Each Indian carries a length of cord for handcuffing prisoners, but they have no use for that right now. This is no longer a French-led battle but, rather, a lesson in terror meted out by these hardened warriors—and killing is the only thing on their minds.
* * *
George Washington gallops toward the fight.
At first, the distant snap of musket fire seemed a trifle, just British advance scouts trading shots with Indian outrangers. From his position at the rear of the column, along with the baggage, camp followers, and cattle, Washington seemed safe from harm. “We … believed our numbers almost equal to the Canadian force. They only expected to annoy us,” Washington later wrote of the confidence displayed by the British and the blue-coated Virginia militia, a hardy band of colonists also known as the “Brave Blues.”
But as the sound of shots increased in intensity, followed by blood-curdling Indian war cries, it became clear that this was more than a mere skirmish. General Braddock instantly ordered his top aides, Washington among them, to spur their horses. They now race up the rocky, uneven road, past teamsters and wagons, and toward the disarray that now characterizes the battlefield.
A favorite Indian tactic is to kill enemy leaders to create confusion among the troops, and it is clear to all who witness Braddock’s arrival that he is every bit the British senior officer. It is not just his age and girth that give him away, but also the beautiful white charger on which he rides and the bright red and gold of his clean uniform.
Washington quickly learns that his blue uniform and breeches also make him a marked man. A musket ball penetrates his coat, embedding itself in the thick fabric but going no farther. His horse is shot out from under him. As the animal collapses in death, Washington is thrown to the ground. He collects the pillow from the saddle and scrambles to his feet, desperate to find a new horse. The smells of carnage attack his senses: gun smoke, excrement, vomit, and urine. Grenadiers racing back from the front have collided headlong with the main body of British soldiers advancing toward the fight. They’ve formed themselves into clumps of twenty to thirty men, praying that their numbers will protect them. The grenadiers refuse to advance, and General Braddock refuses to order a retreat. The soldiers simply huddle and await their fate. The Indians oblige, shooting men one by one from the protective cover of a nearby ravine.
Meanwhile, a riderless horse trots in panicked circles. Washington quickly grabs its reins. In the midst of the battle, he takes the time to place his pillow upon the saddle. Given the horror of seeing men butchered before his very eyes, the luxury of doing battle atop a cushion seems absurd, but there is no other way for him to fight.
As he mounts the horse, he winces in pain. In his weakened state, the simple act of pulling himself up onto a horse’s back requires all his strength. Soon he is astride, and once again galloping through the chaos to encourage the troops. But his efforts are in vain. “Our numbers consisted of about 1300 well armed men, chiefly regulars, who were immediately struck with such a deadly panic … that confusion and disobedience of orders prevailed among them,” he will later remember.
Washington has long feared this sort of ambush. His time at Fort Necessity one year ago taught him the need for unconventional fighting tactics. He insisted to General Braddock that the elite British troops give up their traditional uniforms and instead fight wearing “Indian dress,” in buckskin tunics, leggings, and moccasins, if not for camouflage, then for greater ease of movement. Washington also encouraged Braddock to abandon the traditional straight lines from the British order of battle, allowing the soldiers to fight as small fire teams in the manner of their Indian opponents.
The general ignored him. Braddock enjoys Washington’s company, and is delighted to have him on staff, but an undeniable air of disdain defines the attitude of the British toward the colonials, whom Braddock at least considers to be second-class citizens. Washington’s charisma, wit, and intellect are greatly appreciated at the dinner table, as is his courage in accompanying the expedition as a volunteer aide-de-camp, but in matters of military strategy, George Washington is considered a precocious fool.6
A young George Washington, colonel of the Virginia regiment
Washington’s hat is shot from his head. Another musket ball nicks his coat. An incredible sort of luck seems to follow him now—the musket balls do not so much as touch his skin. In all, four musket balls will strike him today, yet the Virginian will leave this battle unscathed.
His new horse is shot out from under him. Again, Washington is thrown to the ground and hurries to find another mount. Every officer on horseback will be killed or wounded today—all except the young Virginia volunteer.
Washington hurls himself onto a horse and weaves through the chaos, his sword drawn as he screams orders for the British to close ranks and return to the fight. He is disgusted by what he sees. “They ran as sheep pursued by dogs,” he will later write. “[I]t was impossible to rally them.”
It is equally clear to Washington that the Brave Blues of the Virginia militia are outfighting the British regulars. This is not unexpected. The Brave Blues are battling to protect their families and homes, knowing that if the French and Indians win this engagement, there will be little to stop them from marauding through Virginia.
Yet, rather than encouraging the Brave Blues to continue their successful strategy of fighting behind rocks and trees—“treeing,” in the vernacular of the British Army—Braddock loudly denounces the Virginians as “cowards and dastards,” and even strikes them with the flat of his sword to force them out into the open.
In the end, few Brave Blues will return home. “They fought like soldiers and died like men,” Washington will lament of the fallen.
The handful of Brave Blues who make it home will bring with them a new spirit of independence: from this day forward, it will be clear that the Americans no longer need the British to fight their battles.
In fact, on this day, it is the British who need the Americans, but even they can’t reverse the horrible course of the battle.
In the first hour of combat, the grenadiers are routed.
In the second hour of fighting wagon teamster Daniel Boone cuts his horse loose from its traces and joins a group of unarmed teamsters galloping away from the slaughter. Almost all will live.
In the third hour of combat, Gen. Edward Braddock is mortally wounded by a musket ball. He has had four horses shot out from under him, and is struck in the right arm and lungs as he mounts a fifth. Knowing the battle is lost, and that great shame and humiliation will be heaped upon him, Braddock begs for a pistol so that he might take his own life. His aides ignore him.
The general then calls for George Washington, the one man who knows this terrain better than any of the British.
Ride, Braddock tells Washington. Ride for help.
It is past four in the afternoon. Washington is still weak from illness, and emotionally drained from three hours of battle. The summer heat and humidity have caused him to sweat through his linen shirt and thick wool uniform coat. He is thirsty and hungry, and knows that critical reinforcements and medical supplies are dozens of miles away through the wilderness.
George Washington was new to warfare when he surrendered to the French at Fort Necessity a year ago. Though eager and well meaning, he blundered through that conflict and returned home in disgrace. His courage was never an issue, nor his desire to learn from that debacle. He was sure that volunteering as an aide-de-camp to Braddock might replace that memory with one far more glorious.
But the opposite has happened: Braddock has lost; the British have been routed, almost to a man; and the colonies are now defenseless against a French and Indian attack. There is little glory to be gained from what has happened today. The British captives will be paraded back to Fort Duquesne at twilight—the women to be raped, the men to be burned alive for the amusement of the French and Indians.7
Yet, on this day, Washington ceased being a surveyor and Virginia gentleman.
Today, he became a warrior.
Strapping his pillow tightly to his saddle, George Washington obeys Braddock’s order.
1
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
JUNE 16, 1775
8:00 A.M.
George Washington is out for blood.
Twenty years almost to the day after Braddock’s Defeat, as the infamous battle in the Ohio River Valley has come to be known, the six-foot-two Virginian pushes back his chair and rises to his feet. Seventy-year-old Benjamin Franklin watches him from across the cramped Assembly Room here in the Pennsylvania State House. Delegates to the Second Continental Congress sit in high-backed chairs, their papers splayed before them on cloth-covered tables, waiting to hear if Washington will accept the new title he has been offered.
At the head of the room on this oppressively humid Friday morning, overseeing the proceedings, sits John Hancock, the wealthiest man in Massachusetts and president of the Congress. A man of medium height and build, he is thirty-eight and soon to be married, with a baby already on the way. Born the son of a clergyman, Hancock was sent to live with a rich uncle at the age of seven, after his father had died and his mother could no longer care for him. The uncle had no children of his own, so Hancock was raised to take over the family’s highly successful import-export business. In time, Hancock added to his growing wealth by becoming a smuggler of wine, tea, molasses, and tobacco. His duties as president of the Congress are slight—most often, mediating debate. On days when the arguments become loud enough for people outside the tall windows ringing the Assembly Room to hear what is being said, Hancock might insist that they be kept closed. But this morning, thanks to the temperature and thick morning air, they are wide open.1
Sitting on the aisle next to the second row of desks is Benjamin Franklin. He is weary but attentive, his impish sense of humor nowhere to be seen. Just six weeks ago, he returned home from eleven years in England. Unfortunately, his wife, Deborah, who had remained in Philadelphia due to fear of ocean travel, had died during Franklin’s absence. Shortly before last Christmas, she was felled by a stroke. Her husband got the news while living in a small brick row house between Charing Cross and the Strand, in London.
As much as he misses his wife, it is not her passing that lays the biggest burden on Franklin’s heart. His original purpose for sailing to London had been to act on behalf of his home colony, seeking to establish a closer relationship between Pennsylvania and the British Crown. But the effort was soon overshadowed by England’s exploitative policy of taxing the American colonies to pay British debts. Onerous legislation such as the Molasses Act, Sugar Act, and Townshend Acts forced the Americans to pay duties on everyday amenities such as rum, paper, paint, and glass, with all the revenue flowing to England—all to pay for the same frontier defenses the colonies already provided for themselves. The colonists believe this to be illegal.
Even worse, there was no attempt to allow the colonists a voice in Parliament, leading many to fume that “taxation without representation” was a form of slavery.
The Intolerable Acts of 1774 went a step further, punishing the people of Massachusetts by abolishing their provincial government and installing a British general as the colony’s new governor.
At first the enraged colonists responded by actually beating tax collectors. With rebellion in the air, Franklin’s focus changed. Instead of just Pennsylvania, he found himself representing all the colonies as a diplomat, working tirelessly to keep the peace.
Franklin is not a timid man. He knows there is a time and a place for war. In 1755, shortly after Braddock’s stunning annihilation left the colonies wide open to French and Indian attack, more than four hundred white settlers were slaughtered and scalped in Pennsylvania. It was Franklin who led the call for a state militia to defend the people. His pleas were ignored until the bodies of those dead settlers were brought by wagon to Philadelphia and dumped on the steps of this very statehouse.
Two days later, Franklin had his army.
In his efforts to prevent war between England and America, Franklin has made every effort to be impartial. “In England,” he once wrote of the criticism thrown his way, “I am accused of being too much an American, and in America of being too much an Englishman.”
Now, despite his diligent efforts, war has come. On April 19, 1775, shortly after he boarded a ship for the voyage home to America, the Battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts saw the first casualties of a conflict that would eventually become known as the Revolutionary War.2
* * *
On this very day, north of Boston, twelve hundred colonial soldiers are hastily building defensive fortifications on the hills of the Charlestown Peninsula. Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill offer a commanding view of Boston, a city of fifteen thousand people and long a hotbed of loathing toward the British. The Crown has occupied Boston since 1768, as it tightened restrictions in the most rebellious of colonies, controlling the ebb and flow of daily life while carefully monitoring the growing divide between “patriots,” as the rebels call themselves, and the Loyalists. There has been bloodshed as a result of this friction, most notably the Boston Massacre in 1770, when British soldiers fired into a patriot mob, killing five men. Currently, a force of six thousand regulars is garrisoned within Boston’s one-square-mile limits.3
Were it not for a thin stretch of land known as the Roxbury Neck connecting it to the Massachusetts coastline, Boston would be an island. Colonial troops under Artemas Ward control access to the Neck, forming a narrow barrier preventing the British from marching out of Boston and expanding their control of the surrounding towns. Yet, while the English may be contained, they are by no means cut off. They control Boston, which means that English ships come and go with impunity, resupplying the regular army garrison and preventing the military siege that would see British food and ammunition choked off. The Massachusetts Colony has no navy to contest these vessels, many of which are armed with cannon. Thus, a stalemate has existed for months between the two forces—and continues to this day, despite the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord two months ago.
If the British were to take control of Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill, the colonists would lose a key strategic position. From their lofty summits overlooking Boston Harbor and the city itself, the colonists can fire cannonballs—which is why the British have spent the last three weeks secretly plotting an invasion of the Charlestown Peninsula, to capture those heights. But just two days ago, on June 13, the rebels got word of the British plans. Working day and night, they have been preparing redoubts from which to fend off the redcoats. Six feet high, made of earth, with wooden platforms on the interior from which men can stand to fire their muskets, the square-shaped fortifications are protected from assault by ditches around their perimeter.
Early on the morning of June 17, British warships fire on Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill, to little effect. The emboldened colonists endure a sweltering day in the sun as they await the next move from the English. Soon, they spot longboats rowing soldiers from Boston over to the Charlestown Peninsula. The flotilla is massive, ferrying some fifteen hundred grenadiers and light infantry across the harbor. Some of the colonists quietly desert, retreating back toward Cambridge rather than facing sure death. Those who choose to remain will long remember the confusion of that day, as the local militia volunteers mill about with a lack of military discipline, even as the British regulars fix their bayonets and prepare for the attack. The mere sight of them is daunting: hundreds of red-coated soldiers stand abreast, lining up in four neat rows, prepared to launch a full-frontal assault on the hastily built colonial defenses. When American snipers fired from buildings in the town of Charlestown, British cannon responded with red-hot shot, setting fire to the city and casting great plumes of smoke into the air.
Yet it is the colonists who win the early stages of the fight, thanks to the strength of their defensive positions. Shooting with a sniper’s precision, they pick off the English with ease. Man
y grenadier and infantry units lose almost all their men, some with “only eight or nine men a company left,” in the words of one English observer. It appears to be a stunning repeat of Braddock’s Defeat, a comparison made all the more apparent by the fact that the British commander, Gen. Thomas Gage, served side by side with George Washington at that battle as another aide to Braddock.
The first British attack stalls when the light infantry, attempting to turn the American flank, is decimated by fire from a barrier on the shoreline. A second assault fares only slightly better. The British entered the battle believing the colonists would run at the first smell of gunpowder. Their arrogance has been costly, the grenadiers’ advance slowed by fences and other obstacles that disarray their columns and allow them to be cut to ribbons by the fortified colonial positions. Dead redcoats lie sprawled in the dense grass just outside the American fortifications. The wounded and the dying cry for help, but their pleas go unanswered.
As afternoon turns to evening, however, the colonists run out of ammunition. Only then does the tide of the battle turn toward the British. The colonists’ muskets, used more often for hunting dinner than killing men, lack bayonets. So, as the professional soldiers come over the parapets during the third English assault in late afternoon, the combatants resort to hand-to-hand fighting, and the battle swings toward the English.
Having no other choice, the colonists retreat, leaving Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill to the British. They flee toward Cambridge where they will have safety in numbers, some getting caught by British bayonets but most escaping. The retreat is orderly and precise, saving the lives of hundreds of colonists and preventing their imprisonment. And while they have lost what will become known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, the men of Massachusetts have extracted a fierce toll: almost eight hundred wounded and more than two hundred dead, including a large number of officers. Most astounding: almost half of all British soldiers entering this battle are now casualties.
Killing England Page 2