Col. James Innes had been told by Governor Dinwiddie as early as March 23 that the position of Commander-in-Chief of the expedition to the Ohio had been intended for him. Delay had attended the organization of the North Carolina troops whom Innes was to bring to Virginia, but the Colonel himself had proceeded to Winchester. He had arrived in the Valley town on June 30 and had begun to exercise command under orders and commission of Dinwiddie. As Innes held also an old commission as Captain in the regular establishment, he seemed well chosen. He could give orders to the young Captains of Independent Companies and thereby could escape the disputes over rank that George had encountered. Because their Colony had no magazine, Innes’s men had no arms except those that private individuals chose to bring along with them. Two of his five North Carolina companies had disembarked at Alexandria late in June, but they found no weapons there. The other reenforcements on which Dinwiddie had relied for months were the two Independent Companies from New York. These troops had received in March orders to move to Virginia, but they had not reached Norfolk until June 16 and then proved to be poor human material, feebly equipped.
When blame for the capitulation at Fort Necessity was apportioned, Dinwiddie and Washington and all their friends could point to the number of idle troops: of the eight companies, approximately 550 men, who had been expected to support the Virginia Regiment, only Mackay’s company had joined Washington. The delay of the regulars and of the North Carolinians, the Governor told some of his correspondents, had been “monstrous.” Dinwiddie did not once suggest that, as conditions were, the more men Washington had, the sooner they would have gone hungry. The Governor never seemed to appreciate the part that feeble transportation played in the defeat of the expedition. He continued rightly to blame the contractors; he did not realize, or at least did not admit, that he had been culpably over-optimistic in his assumption of the speed with which vehicles could be assembled and men and supplies moved to the Ohio over the rough, mountainous road George slowly had reopened.
Detailed judgment of the misadventure had not been formulated fully by the time George and Mackay hurried to Winchester, where they reported to Colonel Innes, their Commander-in-Chief. They left Winchester on July 11 to ride to Williamsburg to report to the Governor. It was July 17, a fortnight after the bloody day at Fort Necessity, that the two officers reached Williamsburg.
The Governor received George, heard the details of what had happened, and began to make his preparations for the next phase of the struggle. His new orders to Colonel Innes were for the building at Wills Creek of a log fort to receive six months’ provisions. “. . . I think it’s not prudent to march out to the Ohio,” the Governor wrote, “till you have a sufficient force to attack the enemy, and that you be properly provided with everything for that purpose.” This policy was accepted as sound and fixed.
George found that his expedition was the theme of every man’s talk in Williamsburg. He was himself conspicuous, not to say famous. The victory in the skirmish with Jumonville had been much applauded. Public men shared his humiliation at having signed a document that admitted the “assassination” of the young French officer, but this word was attributed more violently than ever to treachery on the part of van Braam. No blame was attached to Washington for the capitulation itself.
Otherwise than by Dinwiddie, official commendation of George and the other officers could not be expected immediately in Virginia because the General Assembly was not in session; but the Governor and Council did have authority to make a grant to the men from money voted at the previous session. When, therefore, Washington started back to his command, he had in his baggage three hundred pistoles for distribution among the men of his Regiment and of the South Carolina Independent Company “as a reward for their bravery in the recent engagement with the French.”
George found the survivors of the expedition in worse condition than they had been at any time. The Independent Companies remained at Wills Creek; his own men had come—or soon came—to Alexandria. They were demoralized, half naked, without hats or blankets, and were in resentful temper because they had not been paid. Some had created disorder at Winchester; others had deserted and carried their arms with them. Miserable as was their plight, George could do little to relieve it, except to appeal to the Governor to remit funds with which to pay them. George learned, also, that the North Carolina troops were close to dissolution because the fund for their support was almost exhausted. The Independent Companies, especially Mackay’s, remained under discipline and in fair condition, but they were numerically weak.
George knew that, lamentable though it was, the men who had been engaged at Fort Necessity were incapable of another effort that year. Clarke’s and Innes’s troops were not equipped or seasoned for the attempt. Even if they were, they lacked adequate transport, without which advance was self-murder. Colonel Washington, for these reasons, was stunned when he opened, a few days later, a dispatch from Dinwiddie dated August 3. Another attempt was to be made forthwith to drive the French from the Ohio. It seemed incredible that such a thing could be considered by a Governor who a fortnight previously had been content to talk of building a fort at Wills Creek and of victualling it for six months’ supply of troops who were not to start westward until they were equipped and concentrated.
George’s orders were that he was to proceed as soon as possible to Wills Creek with the troops he had. The Council, Dinwiddie explained, had decided that, as the French probably would be stronger in the spring of 1755, it would be wise to recross the Alleghenies at the earliest possible moment and either to capture Fort DuQuesne or to construct defences at some point selected by a council of war. Washington was to join Innes for this purpose.
George stood aghast at Dinwiddie’s plan. It seemed the counsel of madness. At the moment he did not trust himself to address the Governor. He reflected and, as soon as he could muster his arguments and discharge his temper, he wrote William Fairfax a long critique of Dinwiddie’s plan. George tore the plan to bits and, in doing so, gave himself an excellent drill in military analysis. If he realized, when he finished it, how much he had learned since the previous November concerning the management of troops and preparation for war, he did not drop a boastful word. The subject was too grim for self-praise. Study of a theoretical military problem was not enjoyable when he might be required to attempt an impossible solution.
The next day he wrote Innes that he was withholding the letter “to Williamsburg,” until he heard from the North Carolinian, so that he might “write nothing inconsistent with what” his immediate superior proposed. Then George recorded explicitly: “If you think it advisable to order me in the shattered condition we are in to march up to you, I will, if no more than ten men follows me (which I believe will be the full amount). . . .”
Events of the next few days made this prediction almost a probability. Desertion continued. Every night or so, some of the ragged men of the Virginia Regiment would slip away. Strength of the Regiment dropped steadily towards a minimum of 150. Among the North Carolina soldiers conditions were even worse. One company mutinied in Augusta County; a like spirit was said to prevail among the others. With alarming speed, companies disbanded for lack of money with which to provide pay or purchase subsistence. By the end of August barely twoscore or, at most, fifty North Carolinians remained as an organized force in Virginia.
Soon George heard at Alexandria that Dinwiddie had declared the plans for an offensive “entirely defeated” by the “obstinacy of our Assembly” in its failure to provide financial support to contest the French, the disbanding of the North Carolinians and the reduction in the strength of the Virginia Regiment. The Governor argued stubbornly that if the Burgesses had provided the money, he could have raised six hundred troops and thereby could have offset the loss of the Carolinians. Plans for an offensive in the autumn of 1754 were suspended. New alarm seized frontier families who expected Indian attacks.
About September 15 marching orders reached Washington, but they op
ened with the statement by the Governor: “I fear we are not numbers sufficient to attack the fort taken from us by the French.” George was to proceed to Wills Creek with such men as he could muster after detaching forty or fifty, who were to go to Augusta County as a guard against incursions of small bodies of Indians and perhaps of French. At Wills Creek George and the remnant of the Regiment would receive further orders. In all these dealings there was one consolation only: The General Assembly, before prorogation, had voted thanks to George and Mackay and to their respective officers, except Muse and van Braam, “for their late gallant and brave behaviour in the defence of their country.”
As it eventuated, circumstances and sickness probably relieved George of the unnecessary march to Wills Creek that autumn. The loss of health he attributed to the hardships he had endured; the hampering circumstances were the preparations for the departure of Captain Lewis’s men for Augusta, and, doubtless, Washington’s inability to get others equipped for a winter on the upper Potomac.
Avoidance of that dull service was not escape from all annoyance. On the contrary, there were new irritations, regrets and further humiliation. Gov. Horatio Sharpe of Maryland made criticisms of the affair at Fort Necessity in a manner that showed misunderstanding of what had happened. The principal regret was over news of the death of Half King. Half King had been the most loyal of the supporters of England in the realm of the Six Nations. It was distressing to learn that he had arrived at Paxton, Pennsylvania, on October 1 in ill health. Three days later he died. George’s new humiliations were over the prospect that if he went back to Wills Creek, he no longer would be commander of the forces. Instead, he would be subordinate to Innes and in unpleasant relationship to the Captains of the Independent Companies. Either he would have to remain entirely separate from those officers or recognize their authority as superior to his.
George had an accumulation of discontent and humiliation weighing on his mind when he started for Williamsburg about October 17, the date to which the House of Burgesses had been prorogued by the Governor. On October 21 he was in Williamsburg. He found the Governor busy in the entertainment of distinguished men and in the planning of a larger war with greater means. The Governor of North Carolina, Arthur Dobbs, had arrived in Williamsburg after a dismal voyage from Spithead. He had brought from the home government £10,000 in specie for Dinwiddie’s use in securing the defence of the Colony, and he had delivered also a crown credit for a like sum and notice that two thousand stands of arms were to be sent to Virginia. Important dispatches had been in Dobbs’s hands for Governor Sharpe, whom Dinwiddie in His Majesty’s name was to summon to Williamsburg for conference with the Governors of Virginia and North Carolina. Obediently, Sharpe had been able to reach the Virginia town on the nineteenth and had been closeted with Dinwiddie and Dobbs.
Washington learned at least something of what was contemplated. Together, the three executives were working on a plan similar to the one Dinwiddie had formulated in August and had abandoned when money ran out and the North Carolina troops scattered. The information of the Governors was that the French force on the Ohio was so reduced that a new opportunity was offered the English. If practicable, Sharpe, who had received a Lieutenant Colonel’s commission from the King, was to raise seven hundred men who, with the Independent Companies, were to proceed forthwith to the Ohio and capture Fort DuQuesne before the French could reenforce it.
Amazement over this rash scheme was effaced almost immediately by news for which Washington was altogether unprepared. The Virginia Regiment was to be broken into Independent Companies! George would cease to be a Colonel and would become a Captain, and that not even on the King’s commission, unless and until His Majesty approved Dinwiddie’s recommendation that the Colonials be on the regular establishment. His pride rebelled against such a thing. Sharpe tried to prevail on George to serve with the troops he was to raise. When George declined, Sharpe asked that Washington at least promise to consider any proposition he might be able to make after he returned to Maryland. George could not refuse this but he did not believe Sharpe could tender a position he could accept. “I think,” he said later, “the disparity between the present offer of a company and my former rank too great to expect any real satisfaction or enjoyment in a corps where I once did, or thought I had a right, to command. . .̵
In that spirit, proud and indignant but not openly wrathful, Washington tendered his resignation as Colonel of the Virginia Regiment. Dinwiddie accepted it. George turned decisively to other matters and completed his shopping in Williamsburg by purchasing new fittings and horse furnishings of the sort a planter of station required. Then on November 2, he started home.
George had no rendezvous except with his own lands, to which he had given little attention during the year that had elapsed since he had undertaken to carry Dinwiddie’s message to Fort Le Boeuf. On November 15, 1753, he had been at Wills Creek and had been engaging Gist as a guide for his first great adventure in the wilderness. November 15, 1754, he was sitting at a desk in Colonel Fairfax’s Belvoir. Within twelve months had come, first, the journey almost to Lake Erie and the struggle in the snow as Geoige hurried back to warn Dinwiddie that the French were preparing to descend to the Ohio. They had done so quickly enough and had driven off Ward before Washington could reach the Monongahela. The responsibilities and excitement of acting as leader of the advanced column, the anxieties and disappointments of command, promotion to the rank of Colonel after the death of Fry, the difficulties with Mackay, the doubtful conferences with the Indians, the affair with Jumonville, the attempt to cut a road to Red Stone Creek, the shameless delay of contractors, the hunger of the soldiers, the disappearance of the red warriors, the blood and the mud of July 3, the humiliation of retreat and of that word “assassination,” the journey to Williamsburg, the thanks of the House of Burgesses, and then the blow, almost the insult, of dropping from the first post of field command to the rank of Captain subordinate to every half-pay officer who might come from England—all this had been hard. George had given his every energy to his duty and had endured more of hardship than any Virginian of his day had been called on to suffer in the public service. It had been shabbily rewarded, he thought. He himself had been repudiated and humiliated. Now the whole of it was behind him. In front of him, there on the desk, was the single sheet on which he was to accept or decline the offer Governor Sharpe had extended on November 4 through William Fitzhugh in accordance with the promise made at Williamsburg.
Sharpe had done his best: If George would reconsider his resignation, Colonel Innes would be no obstacle to his service, because the North Carolinian was merely to exercise post command at Wills Creek. When Sharpe himself was not afield, Fitzhugh would see to it that George would not be required to take orders from those who had been his juniors when he was on the frontier. A letter from Sharpe to Dinwiddie, written to give assurance of this, was enclosed with the Marylander’s invitation and could be forwarded to Williamsburg if George accepted the offer. Fitzhugh added his personal advice “by no means to quit.”
No! He would not accept it. Sharpe and Fitzhugh deserved, of course, the best and most polite answer he could pen, because they had been considerate and generous; but the decision stood—no. Col. George Washington would not submit to loss of rank which Sharpe did not have authority to change. George so wrote Fitzhugh, gravely and politely, and explained that as he could not use it, he was returning Sharpe’s letter to Dinwiddie. Of the Maryland Governor, George wrote:” . . . assure him, sir, as you truly may, of my reluctance to quit the service and of the pleasure I should have received in attending his fortunes. Also inform him that it was to obey the call of honor, and the advice of my friends, I declined it, and not to gratify any desire I have to leave the military line.”
Then he added, in regret and in confession, in memory of stirring days and perhaps in vague thought of the future: “My inclinations are strongly bent to arms.”
CHAPTER / 3
George Washington�
��s resignation as Colonel of the Virginia Regiment in November 1754 did not destroy his ambition for a military career. He quit the service because he felt that Governor Dinwiddie had humiliated him personally and had deprived him of public honors by dividing the troops into Independent Companies. Instead of his former position as Colonel, George would have had that of Colonial Captain only, outranked, as he wrathfully put it, by “every Captain, bearing the King’s commission, every half-pay officer, or other, appearing with such a commission.” He would not endure that, but he still wanted to learn more of “the military art,” and he began to ask himself and his influential friends if there might not be some way by which he could serve in the campaign of 1755 as a volunteer. Especially was he disposed to this when he heard that the next march on Fort DuQuesne was to be under the direction of an experienced British general and not under Colonel Innes or Governor Sharpe, neither of whom he esteemed as a soldier.
Whatever the prospect of new military service as a volunteer, George had his own fortune to advance. For a man not yet twenty-three he was well-to-do, but he had no home of his own. He wanted an establishment, he could afford one, and he had now a prospect of leasing the property he most desired, Mount Vernon. Colonel and Mrs. George Lee (she was the widow of Lawrence Washington) agreed December 17 that George might have the use of the estate and of the eighteen resident slaves at a fixed annual rental of 15,000 pounds of tobacco per annum, or the equivalent in current money of Virginia at the rate of 12s. 6d. per hundredweight of tobacco. As George had little experience in housekeeping and had kind and sympathetic neighbors, it is likely that he consulted often the family at Belvoir and, in particular, the charming Sally Cary Fairfax. His feelings for her may not have been conscious, but he certainly admired her as much as it was proper to regard the wife of a close friend.
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