Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  Indeed, even at the end of 1758 the effects of the great campaigns were evident throughout the colonies, as men like Rufus Putnam and John Cleaveland returned home with stories to tell and pay to collect; as less fortunate men returned with the wounds and injuries that would blight their lives; as still other men never came back at all. In no case, however, were the effects of the war and military service more important than they had been in the life of the tall, grave Virginian who rode into Williamsburg on Christmas to resign his commission as colonel of the 1st Virginia Regiment. 7

  George Washington had been at war more or less continuously for five years. Now, with the expulsion of the French from the Forks and presumably the restoration of peace to the Virginia frontier, he believed that he had done enough. Although he had told almost no one that he intended to resign if the campaign reached a successful conclusion, he had prepared carefully for his reentry into civilian life. The previous spring he had proposed marriage to the richest and most eligible widow in New Kent County, Martha Dandridge Custis, and she had accepted; they were to be married on January 6. By joining their lands, slaves, and wealth they would position the family (for Martha was already the mother of two small children) well up in the ranks of northern Virginia’s planter elite. Shortly after Martha agreed to marry him, Washington had decided to confirm his new standing by seeking election to the House of Burgesses as a representative of Frederick County. The freeholders had elected him to the seat, by a wide margin, in late July, and he would take his place in the House when the winter session began in February. Any interested observer might reasonably have concluded that Washington’s military career—inauspiciously begun with defeat in 1754 and marked thereafter by increasing competence, if not glory—had been no more than a preliminary and perhaps calculated stage in the rise of an unusually ambitious man. But Washington’s career as commander of the 1st Virginia Regiment had in fact been much more.8

  Most of all the war had been a kind of education, in many aspects of life, for a man who had undergone very little formal instruction. Most obviously, his military experience had taught him a variety of technical and practical lessons. In defending the Virginia frontier from 1754 through 1757, he had learned how to make the most of manpower that was never adequate to the task, how to lay out and build forts and blockhouses, organize supply and transport services, dispense military justice, drill and train soldiers, manage the manifold tasks of administration and paperwork that the service required. He had learned less palpable but equally important skills of command as well: how to earn the respect and maintain the loyalty of his subordinate officers, how to issue clear and concise orders, how to keep his distance, how to control his temper. He had acquired these skills in part by study—he had been an indefatigable reader of military manuals and treatises, devouring everything from Caesar’s Commentaries to Colonel Humphrey Bland’s Treatise of Military Discipline— and in part by observing experienced officers in action. He had transcribed the orders issued by the regular officers, Braddock and Forbes and Bouquet, under whom he served, and studied them carefully. Unlike the New Englanders, who had generally recoiled from redcoat discipline and clung the more strongly to their region’s contractualist military traditions, Washington had observed how the regulars conducted themselves in order to emulate them. Thus he acquired their attitudes, copied their habits of command, and absorbed their prejudices to the point that he became one of them in virtually every respect but the color of his coat and the provenance of his commission. As fully and as self-consciously as possible, Washington made himself a professional military officer between 1754 and 1758 and learned to handle regimental affairs with a proficiency not inferior to that of many colonels in the British army.9

  To say that Washington became a capable military administrator, of course, is not to say that he also became a brilliant tactician. Beyond the quality—indispensable in an infantry commander—of unshakable physical courage, he had shown little obvious skill on the battlefield. His first encounter with an enemy force had ended in a massacre; his second in crushing defeat. He had ridden beside Braddock through one of the worst disasters in Anglo-American military history and kept his nerve, but that was about all. The experience did not translate into mastery of woodland warfare. Throughout 1756 and 1757 his regiment had skirmished with Indians along the Virginia frontier, but there is no evidence that it inhibited the raids or lessened their deadly effect. On the Forbes expedition he had shown himself capable of controlling a thousand or more men on the march through difficult country—no mean feat—but in his only encounter with an enemy force he had been unable to identify a friendly detachment in time to stop his men from opening fire on it. Yet even these experiences had, in their way, served him well, for Washington at the end of 1758 was a man much more fully aware of the hazards of combat and of the limitations of command than was the inexperienced, hasty, and seemingly much younger officer who in the summer of 1754 had professed to be charmed by the sound of bullets whistling past his ears.

  The best single indication of his growth as a military leader can be found in a memorandum he wrote to Henry Bouquet on the night of November 6, 1758, following a conference over plans for the remainder of the campaign. November 6 was, of course, the day before Post arrived at Loyalhanna with the news of the Easton treaty, so neither Bouquet nor Washington had any reason to think that the Ohio Indians would abandon their allies. The best recent intelligence of enemy strength dated from Grant’s defeat, and that gave no one cause for optimism. Even so, Bouquet had told Washington that he intended to advise Forbes to cut the army loose from its supply base at Fort Ligonier and march without delay to Fort Duquesne. Washington had tried to demur, but Bouquet had been unconvinced. Hours after their meeting, Washington found himself haunted by the thought that Bouquet would convince Forbes, so eager to bring the campaign to a successful close, to take the risk. His memorandum was a final effort to dissuade Bouquet from advocating an immediate attack.

  With the history of Braddock’s expedition obviously in mind, Washington first urged Bouquet to consider what the consequences would be of meeting the enemy on his own ground, with only the supplies they could carry and no system capable of replenishing stocks of food and ammunition when they were exhausted. Under such circumstances, a defeat might mean being forced back to Fort Ligonier, which they would then be compelled to evacuate for lack of provisions, “ab[and]oning our Artillery either to the Enemy or a general destruction.” But then, he went on, “suppose the Enemy gives us a meeting in the Field and we put them to the Rout[. W]hat do we gain by it? perhaps triple their loss of Men in the first place, thô our numbers may be greatly superior (and If I may be allowd to judge from what I have seen of late, we shall not highten much that good opinion they seem to have of our skill in woods fighting)— therefore to risk an Engagement when so much depends upon it, without having the accomplishment of the main point in view, appears in my Eye, to be a little Imprudent.” 10

  This remarkable document suggests several things about Washington, not least of which is that he had sufficient confidence in his own judgment to press his views home to a regular officer who disagreed with them: an officer who was not only his superior, but a man who had seen his first military service before Washington was five years old. Most of all, however, the memorandum shows that Washington had grasped the most significant lessons that the wilderness war had to offer: that to win campaigns, or presumably even the war itself, one need not necessarily win battles; that, indeed, to win a battle at the wrong time or in the wrong way could lead to failure in the larger realm of conflict. Any number of tactical defeats could be compensated for by merely retaining discipline and maintaining one’s force in the field longer than one’s enemy.

  Braddock’s experience had suggested as much, and Forbes’s campaign was on the verge of proving it. Braddock’s army had forfeited the advantage to the French in 1755 not because it suffered a grievous defeat in which Braddock himself had been killed, but because
Dunbar had succumbed to the momentum of demoralization and flight. By ordering the army’s supplies and cannon destroyed, he had destroyed the army’s chance to return and fight again. Forbes fully understood this lesson and thus spent enormous amounts of time and money securing his lines of communication and studding them with fortified supply depots. As a result, individual defeats—even ones as substantial as Grant’s—might slow his advance, but they could not stop it. In the end Forbes’s army would not win a single engagement with its enemy, but it would gain its ultimate goal. The absence of a strict relation between victory on the battlefield and achieving one’s strategic purpose was by no means obvious, even to officers as experienced and sophisticated as Henry Bouquet. But it was a lesson that Washington understood as fully, as decisively, as Forbes himself.

  It would be merely silly, if it were not morally repugnant, to maintain that war builds character. And yet it ought not to be denied that, for better or for worse, military service and combat mold the views and the character of those who experience them. The Washington who advised Bouquet not to act rashly was a man who no longer entertained the illusions of his youth. He was, instead, a man for whom the strains of command and the experience of seeing men killed and wounded as a result of his orders had burned away the delusion that courage and valor—or even victory—will necessarily make the decisive difference that commanders long to achieve. He had acquired the professionalism of a British officer, even as he had been denied the commission that would have made him one. He had met many regular leaders and had modeled himself on those whom he took to be the best among them. He had learned how to give commands and how to take them. He had gained self-confidence and self-control, and if he could not honestly number humility among his virtues, he had at least begun to understand his limitations. George Washington, at age twenty-seven, was not yet the man he would be at age forty or fifty, but he had come an immense distance in five years’ time. And the hard road he had traveled from Jumonville’s Glen, in ways he would not comprehend for years to come, had done much to prepare him for the harder road that lay ahead.

  PART V

  ANNUS MIRABILIS

  1759

  Military successes at Louisbourg and elsewhere consolidate Pitt’s power and increase his determination to strip France of its empire. American anxieties and commitment to the war effort grow as the invasion of Canada nears. British successes at Niagara, Ticonderoga, and Crown Point. Wolfe meets Montcalm—and both meet their Maker—at the Battle of Québec. Amherst reacts unenthusiastically to provincial behavior; the colonists react ecstatically to British victories. The state of the European powers and the increasingly perilous circumstances of Frederick the Great. The year’s decisive battle: Quiberon Bay.

  CHAPTER 30

  Success, Anxiety, and Power THE ASCENT OF WILLIAM PITT

  LATE 1758

  AT SEVEN O’CLOCK on Friday morning, August 18, 1758, a weary young infantry officer knocked at William Pitt’s door. Captain William Amherst had landed at Portsmouth the previous day with dispatches from America, then posted more than sixty miles to London by an overnight coach. The secretary was out but expected back; the captain was welcome to wait. Amherst cooled his heels for three hours more before Pitt returned. Then, at last, he could speak the words that he had come three thousand miles to say: Louisbourg had surrendered four weeks before, and he had the honor of being sent to inform His Majesty of the event. Unable to restrain himself, Pitt hugged the startled captain and cried, “This is the greatest news!” Amherst, he exclaimed, was “the most welcome messenger that had arrived in this kingdom for years!”

  As they hurried from dignitary to dignitary that morning, Pitt found “many handsome things to say” about Amherst’s brother Jeffery, who “would make nothing of Quebec after this.” Lord Ligonier was so delighted that he gave the young captain five hundred pounds and then added another hundred so Amherst could buy himself a suitable sword. The king, characteristically, asked many questions and offered no reward. The prince of Wales—himself a young man who longed for distinction—said that “he had expected great things” of General Amherst, but “what he had done exceeded his expectation and added that it was a very fine thing for so young a man to distinguish himself in so particular a manner.” And Newcastle’s enthusiasm, of course, overflowed. “His Grace,” Captain Amherst noted, “in great joy often repeated that he had sent‘orders for two Corporations to be made drunk.’ ” 1

  More than two corporations, of course, honored the duke’s desire. Britain’s beer barrels gurgled dry in their thousands to honor Amherst, Pitt, and the sovereign. On every hill, it seemed, bonfires blazed; from every battery cannons boomed. Amid pealing bells a procession of eminences bore Louisbourg’s colors to Saint Paul’s, there to deposit them among the cathedral’s sacred symbols and to hear a sermon on the victory’s providential significance. It was incomparably the greatest news to come from America since the war’s beginning, and the nation spared nothing in its jubilation. 2

  BRITAIN WOULD HAVE so many more occasions to celebrate before the year was out that Horace Walpole could facetiously complain that “our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories.” Yet for many months after Amherst delivered his news, it was far from apparent that the victory at Louisbourg would set the pattern for events yet to come. Indeed, just two days after Pitt had hugged Amherst in delight, news arrived of disaster at Ticonderoga and the death of Lord Howe, plunging the secretary into a gloom that would remain unrelieved for days. Not until October would he know that Bradstreet had destroyed Fort Frontenac, nor until the New Year that Forbes had taken Fort Duquesne. Thus in the last days of August, as Pitt considered what to do next, he was less prone to contemplate the glories of victory at Louisbourg than the problems that clouded his horizon. The darkest of them all loomed up from Europe.3

  Although Pitt’s strategic vision still focused on attacking France’s imperial periphery rather than her armies in Europe, during 1758 the fighting on the Continent had forced itself to the center of his attention and had commanded an increasingly large share of his government’s resources. There was no way to avoid this, for since the middle of 1757 Britain’s ally Frederick of Prussia had been beset from every quarter by French, Austrian, Russian, and Swedish enemies. While Frederick had won impressive victories—he had beaten the French, brilliantly, at Rossbach in November 1757 and just a month later had stunned the Austrians with even greater tactical mastery at Leuthen—his armies had paid a heavy price in casualties. Encouraged by his successes, the British had tried to compensate for his losses by dramatically increasing their subsidies. In April 1758, as part of a formal treaty of alliance in which both powers promised not to conclude a separate peace, Pitt’s government agreed to provide Frederick with £670,000 sterling per year. Money could not relieve the pressure on Prussia’s armies, however, and the treaty accordingly stipulated that Britain would take the Hanoverian army into its pay (an obligation that would cost £1,200,000 a year) and would garrison the North Sea port of Emden—the first redcoats to be committed on the Continent.4

  Heretofore Pitt had resisted direct involvement, worrying that to commit so much as a battalion to the fighting in Germany would open the door to endless escalations in the demand for troops. Events soon showed how prescient that fear had been, for even before the Emden garrison had taken ship, the calls for thousands more redcoats to be sent to the Continent were becoming steadily more urgent. What ultimately made them irresistible was not the necessity of plugging up the drain of manpower in Prussia, but rather the hope of inflicting a decisive defeat on the French army in Western Europe; and Pitt, ironically, would reverse the policy himself.

  After the renunciation of the Convention of Kloster-Zeven, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick had taken command of Cumberland’s army of observation in Hanover and with remarkable speed rebuilt it into a force capable of taking the offensive. He waited only for Frederick’s victory at Rossbach before opening a winter campaign against th
e French in Hanover and the Prussian territory of East Friesland. Ferdinand’s deft maneuvering, together with the timely arrival of a few British warships, had compelled the French and Austrians to evacuate Emden in March 1758. Their withdrawal had made it necessary to send a British garrison to hold the city; but it was the subsequent retreat of the French from the River Ems across the Rhine that had created the demand for a large number of redcoats.5

  To this point Pitt had preferred to make “descents”—amphibious raids—on the coast of France. These had proven less successful than he hoped, for although they tied down thousands of French soldiers in shore defenses, they were risky, difficult to execute, inherently indecisive, and unpopular among the officers assigned to lead them. The most recent descent, a raid in June on the Breton shipbuilding port of St.-Malo, had destroyed a great deal of French shipping but gained little else; its commander, fearing a French counterattack, had withdrawn without even attacking the town. This inglorious result became known in Whitehall shortly after word arrived that Prince Ferdinand had moved his army across the Rhine in pursuit of the French, who were withdrawing toward the Austrian Netherlands. On June 23 Ferdinand finally goaded his opposite number, Prince Louis de Bourbon Condé, comte de Clermont, to give battle at the town of Crefeld, near Düsseldorf. The result, a sharp defeat for the French, caused Clermont to retire up the Rhine all the way to Cologne.6