While Post had been persuading the savages to end their war with England, Sir William Johnson and others had been inviting the Chiefs of many tribes to the meeting at Easton. Forbes had followed eagerly each step in this adventure of diplomacy and had countenanced military delays he otherwise would have rebuked, because he was afraid a premature blow against Fort DuQuesne might involve the death of some of the Indians who, by patience, might be prevailed upon to make peace and desert the French. At last, about October 27, Forbes heard that a treaty had been signed under which some of the Indians would make common cause with England, but, as he reported to Pitt, “[they] require time, a thing at present so precious to me that I have none to spare.” Then he stated his stark alternatives: “[I] must in a day or two choose either to risk everything and march to the enemy’s fort, retreat across the Allegheny if the provincials leave me, or maintain myself where I am to the spring.”
These alternatives were not hypothetical. Apart from the paralyzing halt that might be caused by weather, there was danger the little Army might be wrecked by discharge. The Second Virginia would cease to exist, under the terms of its enlistment, on December 1. Provision had been made for the muster-out of the First Virginia Regiment on May 1, 1759. It was much the same with the Pennsylvania, Maryland and North Carolina troops. No pay beyond December 1 had been provided for them. They might start home with the Virginians and leave the General no troops but the survivors of his 1500 Highlanders. Forbes consequently had to work more vigorously than ever to put the troops in condition to go forward at full speed if November brought a sufficient number of clear days to dry the road.
Skies remained dark. Uncertainty prevailed both as to the weather and the strength of the enemy. None of the Indians would undertake reconnaissance as far as Fort DuQuesne at that bleak and treacherous season. Daily there was grim subtraction; every day left one less of life for the force, one less of hope of victory. The outlook was more discouraging than ever when, on November 12, the outposts sent word that the enemy again was approaching Loyal Hannon. Forbes immediately sent Washington with five hundred of the Virginia troops to pursue the French, who were assumed to be making another raid on the cattle and horses of the British. Behind Washington, George Mercer was to proceed with another five hundred men and try to surround the enemy. Washington proceeded briskly and came upon a party of French and Indians around a fire. In an exchange of musketry, one of the alien soldiers was killed. By closing in quickly on the others, the Virginians captured a white prisoner and two Indians.
Washington held these prisoners near the fire and awaited developments. Presently, through the growing darkness, a considerable force was observed. Almost at the same instant, both sides delivered a volley. Men fell; the wounded cried out. From the approaching troops there likewise came shouts. Officers yelled their orders—and yelled in English. The men were Mercer’s. Virginians were firing into the ranks of their friends. Each side had mistaken the other for French. As soon as the grim mistake was realized, the men lowered their guns and turned to the care of their wounded. The toll was heavier than in any action Washington had witnessed after Braddock’s defeat: one lieutenant dead; thirteen other soldiers killed; twenty-six wounded. The enemy, disappearing in the darkness, might say mockingly that he did not need to attack the English: they would kill one another.
Washington’s humiliation was not without balm. The white prisoner taken by the Virginia Regiment proved to be a British subject, one Johnson, who had thrown his fortunes with the French and had served in the garrison at Fort DuQuesne. If he could be made to tell the truth, he could give Forbes the information most desired, that of the strength of the enemy at Fort DuQuesne. Faced with the promise of life and gold as the alternative to torture and death, Johnson talked freely. The French at Fort DuQuesne were weak. The contingent that had made the raid on Loyal Hannon had quit the forks of the Allegheny and Monongahela; the Ohio Indians had gone home. Similar information was given by the two captured Indians
Forbes believed his opportunity, his last opportunity, had come: he would gamble on the truth of this new intelligence; his advanced units must cut a road quickly over the last barrier of Chesnut Ridge; then with an unencumbered, fast-moving force he would march for Fort DuQuesne. To assure fullest mobility, Forbes divided his attacking force into three brigades. One of these was to be commanded by Colonel Bouquet and another by Lt. Col. Archibald Montgomery of the Seventy-seventh. The third, the only one entrusted to a Colonial officer, was assigned to Washington. His command was to be his own Regiment, two companies of artificers and the Maryland, North Carolina and Delaware contingents.
Forbes now sent out three forces. One of Pennsylvanians under Col. John Armstrong was to proceed ahead of the others and build redoubts one or two days’ marches apart. Washington was to follow and cut a road; Montgomery was then to proceed, as a reenforcement of the troops ahead and as a vanguard of the main body of infantry and artillery.
November 18—twelve days and twelve only before the army would begin to break up! The weather held fair. There was a chance, if still a gambler’s chance, that the fort could be reached and taken.
On the twenty-first, the army was close to Fort DuQuesne, exactly how close none could say with certainty, but near enough to invite surprise attack. Vigilance already had been carried far beyond the care the average prudent commander would display; overnight it was made an absolute imperative for every man. With Bouquet’s troops in advance, the columns made good progress on the twenty-second and camped on the farther side of Turtle Creek. The men lay on their arms that night in complete silence.
Before Forbes began the march on the twenty-third the weapons of all soldiers were examined again. Warning was given that any man who fired his piece without an officer’s order would receive two hundred lashes on the spot. Then the troops started through the woods and marched briskly in the cold weather. When distances were computed after they bivouacked, one estimate put the column fifteen miles from Fort DuQuesne; another scout reckoned the distance twelve miles. The men once more were told what they were to do in the event of sudden attack. Flour for six days and meat for four were issued; all the felling axes were ground. Most careful were the efforts to determine what the enemy was doing and whether he knew the English were close enough to lunge. Patrols were sent to search the woods nearby. Reconnaissance to Fort DuQuesne itself was entrusted to Indians who went out separately.
The anxious twenty-fourth of November was spent in camp—the beginning of the last week during which the army could be held together. If Forbes had only seven days, he was resolved to make the most of them.
Night came early, a bleak night of foreboding and of expectancy. The next day might bring, perhaps must bring, the battle to which Washington had been looking forward since that July day almost three and a half years previously, when he had been compelled to turn his back on the Monongahela and the ghastly field of Braddock’s debacle . . . and now . . . Now a Redman was going to Headquarters—one of the scouts who had been sent out on the twenty-third. No great news was his. He had not been to the junction of the rivers, but he had been on ground whence he could look directly toward DuQuesne, and billowing there he had seen a great column of smoke.
Smoke! Had the French learned of the approach of the English, and, despairing of successful defence, burned and abandoned their stronghold? It was a mystery of minutes only: another scout arrived. He had been to Fort DuQuesne—or rather where Fort DuQuesne had been. It was gone. So were the French. They had abandoned the site!
No battle, then, was ahead—perhaps no flags, no surrendered arms, no booty—but the prize would be England’s! As soon as the light horse could saddle and get off, they must ride to the junction and, if the fire still burned, they must put it out. The infantry would follow the next morning.
A long, long morning it must have been and a still longer afternoon. Twelve miles of unbroken woodland and all its little streams had to be crossed by men whose eager ambition ran f
ar ahead of them. Darkness had fallen when, at six o’clock, the army reached its goal. There, at the junction, stood the wreck of the ramparts of the stout square fort. Two hundred yards away, on the bank of the Allegheny, was the shell of another burned fort, the deserted outworks of which had never been finished. In the gathering darkness, this seemed a poor reward for so much of sickness and shivering, of muddy marches and long nights’ misery—an ugly, disappointing scene to men who doubtless had pictured a frowning fort, its bastions crowded with stubborn French. No fort, no food, no booty the British found, but almost beneath them was the Ohio, the mighty stream that watered a valley of fabulous richness as it swept to the Mississippi.
Indians in considerable number were on an island in the river, ready to make their peace with the victor. The British learned that the French had placed the cannon of the forts on boats and had carried them down the river. Then the garrison, reported to consist of about five hundred, had set fire to everything that would burn. The troops had departed, some by water, and some on foot down the bank of the Ohio. They were going, the Indians believed, to the Illinois country.
Forbes had made a great conquest at small cost in life. Neither ambition nor illness blinded him to the possibilities of the land where, once again, the standard of Britain had been set. He would be compelled, he said, to keep a small force of Colonials at the fort during the winter, after which he hoped Pennsylvania would give him support “to fix this noble, fine country, to all perpetuity, under the dominion of Great Britain.” Ceremonies attended so great an advance—a service of thanksgiving November 26 with a sermon, a day of celebration on the twenty-seventh, and then a solemn march to Braddock’s field, where the skulls of more than 450 men were buried. Their bones long before had been scattered by wolves.
If Washington had a part in these events it probably was perfunctory because he was looking now to Williamsburg and to the White House on the Pamunkey. Reluctantly he obeyed the order of Forbes to assign some of the ragged men of the First Virginia Regiment to the garrison of Fort DuQuesne. Justice and gratitude prompted Washington to urge that arrangements be made for provisioning and clothing these men more heavily during the bleak months they must remain on the icy Ohio. The entire Regiment, in fact, was worn and must be refitted; help to them best could be rendered where his heart was calling him. So, when Forbes suggested that Washington might be able by personal representation to get early assistance from Virginia for the troops of the Colony, it was not necessary for the General to use persuasion. Washington was off. On arrival at Winchester during the night of December 8, he was sick and exhausted, but, after brief efforts at recuperation, he made his way to Belvoir and before the year’s end was in Williamsburg.
It had now been five years and two months since Washington had started for the Ohio to warn the French to leave that region. He had required fifty-two days only to reach in December 1753 the “land in the Fork,” which he had thought “extremely well situated for a fort”; after that visit, nearly the whole of his energies for four years and a half had been devoted to getting there again. Now, he was looking to the future, matrimony, the management of a much-enlarged estate, and service as a Burgess. He took pride in what he had done as a soldier, but he considered his years of military duty a closed chapter of his life.
Had Washington sat down to analyze the scope of his training, he would have found that the stern master, Experience, sometimes to the scourging of a sensitive skin, had taught him many fundamentals of command but had given him few of the higher qualifications. What he had learned on the frontier, what every officer had to learn in that school of experience, were the A B C’s of leadership, commonplace but irreplaceable.
Washington had been able to assume responsibility. He could not have acted as he did on a score of occasions if he had not seen clearly that a soldierly trust carries with it the obligation to make decisions and take the consequences. Washington had found that he often must deal with subordinates who were not men of his own choice or even of any special aptitude for arms. He had to take the human material given him and ascertain its worth in order that he might use every officer at that individual’s best. He learned in time how to gain the affectionate confidence and enthusiastic good will of most of these subordinate officers, though he did not succeed in winning a similar measure of personal esteem from many officers of his own rank in the regular establishment or in the service of other Colonies. Most of these men regarded him as competent, but they considered him ambitious and not particularly likeable or conspicuously able.
Washington quickly realized the value of absolute justice in dealing with his officers and learned equally well the ensnaring danger of any sort of favoritism. Justice was instinctive with him. He learned a different code for the men in the ranks, the traditional code of punishment as the basis of discipline. He found that drunkenness and desertion had ceaselessly to be combated with every weapon a commanding officer could fashion. Tippling-houses had to be under sternest regulation and, if possible, suppressed. As for desertion, it was the nightmare of command. Washington tried all the expedients. Nothing availed. Washington learned that as desertion steadily sapped his Regiment, he could not hope to raise it to full strength by the voluntary enlistment of free men. He was convinced of the futility of relying upon the militia. The only substantial resources of manpower were indentured servants, vagrants and such unmarried men as county officers would be willing to draft. Washington’s lesson in recruiting was largely negative: He knew where he could not get men; he did not know where he could.
Washington acquired, among others, this fundamental of military administration: Transport and supply called for early planning and constant, detailed attention; but if these qualities were displayed energetically, it was possible to provide food for troops in spite of the small number of wagons and the badness of roads. One of the most protective of all the lessons he learned was that of timing with reasonable accuracy the preparation and delivery of supplies and provisions. Another basic lesson in military administration was that shortages in clothing, equipment and tools and deficiencies of medical care were inevitable and that the most had to be made of what was procurable. It was repeatedly impressed upon him that the backwardness of American industry, the limitations on exports and the resulting scarcity of money made the sternest economy a sine qua non of military defence.
Such were the principal lessons Colonel Washington learned by the time Forbes reached the site of the burned and abandoned Fort DuQuesne. All were elementary lessons, but they were essentials of warfare that might unhappily be renewed in America. War could be waged with ill-trained and sometimes reluctant and sullen soldiers who would be poorly supplied with transport, weapons, equipment and provisions by a feeble government that lacked solid financial resources. The only commanding officer who would have any prospect of success with such an army, under such a government, would be one who had learned how to make much of little, one who had, above all other qualities, resolute patience.
Washington had acquired that patience and some of the other essentials, but his training was deficient in seven disciplines of importance among the many an officer should master. He had not acquired the art of dealing with the private soldier in a manner to arouse the individual’s sense of responsibility for a cause. He had been a definite failure in recruiting. He had shown that he could lead a regiment; he had not demonstrated that he could raise one quickly. He had learned scarcely anything about the utilization of militia and apparently never made allowance for their ignorance and their lack of weapons the law unreasonably expected them to provide. Their reluctance to serve, their readiness to desert and the cowardice that many of them exhibited in the presence of the enemy created early in Washington’s mind a disgust that soon became a prejudice. He had to call on them frequently, but he never did so with any confidence. Nor did he press his proposals for their training under sterner law and through longer service.
Washington’s next deficiency in training was hi
s limited acquaintance with officers from other Colonies. He had much to learn concerning the manner in which ambitious, self-important officers of the different Colonies could work together. Akin to this was his failure to adopt precisely the right attitude towards his superior officers. The more Washington dealt with the senior officers of the regular establishment, the less, in general, was his respect for their accomplishments. Forbes and Bouquet were the best soldiers with whom he had served. He could have learned much from them concerning matters of military administration. Instead, he opposed so persistently the choice of the Raystown route that he probably became prejudiced against them and certainly, for a time, created suspicion in the mind of Forbes. There scarcely could be denial that Washington went beyond the bounds of what the military etiquette of the times allowed a subordinate.
MAP / 4
THE REGION OF THE ADVENTURES
OF YOUNG GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1732-1759
FAMILY LIFE
Washington’s other deficiencies as a young commander were circumstantial. He had been given little opportunity of handling any large body of men on the road until the last weeks of the campaign under Forbes. Even then, he never directed the advance of more than one thousand. That number he apparently commanded with ease, and he employed a road-building contingent with success. No fair-minded man could have said he gave evidence of having reached the limit of his ability to command. Washington seems never to have had any misgiving of his ability to keep his head while engaged with the enemy. His baptism of fire had convinced him, apparently, that he could meet the challenge of conflict. It was by chance and by reason of modest rank that Washington had been given no opportunity of employing in a strategic plan of his own design the tactics he had learned thoroughly. Even so, he had not been lacking in strategical study, nor had he been deficient in strategical sense, that refined, acute military judgment indispensable to the soldier. The Virginia commander, though displaying no genius in strategy, appeared to have sound conceptions and just appreciation of the value of the wisely timed offensive.
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