Crucible of War

Home > Other > Crucible of War > Page 88
Crucible of War Page 88

by Fred Anderson


  CHAPTER FOUR: Washington Steps onto the Stage . . .

  1. Charles Moore, ed., George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation (Boston, 1926), rules 2, 9, and 13. On the formation of Washington’s character, see Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington, Man and Monument (Boston, 1958), 35–60; James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man (Boston, 1974), 5–18; John E. Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (Knoxville, Tenn., 1988), 8–20; Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, vol. 1, Young Washington (New York, 1948); Thomas A. Lewis, For King and Country: The Maturing of George Washington, 1748–1760 (New York, 1993), 3–43; Paul Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley, Calif., 1988), 1–24; Don Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition (Athens, Ga., 1985), 1–38; Edmund Morgan, The Genius of George Washington (Washington, D.C., 1980); and id., The Meaning of Independence: John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, Va., 1975), 29–36.

  2. This account follows Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 4, Zones of International Friction: North America, South of the Great Lakes Region, 1748–1754 (New York, 1967), 296–301; and Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 60–8. On Van Braam, see L. K. Koontz, Robert Dinwiddie (Glendale, Calif., 1941), 243 n. 299; and W. J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760 (Albuquerque, N.M., 1983), 205 n. 15.

  3. Legardeur’s amusement: Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 63. Dinwiddie’s warning: Dinwiddie to Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, in Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., Wilderness Chronicles of Northwestern Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, Pa., 1941), 76–7. Washington’s notes: “Washington’s Description of Fort Le Boeuf,” ibid., 79. The scope of Legardeur’s career and achievements as an officer and diplomat can be fully appreciated in the excellent collection of documents edited with commentary by Joseph L. Peyser, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre: Officer, Gentleman, Entrepreneur (East Lansing, Mich., 1996); the documents dealing with his encounter with Washington are at 201–4.

  4. Legardeur de Saint-Pierre to Dinwiddie, 15 Dec. 1753, in Stevens and Kent, Wilderness Chronicles, 78; cf. the more literal translation in Peyser, Legardeur, 205–6. Washington’s return: Lewis, For King and Country, 114–19.

  5. Dinwiddie to Trent, 26 Jan. 1754, quoted in Gipson, North America, 300.

  6. Ibid., 299–302.

  7. Ibid., 302–4. Croghan later wrote to Pennsylvania’s governor: “The government may have what opinion they will of the Ohio Indians, and think they are oblig’d to do what the Onondago Counsel will bid them, butt I ashure your honour they will actt for themselves att this time without consulting the Onondago Councel” (to Gov. James Hamilton, 14 May 1754, quoted in Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959], 61).

  8. Supply shortage: Ward testimony, 1765, quoted in Gipson, North America, 304. Approach of the French: Ens. Ward’s deposition, 7 May 1754, ibid., 309–10 n. 113 (quotations from 309).

  9. On the Virginia fort, see Gipson, North America, 307–10 n. 113; Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 64–5; and George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 51–3, 53. Fort Duquesne: Charles Morse Stotz, Outposts of the War for Empire: The French and English in Western Pennsylvania: Their Armies, Their Forts, Their People, 1749–1764 (Pittsburgh, 1985), 81–7.

  CHAPTER FIVE: . . . And Stumbles

  1. For Washington’s views on the undersupplied, underpaid quality of his troops, see Washington to Dinwiddie, 7 and 9 Mar. 1754, in W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 1, 1748–August 1755 (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 75–87; on the poor pay of officers, same to same, 18 May 1754 (two letters), ibid., 96–100. For Dinwiddie’s lack of sympathy for Washington’s complaints, see Dinwiddie to Washington, 15 Mar. and 25 May 1754, ibid., 75–7, 102–14 (quotations from Dinwiddie at 102). See also Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 6, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (New York, 1968), 22–30; James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 46–72; and Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 65–70.

  2. “Instructs to Be Observ’d by Majr Geo. Washington on the Expeditn to the Ohio” [Jan. 1754], Papers of Washington, 1:65.

  3. George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 54. My account follows Stanley’s version, with additional information from Gipson, Years of Defeat, 30–2; Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973), 333–6; and Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 66–70.

  4. On the topography of Great Meadows and vicinity, see Tom Thomas and Margaret DeLaura, Fort Necessity National Battlefield, Pennsylvania (Historic Resource Study, Sept. 1996: Denver Service Center, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior), 91, 94–6, 99, et passim. Gist’s plantation, established in 1753 on the divide between Red Stone Creek and the Youghiogheny River, was to be a way station for migrants to the Ohio Company’s lands; twenty families had already settled there in 1754. See Thomas A. Lewis, For King and Country: The Maturing of George Washington, 1748–1760 (New York, 1993), 68–70.

  5. Donald Jackson, ed., The Diaries of George Washington, vol. 1, 1748–65 (Charlottesville, Va., 1976), 195 (27 May 1754 entry).

  6. Cf. the phraseology in the diary and that in Washington to Dinwiddie, 29 May 1754, Papers of Washington, 1:110; same to same, 29 May 1754, ibid., 116; and Washington to John Augustine Washington, 31 May 1754, ibid., 118. In addition to Washington’s record and the accounts analyzed below, a fifth (much later) witness’s narrative also survives. Written by Captain Adam Stephen to prove that the Virginia troops had not been the aggressors but had behaved with discipline and observed the rules of civilized warfare, this embroidered version adds no verifiable facts to the other documents and distorts a good deal of what did occur (suggesting, for example, that the Virginians “advanced as near [the French] as we could with fixt Bayonets, and received their Fire,” before executing the kind of bayonet charge that European regulars might make, but of which the half-trained Virginians were incapable). Stephen’s account appeared in the Maryland Gazette, 29 Aug. 1754, and the Pennsylvania Gazette, 19 Sept.

  7. Contrecoeur’s report was published in Europe. Translated into English in London, it appeared along with other documents on the beginning of the European phase of the war as A Memorial Containing a Summary View of Facts, with Their Authorities. In Answer to the Observations Sent by the English Ministry to the Courts of Europe (reprint, New York, 1757). The passage quoted appears in the reprinted version at 69; it is reproduced in Papers of Washington,1:114. For the original, see Fernand Grenier, ed., Papiers Contecoeur et autres documents concernant le conflit anglo-français sur l’Ohio de 1745 à 1756 (Québec, 1952). That members of the French party had been sleeping or had only recently awakened at the time of the attack—a detail mentioned by neither Washington nor Stephen—would seem clear from the fact that Monceau escaped without pausing to put on shoes. When an Indian messenger from the Forks joined Washington at Great Meadows on June 5, he reported having “met a Frenchman who had made his Escape in the Time of M. de Jumonville’s Action, he was without either Shoes or Stockings, and scarce able to walk; however he let him pass, not knowing we had fallen upon them” (Diaries of Washington, 1:199).

  8. “Affidavit of John Shaw,” in William L. McDowell Jr., ed., Colonial Records of South Carolina: Documents Relating to Indian Affairs, 1754–1765 (Columbia, S.C., 1970), 4–5.

  9. Size and composition of Jumonville’s party: Summary View, 67. I am much in debt to my colleague Dennis Van Gerven, professor of physical anthropology at the University of Colora
do, Boulder, for explaining how skull bone would fragment under a blow from an edged weapon, the qualities of the meningeal sac, the volume of blood in the head, the consistency of brain tissue in a living (or recently killed) human being, and other aspects of violent trauma to the head.

  10. Michael N. McConnell makes a parallel argument, though he stops short of describing Tanaghrisson as a refugee. See id., A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 110.

  11. “Journal de Joseph-Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry, lieutenant des troupes, 1754–1755,” Archives de Québec: Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec (1927–28), 372–3. My translation differs somewhat from that in the only other English version I have seen, a Works Progress Administration mimeograph publication in the Frontier Forts and Trails Survey series: Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., Journal of Chaussegros de Léry (Harrisburg, Pa., 1940), 27–8. I am grateful to my colleague, Professor Martha Hanna, for help with the translation.

  12. We may reasonably infer that the sight of Tanaghrisson’s act would have temporarily rendered Washington incapable of acting. Even though he, like virtually all colonial Virginians, would have seen animals slaughtered and slaves whipped, it is extremely unlikely that he would ever have seen blood gush in such quantities as would have issued from the wound that Jumonville sustained: because at any given moment nearly a third of the human blood supply is in the brain, under great pressure, the discharge of fluid would have been prodigious. Such sights frequently induce physiological shock in observers; there is no reason to assume that Washington would have been immune to the reaction. (Again I thank Dennis Van Gerven for his careful explanation of the brain and its properties, and for his description of the effect on modern witnesses of seeing wounds similar to the one Jumonville sustained.)

  13. Washington to Dinwiddie, 29 May (two letters), 3 June, and 10 June 1754, Papers of Washington,1:110–12, 116–17, 124, 135. In the 3 June letter, Washington varied his story to come close to admitting what had happened, without suggesting that he bore any responsibility for it. In speaking of the encounter he noted that only seven of Tanaghrisson’s warriors were armed, adding that “There were 5, or 6 other Indian[s], who servd to knock the poor unhappy wounded in the head and beriev’d them of their Scalps.” This statement—an aside—was ambiguous enough to allow Dinwiddie to infer that the killing occurred between the cessation of firing and Washington’s acceptance of the French surrender. Lewis draws exactly that conclusion on the basis of Washington’s letter in his able, careful account of Washington’s youth: “Thoroughly panicked, the French turned and ran toward the Virginians again, waving their arms in the air. Before Washington could get down to the floor of the ravine to accept their surrender, the Iroquois began tomahawking the wounded and collecting scalps” (For King and Country, 143).

  14. Washington to Dinwiddie, 29 May (physical stamina), and 10 June 1754 (ardent wish for direction of an experienced officer), Papers of Washington, 1:107, 129.

  15. Entry of 2 June 1754, Diaries of Washington, 1:199.

  16. “That little thing”: Tanaghrisson’s speech at Aughwick, 3 Sept. 1754, quoted in Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 67. “The attack of 500 men”: Washington to Dinwiddie, 3 June 1754, Papers of Washington, 1:124.

  17. Gipson, Years of Defeat, 32–3; Nicholas Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 62–3.

  18. Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, vol. 1, Young Washington (New York, 1948), 391–3; Diaries of Washington, 1:202–7 (entries of 16–21 June 1754).

  19. Tanaghrisson quoted by Conrad Weiser, “Journal of the Proceedings of Conrad Weiser in His Way to and at Auchwick . . . in the Year 1754,” 3 Sept. 1754, in Paul A. W. Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 1696–1760: Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia, 1945), 367. Tanaghrisson’s followers returned to the Forks and made their peace with the French. His successor as half-king, the Oneida chief Scarouady, had been with Tanaghrisson and Washington when Jumonville was killed. He remained as a refugee in Pennsylvania until 1756 (see Duquesne to the minister of marine, 3 Nov. 1754, in Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., WildernessChronicles of Western Pennsylvania [Harrisburg, Pa., 1941], 84; Francis Jennings et al., eds., The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy [Syracuse, N.Y., 1985], 250–2; and McConnell, A Country Between, 110–11).

  20. Freeman, Young Washington, 395–7; “Minutes of a Council of War,” 28 June 1754, Papers of Washington, 1:155–7.

  21. Lewis, King and Country, 152.

  22. Gipson, Years of Defeat, 35.

  23. Maryland Gazette, 29 Aug. 1754, quoted in Gipson, Years of Defeat, 39; see also Harry M. Ward, Major General Adam Stephen and the Cause of American Liberty (Charlottesville, Va., 1989), 10–11.

  24. “Account by George Washington and James Mackay of the Capitulation of Fort Necessity,” 19 July 1754, and “George Washington’s Account of the Capitulation of Fort Necessity,” 1786, in Papers of Washington, 1:159–64, 172–3; affidavit of John Shaw, 21 Aug. 1754, South CarolinaIndian Affairs, 5–7. The quotation on the composition of the Indian allies originated with Robert Callender (a business partner of Croghan’s who was present at Fort Necessity), who reported it to a resident of Paxton, Pa., who in turn included it in a letter to Gov. James Hamilton, 16 July 1754; quoted in Gipson, Years of Defeat, 41, emphasis added. In general see ibid., 37–43; Lewis, For King and Country, 153–7; and Leach, Arms for Empire, 339–42.

  25. English casualties: Gipson, Years of Defeat, 41 n. 60; French casualties: Varin to Bigot, 24 July 1754, in Stevens and Kent, Wilderness Chronicles, 81.

  26. Physical condition and desertion: Titus, Old Dominion, 55–7; and Leach, Arms for Empire, 342. Quotation: Washington to William Fairfax, 11 Aug. 1754, Papers of Washington, 1:186–7.

  27. Stanley, New France, 57; W. J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760 (Albquerque, N.M., 1983), 164–7.

  CHAPTER SIX: Escalation

  1. Hayes Baker-Crothers, Virginia in the Seven Years’ War (Chicago, 1928), 41–5; James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 103–6; L. K. Koontz, Robert Dinwiddie (Glendale, Calif., 1941), 319–20; J. R. Alden, Robert Dinwiddie: Servant of the Crown (Charlottesville, Va., 1973), 47–8.

  2. Newcastle to the earl of Albemarle, 5 Sept. 1754, quoted in T. R. Clayton, “The Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of Halifax, and the American Origins of the Seven Years’ War,” Historical Journal 24 (1981): 590–1.

  3. On Braddock’s career and character, see Lee McCardell, Ill-Starred General: Braddock of the Coldstream Guards (Pittsburgh, 1958); on the plan and Halifax’s reaction, see Clayton, “American Origins,” 593; and James Henretta, “Salutary Neglect”: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle (Princeton, N.J., 1972), 333–40.

  4. Stanley Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (1933; reprint, New York, 1968), 31–3.

  5. Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 124.

  6. Clayton, “American Origins,” 596–7, 603.

  7. Newcastle seized on the French proposals as genuinely aimed at preserving the peace, but Halifax sabotaged the negotiations in Feb. 1755 by publishing a Board of Trade map of British claims in North America that precluded further compromise. Negotiations continued, fruitlessly, until June. Clayton, “American Origins,” 597–601; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 5, Zones of International Friction: The Great Lakes Frontier, Canada, the West Indies, India, 1748–1754 (New York, 1967), 298–338.

  8. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 6, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (New York, 1968), 359–65.

  9. Newcastle to Bentinck, 17 Dec. 1754, quoted in Clayton, “American Origins,” 598; I have reversed the order of Newcastle’s sentences (“the conduct . .
.” and “the great System . . .”) for the sake of clarity.

  PART II: DEFEAT, 1754-1755 CHAPTER SEVEN: The Albany Congress and Colonial Disunion

  1. See Thomas Pownall to My Lord [Halifax], 23 July 1754, in Beverly McAnear, ed., “Personal Accounts of the Albany Congress of 1754,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (1953): 742, 744; and William Smith Jr., The History of the Province of the State of New-York, ed. Michael Kammen, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 161.

  2. Lydius and the Wyoming scheme: Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 5, Zones of International Friction: The Great Lakes Frontier, Canada, the West Indies, India, 1748–1754 (New York, 1967), 90; Smith, History of New-York, 2:88–9; Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 106–7, 153; James Thomas Flexner, Lord of the Mohawks: A Biographyof Sir William Johnson (Boston, 1979), 75–7, 128–30, et passim. The Susquehannah Company’s scheme to acquire land within Pennsylvania rested on Connecticut’s charter grant, which antedated Pennsylvania’s and set the colony boundary at the Pacific Ocean. The Connecticut Assembly, whose members included many stockholders in the Susquehannah Company, refused to agree to the Plan of Union because it would have modified the charters of provinces with sea-to-sea patents. See Gipson, Great Lakes Frontier, 150; and Robert C. Newbold, The Albany Congress and the Plan of Union of 1754 (New York, 1955), 137–40.

  3. On Weiser’s activities, see Gipson, Great Lakes Frontier, 121–2; Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 103–6; and Paul A. W. Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 1696–1760: Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia, 1945), 358–60.

  4. On De Lancey, Johnson, Pownall, and the congress, see Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York, 1971), 171–8; Stanley N. Katz, Newcastle’s New York: Anglo-American Politics, 1732–1753 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 200–13; and Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 71–108. De Lancey’s formidable connections included his former Cambridge tutor who had gone on to become archbishop of Canterbury, and his brother-in-law, Admiral Sir Peter Warren, a member of Parliament who had procured the lieutenant governorship for De Lancey. Warren was also the uncle of William Johnson, who had initially come to New York in 1737 to manage his interests in the Mohawk Valley. On the Warren-Johnson connection, see Flexner, Lord of the Mohawks, 13–27; Milton W. Hamilton, Sir William Johnson, Colonial American, 1715–1763 (Port Washington, N.Y., 1976), 3–14; and Julian Gwyn, The Enterprising Admiral: The Personal Fortune of Admiral Sir Peter Warren (Montréal, 1974), 29–93.

 

‹ Prev