Band of Giants_The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence

by Jack Kelly

  American militiamen had practiced only a weak semblance of these drills on muster days. Braddock assigned a lieutenant to exercise the provincial troops, “long, lank, yellow-faced Virginians, who at best are a half-starved, ragged dirty Set.” In the short time available, the men barely learned the rudiments.

  The British soldiers were receiving an education of their own. The intimacy of slavery in Virginia surprised them. “How it strikes the Mind on the first Arrival,” an officer observed, “to have all these black Faces with grim Looks round you.” Then, when the army finally marched to Fort Cumberland, a primitive stockade at the limit of settled territory in western Maryland, the soldiers first encountered America’s indigenous people. The customs and manners of these natives, one of Braddock’s men said, “are hardly to be described.”11

  “They paint themselves in an odd manner,” he went on. “And the men have the outer rim of their ears cut, which only hangs by a bit top and bottom, and have a tuft of hair left at the top of their heads, which is dressed with feathers. . . . They dance and make a most horrible noise.”12

  Braddock’s attitude toward America’s natives grew out of his own profound ignorance. Franklin had warned the general that his army, stretched out along a thin line, would be vulnerable to “ambuscades of Indians.”

  “These savages may, indeed, be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia,” Braddock replied, “but upon the King’s regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they should make any impression.”13

  Indians lacked discipline, organization, and the other accouterments of civilization. Braddock assumed they must therefore lack power. A group of chiefs offered their aid to the expedition as scouts and warriors. Braddock was ready to accept, but when the Indians asked for guarantees respecting their own claims to the Ohio Country, he was typically blunt: “No Savage Should Inherit the Land.” Most of the Indians departed for good.14

  * * *

  Studying bad maps back in London, British officials believed that the trek from Fort Cumberland, Braddock’s base, to Fort Duquesne, the French bastion at the Forks of the Ohio, was about 15 miles. The actual distance was 120 miles over mountainous, forested terrain that no English bureaucrat could imagine. In Europe, carriages traveled decent roads and primeval forests had vanished long ago. Braddock’s would be the first wheeled vehicles to roll over the Appalachian Mountains.

  The expedition started on June 7, 1755, with 2,500 men, far fewer than the 15,000-man amalgam of regulars, provincials, and Indians the plan had called for. The six-mile-long cavalcade would have to climb and descend seven steep mountain ridges before reaching the Forks. Coming down the very first of these heights, three wagons broke away from their drivers and careened downhill, killing the horses and smashing the wagons to pieces. “The very Face of the Country,” an officer commented, “is enough to strike a Damp in the most resolute Mind.”15

  As they pushed into the wilderness, Washington complained in a letter that “the march must be regulated by the slow movements of the Train [of artillery and baggage] which I am sorry to say will be tedious, very tedious indeed, as I long predicted, tho’ few believed.” At times, the expedition became so strung out that the rear guard lagged two days’ march behind the van.16

  Though frustrated at the pace, the young Washington enjoyed Braddock’s congenial mess. The general served good wine to his military family, who passed mild summer evenings telling war stories. Washington had a chance to mix with officers like the urbane Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage, second son of a viscount. “Honest Tom,” then thirty-five, was not given to the usual officers’ vices of drinking, gambling, and whoring.

  Washington met Charles Lee, an English lieutenant of his own age. The well-educated Lee was a thinker in a profession where deep reflection was not the norm. He loved Shakespeare—Washington was likewise a devotee of the theater. Lee had ordered a copy of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian Wars in the original Greek to read on the expedition. A great talker, he might have quoted that historian’s remark: “Men do not rest content with parrying the attacks of a superior, but often strike the first blow to prevent the attack being made.”

  Washington also had the chance to know Horatio Gates. The twenty-eight-year-old captain had been born to an English housekeeper. His mother’s friend was a maid in the household of the aristocratic Walpole family. As a result, Gates had become the godson and namesake of Horace Walpole. His upper-class connections had helped the young man obtain an officer’s commission. Under Braddock, he led a provincial company from New York. He was destined, like some of the others on the expedition, to play a significant role in a war that none of them could yet imagine.

  On June 17, heeding the advice of Washington, who “urged it in the warmest terms I was master of,” Braddock divided his force. A Falstaffian colonel, Thomas Dunbar, would manage the bulk of the supplies and guns in the rear division. Braddock, freed from encumbrances, would surge ahead with a compact but lethal “flying column.”

  Daniel Morgan remained with the supply force, which dropped farther and farther behind. Six days later, Washington, too, was forced to join this contingent. Dysentery, dreaded by soldiers as the “bloody flux,” had caught up with him. Overcome with violent diarrhea and fever, he could no longer ride but lay in the bed of a jolting wagon. The expedition proceeded into a vast pine forest known as the Shades of Death. A nineteenth-century historian said it was “like the dark nave of some endless, dream-born cathedral.”17 The profound silence went on forever. A feverish Washington caught glimpses of the sky through the black tangle of branches overhead.

  On July 8, the main army camped a day’s march from Fort Duquesne. Washington came up from Dunbar’s supply train, which now lagged thirty-six miles behind. Still weak and suffering an excruciating case of piles, he needed the aid of a cushion to bear sitting on a horse. He was not about to miss the final thrust of the historic expedition.

  To reach Fort Duquesne, Braddock had to cross the Monongahela River. Aware that fording would leave his force vulnerable, he ordered Lieutenant Colonel Gage to cross at four o’clock on the warm morning of July 9, 1755, and to secure the high ground on the opposite bank. Gage led an elite force consisting of grenadiers, the tall shock troops of the army, and light infantrymen, its most capable fighters. Braddock then ordered his men to “march over the river in the greatest order, with their bayonets fixed, Colors flying, and Drums and Fifes beating and playing.” It was an exercise in intimidation. Over the haughty beat of forty large drums, scores of fifers pierced the forest’s stillness with the lilt of “The Grenadiers’ March.”

  Perhaps overly impressed with his own display, Braddock directed Gage’s advance guard to give up the high ground and to form a column ahead of the army. Minutes later, Gage’s men spotted an enemy force. A small group of French regulars and Canadian militiamen, accompanied by six hundred Indians, had sallied from Fort Duquesne. When they engaged, the two bodies of soldiers stood only two hundred yards from each other in the sweltering forest.

  Gage ordered his troops to form a line and fire. One of their first volleys struck the enemy commander, killing him. The French regulars and Indians immediately spread out to seek cover. Their return fire and the unnerving shrieking of the Indians shocked the grenadiers. This was the first taste of combat for many of the redcoats. They ignored Gage’s order to fix bayonets and attack up a slope. “Visible terror and confusion,” one observer noted, “appeared amongst the men.”

  The French and Indians fired at the massed troops. The noise was unimaginable. Men groped through smoke, their ears numb. The big guns, which the British had brought across the ocean and manhandled through the wilderness, proved impotent. The Indians, one man saw, “kept an uncessant fire on the Guns,” cutting down the gunners before they could load their pieces.

  Washington accompanied Braddock into the smoke-clogged chaos, riding forward “
on horse-back, tho’ very weak and low.” He noted the “irretrievable disorder” in the vanguard and the “unusual hallooing and whooping of the enemy.” “The yell of the Indians is fresh in my ear,” a veteran later wrote, “and the terrific sound will haunt me till the hour of my dissolution.”18

  Washington saw the weakness of an entire system of warfare exposed in an instant. Men trained to act on command as a single unit could not suddenly adopt new tactics. They did not take cover, did not respond to the evolving attack with fluid maneuvering of their own. They fired in volleys as they had been trained to do, even when no target was in sight.

  Officers “dropped like leaves in Autumn.” Thomas Gage was wounded. Horatio Gates was shot in the breast and arm. Before the battle was over, almost every British field officer would be killed or wounded.

  The battle began at one in the afternoon. By four, the British were nearly surrounded. Colonel Dunbar was too far behind to send help. Washington, in spite of his weakness, remained in the thick of the action. Bullets pierced his clothes; two horses were shot from under him.

  The line wavered. Civilian wagon drivers, smelling disaster, cut loose the draft horses and fled. A musket ball pierced Braddock’s shoulder and lodged in his lung. At around five o’clock on that suffocating afternoon, “as if by beat of Drumm,” the whole army turned and ran, “every one trying who should be first.”

  Washington helped the fallen general into a wagon and off the field. Indians chased down the vanquished, catching some as they tried to recross the river. They “dyed ye stream with their blood, scalping and cutting them.” A bonanza of booty distracted the French and Indians, who fell to plundering. The defeated raced on, pursued by their own fears.

  That July afternoon, George Washington saw war stripped of all its masks. There was no glory, no dignity, and little honor in the spectacle. The aftermath of the battle stunned him. “The shocking Scenes which presented themselves in this Night’s March,” he wrote, “are not to be described. The dead, the dying, the groans, lamentations, and crys . . . were enough to pierce a heart.”19

  The soldiers taken prisoner lived through a few hours of mind-scalding terror, imagining what was to come. Then it came. That night outside Fort Duquesne, the Indians lashed them to stakes, prodded them with red-hot irons, tore their flesh, and finally burned them alive, their screams evaporating in the darkness.

  As the survivors reached the supply train, General Braddock’s condition worsened. He murmured, “Who would have thought it?” The disaster along the Monongahela was the worst defeat that had ever befallen British forces. Fourteen hundred soldiers had taken part, and more than eight hundred had been killed or wounded.

  In the second contingent, Colonel Dunbar still had enough men and heavy guns to attack and conquer Fort Duquesne. But as one observer noted, “the Terror of the Indian remaining so strongly in the men’s minds,” he did not make the attempt. General Braddock, before he died, ordered the precious supplies, gathered and transported at such expense, more critical now than ever for the defense of the frontier, to be destroyed. His object was a faster retreat, although no force was pursuing. Even as the citizens of Philadelphia were raising funds for a victory celebration, Daniel Morgan and the other teamsters were scattering gunpowder and flour and burying the remaining cannon.

  Before the expedition returned, Washington had Braddock’s body interred not far from the glen where Jumonville had died a year earlier. When the troops reached Philadelphia, Dunbar demanded winter quarters for his troops, inviting the colonists’ derision: it was still July.

  Washington was quick to criticize the behavior of the British soldiers. He wrote to Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie, “The Virginia companies behav’d like Men and died like Soldiers.” The regulars, he declared, “broke and ran as Sheep before Hounds.” The most enduring legacy of Braddock’s defeat was the tarnish it left on the British army’s reputation for invincibility. “This whole transaction gave us the first suspicion,” Benjamin Franklin noted, “that our exalted ideas of the prowess of British regular troops had not been well founded.”20

  Braddock came in for his share of the blame. But Washington, who would remain an admirer of his mentor, simply called him “brave even to a fault.”

  The defeat affected all of the country’s inhabitants. Virginians feared that this demonstration of British impotence might incite a slave rebellion. “The negro slaves have been very audacious on the news of the defeat on the Ohio,” Dinwiddie noted. In Philadelphia, nervous inhabitants turned on the Irish, who as Catholics were suspected of sympathizing with the French.21

  It was not slaves or immigrants whom the Americans had to fear, but the continent’s indigenous people. The defeat on the Monongahela touched off a series of violent Indian attacks on frontier settlements, atrocities known as the Outrages. Thousands of pioneers were pushed eastward by the Indians whom they had earlier dispossessed. The frontier regions of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia lost as much as half their population in the three years after the Braddock catastrophe.

  George Washington remained at the head of the Virginia Regiment during the first years of what Americans called the French and Indian War. After early defeats, the British rallied. In 1758, Washington joined General John Forbes on a second expedition to the Ohio Country. That force overwhelmed the French and took Fort Duquesne without a major battle. General James Wolff led British forces in the conquest of Quebec a year later. Having utterly vanquished the French in North America, King George III, who had assumed the British throne in 1760, emerged from the conflict with the most extensive empire of the age.

  Washington showed little enthusiasm for the war he had inadvertently started. Elected to Virginia’s House of Burgesses in July 1758, he resigned his militia commission at the end of that year and took no further part in the struggle. He married Virginia’s wealthiest widow, Martha Dandridge Custis, in January 1759 and joined the colony’s elite.

  One of Washington’s principal virtues was his ability to learn, and Braddock had been his most important teacher. The Virginian did not take a simple lesson from his experiences in the 1750s. He remained convinced of the efficacy of formal European fighting methods when properly employed, but he saw the need for flexibility and adaptation. Braddock’s misfortune showed that the forests of America were not the plains of Europe. Irregular fighting and the use of special forces could be valuable supplements to traditional tactics. It was a matter of balance, and a tendency to weigh and balance was a prominent feature of Washington’s mind.

  From Braddock, Washington took his concept of how an army should be constituted and managed. In the egalitarian climate that would sweep America during the Revolutionary era, rigid hierarchy, taut discipline, and punishment by flogging would all come into question. But Washington would insist that “discipline is the soul of an army.”

  Washington learned that a defeat, even a ruinous one like the cataclysm at the Monongahela, could be overcome. Perhaps the most important lesson he took from Braddock was a basic one: how to sustain an army in the field. In war, logistics could often be more critical than any single victory.

  Like Braddock, Washington would favor the offensive. Like Braddock, he would scorn Indians as allies, maintain a military family of close aides, and pay close attention to such mundane issues as his troops’ hygiene and pay. Like Braddock, he would adopt the honorific “Excellency.”

  He would not, like his mentor, emulate the studied decadence of the British officer class. He would discourage exorbitant drinking, gaming, and womanizing in the Continental Army, setting a tone that fit his own personality. A contemporary described him as “Discreet and Virtuous, no harum Starum ranting Swearing fellow, but Sober, steady and Calm.”22

  Washington’s behavior during the battle on the Monongahela overshadowed and erased the stain of his failure at Fort Necessity. Although a disaster for Braddock and the British, the
campaign left Washington “the hero of the Monongahela.”

  Washington had borne witness to the cost of war. Of 150 Virginia provincial soldiers who marched with Braddock, many of whom Washington had personally recruited, 120 had been killed or wounded. Washington would never again describe bullets as charming. He himself seemed a child of destiny, left untouched when so many others died. The Presbyterian minister Samuel Davis wrote at the time that he hoped Providence had preserved Washington “in so signal a Manner for some important Service to this Country.”23

  And so Providence had. A man who understood something of the military art, a social climber, a slave owner, an athlete, a lover of theater, a determined, self-deprecating man, always wary, subject to anger but not bluster, tempered by early defeats, open to the hard lessons of

  experience—this was the man whom history had chosen to play the lead role in a drama that would change the world.

  Two

  Blows Must Decide

  1774

  Twenty years later, the colonies continued to feel the effects of the war that George Washington had started in 1754. The fighting had left Great Britain with a magnificent empire and a ruinous debt. The government’s attempts to tax the colonies had generated more protests than revenues and had goaded the inhabitants to the edge of violent insurrection.

  During the tense summer of 1774, two men sat discussing the affairs of the day over pints of ale in the Boston tavern The Bunch of Grapes. One was the tall, paunchy Henry Knox, a well-known city bookseller of twenty-four, given to booming laughter and subtle, insightful analysis. The other was a pudgy, lame Rhode Island businessman named Nathanael Greene. Eight years older than Knox, he still showed the roughness of his country upbringing. But Greene was an avid learner and was in fact one of Knox’s best customers. The liberal-minded Knox admired his friend’s enthusiasm. To know freedom and not defend it, Greene asserted, was “spiritual suicide.”