the lead, the army marched from its Loyalhanna camp on the morning of November 15. The troops left their camp women and even their tents behind at Fort Ligonier and advanced as rapidly as they could toward the Forks, cutting between three and five miles of road a day as they went. Each day a special detail built a hut with a chimney for Forbes, who though weaker than ever had himself carried forward in his litter, spending each night as close as possible to the head of the column. By November 21, the advance guard was encamped at Turtle Creek, twelve miles from Fort Duquesne.27
That was also the day that Lignery finally admitted that the game was up. Knowing that the Delawares were still debating whether to accept the peace belt from Pennsylvania, on the twentieth he had sent a war belt to Kuskuski along with a message asking them to join him in a new attack on the English. To his chagrin, the Delawares refused to accept the belt and instead kicked it about as if it were a snake. “Give it [back] to the French captain,” they told Lignery’s messenger, “and let him go with his young men; he boasted much of his fighting; now let us see his fighting. We have often ventured our lives for him; and had hardly a loaf of bread [in return] . . . ; now he thinks we should jump to serve him.” The French emissary, “pale as death,” endured their ridicule until midnight, then sent word back warning Lignery not to expect help from his erstwhile allies.28
When the unwelcome news arrived at the Forks, the commandant took the only option left to him and ordered the fort evacuated and destroyed. Sending what provisions were left to the nearest Wyandot band (“to induce them always to take our side and attack the English,” he explained), he had the fort’s cannon and munitions loaded on bateaux and ordered the militiamen from Louisiana and Illinois to convey them, along with the remaining prisoners, to the Illinois Country. Finally, on November 23, while the remaining two hundred men of his garrison waited in their canoes, he ordered the fort to be set afire and a mine of fifty or sixty barrels of powder to be detonated under its walls. Pausing only long enough to make sure “that the fort was entirely reduced to ashes and that the enemy would fall heir to nothing but the ironwork of the community buildings,” Lignery and his men paddled up the Allegheny for Fort Machault, the supply station that stood at the mouth of French Creek. There he and a hundred of his healthiest men would hold the line for the winter, awaiting the return of spring and the reinforcements needed to reconquer the Forks before the English, too, could reinforce their winter garrison.29
Although the Anglo-Americans at ten miles’ distance heard the explosion that blasted Fort Duquesne into oblivion, they advanced with caution and did not occupy the site until the following day, November 24. By then, Forbes’s little army was within a week of dissolution, for the enlistments of the provincials who comprised two-thirds of its strength were due to expire on the thirtieth. Thus Forbes made haste to consolidate his gains, ordering a stockaded fort to be constructed just up the Monongahela from the rubble of the French post. Its purpose was to shelter a winter garrison of just two hundred Pennsylvania provincials under another Scottish physician-turned-soldier, Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Mercer. This was a tiny number, indeed a perilously small one; but not a man more could be provisioned from Fort Ligonier, forty miles to the east. Even more important than this fort, Forbes knew, was settling the minds of the local Indians, who would easily be able to overwhelm its garrison. He therefore dispatched George Croghan, who had joined him after Easton, to invite the local village chiefs to meet with him at the fort.
But Forbes himself could not remain, and when the conference opened on December 4 it was Colonel Bouquet who was there to distribute gifts and assure the assembled chiefs that the English had come not to settle, but only to reopen trade and guard against the return of the French. On November 26, Forbes’s health had finally, irrevocably collapsed: “being seized with an inflammation in [his] stomach, Midriff and Liver, the sharpest and most severe of all distempers,” he realized that if he was to survive he would have to return to Philadel
phia, where he could receive proper medical care before going home to England.30
Although he had doubted that he would survive the journey, Forbes lived to reach Philadelphia about six weeks later. There he recovered only enough strength to set his affairs in order and to write a few letters: the administrative and strategic testament of a man who could feel his life ebbing away. The most important of Forbes’s last letters were addressed to Jeffery Amherst, recently named as Abercromby’s successor. Indian affairs continued to concern Forbes, for he worried that Amherst (still inexperienced in wilderness warfare) would assume that the Indians were primitives who would merely side with the likeliest winner and that relations with the Indians could therefore be reduced to a simple calculus of force. Forbes begged Amherst “not [to] think trifflingly of the Indians or their friendship.” If he hoped to preserve Britain’s foothold on the Ohio, Amherst would need to “have [Indian affairs] settled on some solid footing, as the preservation of the Indians, and that country, Depends upon it.” Relations with the tribes had generally been misunderstood, Forbes wrote, “or if understood, perverted to purposes serving particular ends.” In this regard the greatest problems had arisen from two sources: “the Jealousy subsisting betwixt the Virginians & Pensilvanians . . . as both are aiming at engrossing the commerce and Barter with the Indians, and of settling and appropriating the immense tract of fine country” around the Forks; and “the private interested views of Sir William Johnstone [ Johnson] and his Myrmidons.” Unless Amherst exerted a strong hand, Forbes feared, the result would be chaos in the west and the loss of a country that he had literally given his life to win.31
His last act was a sentimental gesture. Ordering “a Gold medal to be struck . . . [for] the officers of his Army to wear as an honorary reward for their faithful services,” he gave detailed instructions for the inscription. “The Medal has on one side the representation of a Road cut thro an immense Forrest, over Rocks, and mountains. The motto Per tot Discrimina—on the other side are represented the confluence of the Ohio and Monongahela rivers, a Fort in Flames in the forks of the Rivers at the approach of General Forbes carried in a Litter, followed with the army marching in Columns with Cannon. The motto Ohio Britannica Consilio manuque. This to be worn round the neck with a dark blew ribbon. . . .” 32 John Forbes succumbed to his “tedious illness” on March 11, 1759, three weeks after he ordered the medal struck, and a little less than five months short of his fifty-second birthday. Pennsylvania gave him an extravagant state funeral and buried him at public expense in the chancel of Philadelphia’s Christ Church.33
It was the least that Penn’s province could do, and not only because the general had secured its frontiers after three years of horrific bloodshed. What was already being called Forbes Road had opened a direct line of communication, with way stations no more than a day’s travel apart, from Philadelphia to the Ohio Valley. And that, from the various perspectives of Pennsylvania’s proprietary family, merchants, land speculators, Indian traders, and farmers, would prove to be the most important achievement of all.
CHAPTER 29
Educations in Arms
1754-1758
BY THE END of November, when the weary, freezing, ragged provincials of Forbes’s army received their discharge at Pittsburgh, most of their counterparts in the northern theater of operations had already made their way home. Abercromby had closed down the New York campaigns in late October and thus avoided the usual mass desertions of provincials disinclined to serve past the expiration of their enlistment contracts. The mere absence of desertions, however, did not indicate contentment among the thousands of New England, New Jersey, and New York provincials any more than it bespoke admiration for the regular officers under whom they had served the past six months.1 Something nearer the opposite was the case. For the six thousand or so provincials who witnessed the debacle of Abercromby’s defeat at Ticonderoga the principal lesson was clear enough: it had been an almost incredibly “injuditious and wanton Sacrefise of men,” a tragic demonstration of how an arrogant or incompetent commander could destroy hundreds of lives in a few hours. 2 The provincials at the edge of the battle could not have doubted the discipline or the courage of the regulars who had met their deaths in Montcalm’s abatis, but nothing about the sight could have made them eager to emulate the redcoats’ example, either.
Or, more properly, none of them wished to be compelled to emulate that example. Service alongside the king’s troops made nothing more obvious to the provincials than that a coercive disciplinary system was the engine that drove the British army, and that the blood of common soldiers was its lubricant. Provincials who had volunteered to serve for a single campaign under their neighbors or older kinsmen were simply stunned to witness the operation of a system of military justice in which officers routinely sentenced enlisted men to corporal punishments that stopped just short of death, and not infrequently inflicted the death penalty itself.
In previous wars when New Englanders had served only under provincial, not regular, officers, they had behaved more or less like civilians in arms. A soldier who insulted his captain could expect to bear the consequences, which—depending upon the officer—might range from being knocked down on the spot to being placed under arrest, being court-martialed, and receiving ten or twenty lashes with a cat-o’-nine-tails. But under regular military discipline, insolence to an officer was a crime that carried a penalty of five hundred lashes; the theft of a shirt could earn a man a thousand; and desertion (no uncommon act among New England troops) was punishable by hanging or a firing-squad execution. An average provincial soldier serving with Abercromby’s army could witness a flogging of fifty or a hundred lashes every day or two, a flogging of three hundred to a thousand lashes once or twice a week, an execution at least once a month. Men could be seen enduring less formal “company punishments,” such as being compelled to walk the gauntlet or ride the wooden horse, almost any time. A provincial surgeon with Abercromby’s army noted that one had to make a special effort not to see punishments inflicted. “I saw not ye men whiped,” Dr. Caleb Rea wrote after a punishment parade at which one man was hanged and two others were flogged a thousand lashes each; “for altho’ there is almost every Day more or less [men] whiped or Piqueted or some other ways punished I’ve never had ye curiosity to see’m, the Shrieks and Crys being Satisfactory to me without ye Sight of ye Strokes.”3
The experience of service with the regulars left enduring marks on the provincials, and not only on those who left the army with scars on their backs. Most private soldiers in the New England regiments that made up most of the northern army’s manpower were young native-born men between seventeen and twenty-four years old, not yet married and still living in or near their hometowns. Most of them had grown up assuming that they were Englishmen of a particularly virtuous sort, for they were not only the sons of freeholders and men who could expect to become independent landholders in their own right, but the descendants of religious dissenters who had come to America to establish a New England, one more pleasing to God than the old. Their army service gave most of these young Yankees the opportunity to meet sizable numbers of real Englishmen—and Scots, and Welsh, and Irishmen—for the first time. What they saw and heard and experienced in this, their first extended experience away from home, was all the more striking because it challenged so many of their inherited preconceptions: notions about everything from the character of relations between men—which they had assumed were contractual and fundamentally voluntary but that British officers regarded as being founded on status and coercion—to the nature of Englishness itself. While the war demonstrated the manifest differences between themselves and their British comrades-in-arms, it by no means convinced them that they were inferior to the redcoats, who, as one provincial wrote, “are but little better than slaves to their Officers.” 4 Nor did contact with regular officers do anything to convince them that these representatives of the metropolitan ruling class were their moral superiors. The treatment they
received from the likes of Abercromby and Loudoun nonetheless made it emphatically clear that the army’s leaders regarded them at best as “an Obstinate and Ungovernable People, Uterly Unaquainted with the Nature of Subordination,” and at worst as “the dirtiest most contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive.”5
From 1756 onward, the Anglo-American armies became arenas of intercultural contact in which tens of thousands of American colonists encountered the British cultural and class system as refracted through the prism of the regular army. Because the war did not affect all the colonies equally, its impact varied from region to region; New England in particular contributed vastly more men in proportion to its population than the Chesapeake or the Middle Colonies. Yet especially after Pitt’s policies took effect in 1758 and the total numbers of colonists engaged in fighting the war rose to unprecedented levels, provincial soldiers came from everywhere in North America, and the experience of military service became correspondingly widespread. Wherever provincials served alongside regulars they could no more escape noticing the differences between themselves and their redcoated superiors than they could avoid hearing the “Shrieks and Crys” of the men being “whiped or Piqueted or some other ways punished” in their camps. Moreover, because the great majority of provincial common soldiers were young men, men whose influence on their society would grow more palpable as they acquired property and household-headship in later years, the impact of their wartime experiences might be felt for years after their discharge from service. By sheer weight of numbers the war’s greatest long-term impact would be felt in New England, where between 40 and 60 percent of the men in the prime military age range would pass through the provincial forces before peace finally returned. At least in Massachusetts and Connecticut, the war’s ultimate effect would be to create a generation of men from people who had been mere contemporaries. But everywhere in the colonies that men had served as provincial soldiers, the war would have its influence, even if it was less encompassing than in New England. The intense, shared experiences of fatigue and discipline, of boredom and fear, of physical hardship and battle, would for years inform the perceptions and help shape the actions of the men who had served.6
Crucible of War Page 35