Five days later they spotted the welcome sight of Gist’s cabin. Washington had barely made it. Rafting down the Allegheny, propelled by swift currents, darting precipitously between ice chunks, he lost his footing and cascaded into the piercing waters. Gist could not help. It was all he could do to keep the raft afloat; besides, his frostbitten fingers were too painfully sore to be of any use. Somehow Washington managed to grab hold of the raft, clinging for dear life until Gist could steer the beleagured vessel and its passengers to the haven of an island.38
When the two reached Gist’s residence Washington paused only long enough to procure a horse. Nine days later he was at Belvoir, where he stopped to rest and to have a good meal and a comfortable night’s sleep, and, of course, to report on his adventures to Colonel Fairfax. In mid-January, a month and a half after his departure, Washington was back in Williamsburg, delivering the French response—such as it was—and an account of his exploits to Dinwiddie. The governor was impressed. He also believed the young major might be used to further his schemes. In its last session, the Burgesses had refused to appropriate even a cent for defense against the French. However, Washington’s eyewitness account of the French efforts to woo the Indians, and his story of Joncaire’s bellicose rhetoric, might convert the legislators to the governor’s way of thinking. He asked the young man to return the next afternoon with an account of his expedition suitable for publication. The major worked far into the night compiling a narrative of his adventure, a chronicle worked out from the sketchy notes he had made along the way. Right on time, Washington delivered the manuscript the next afternoon. Dinwiddie hurriedly looked it over, rushed it to the printers, and issued a call for a special session of the Burgesses. Within the month a local printer issued Washington’s narrative of his trek. Subsequently it was reprinted in several American newspapers, and it was distributed in London as well.39
Meanwhile, Dinwiddie moved quickly on various fronts. He dispatched a party of workers to the site Washington had chosen for a fort, he called up two hundred frontier militiamen, whose duty it would be to maintain the new installation, and he asked the Burgesses to finance a supplemental force of four hundred additional men. As adjutant of the Northern Neck District, Washington was directed to raise a hundred of the troops. The time for playing at being a soldier, of merely wearing a handsome uniform at balls and celebrations, was at an end. Now Washington was an officer in the midst of an undeclared war. There is no reason to suspect that he was disappointed with this turn of events. Soldiers still were lauded and lionized throughout eighteenth-century America. Soldiering, moreover, was a fast path to recognition, especially for a tough young man without a formal education, a man who otherwise faced only the prospect of a lifetime as a middling planter.40
Washington’s first month as an actual soldier was exasperating. Recruiting went slowly. This was a farming society, and one with little tradition of active militia service; besides, the pay was low, and the men were compelled to furnish their own arms and powder. Probably some agreed with those in the Burgesses who muttered that the Ohio country legitimately belonged to France, and some may have suspected that Washington’s report was a pack of lies designed to facilitate Dinwiddie’s pecuniary interests rather than to further the welfare of Virginia. Unable to secure many enlistees, Dinwiddie shaved his army to only three hundred men, and he offered land bounties to those who would serve. The governor also named Joshua Fry as commander. Fry was a college professor with militia training but no fighting experience; Washington scorned him as old, fat, and slow. Of course, Washington had longed for the appointment. In fact, he had hung around Williamsburg while the Burgesses was in session actively lobbying for the command. Disappointed in that respect, he nevertheless was promoted to lieutenant colonel and made second in command. He was only twenty-two years old, and unlike Fry he had never served in a military unit under the watchful eye of a superior officer. When Dinwiddie received word that hundreds of French troops were proceeding to the Ohio, he ordered Colonel Washington to push ahead without Fry; he was to attempt to beat the French to Virginia’s fortress at the forks of the Ohio.41
Having spent a month engaged in endless paper shuffling at headquarters in Alexandria, Washington was eager to move out. He debouched for the front with a band of 134 ill-trained, poorly equipped, mostly “loose, Idle” men. He retraced his now-familiar path to Winchester—the way he had taken on numerous surveying excursions—where he was joined by a company of 25 men raised by Adam Stephen, a bachelor physician who had immigrated recently from Scotland. The small army spent a week there while its commander searched for additional supplies. While at Winchester Washington learned that Virginia’s new fort on the Ohio had fallen to the French.
He also learned that there were more than a thousand French troops on the Ohio. A more experienced officer might have been inclined to await reinforcements, but Washington pushed on, planning now to march to the junction of the Red Stone Creek and the Monongahela, thirty-seven miles south of the Ohio, and there await Colonel Fry or new orders. His principal aim, evidently, was to impress the Indians with Virginia’s vigor and resolve. By mid-May he was deep into the forbidding wilderness, the first transmontane road into the Ohio country cut behind him, when good news arrived. Reinforcements were on the way. He could expect assistance from the Independent Companies of New York. But there was trouble too. His officers had carped about their low pay since the day they began their service. Their complaints were not unjustified; their pay was far below that of British officers who served in America. Despite their cries, however, word now arrived from Williamsburg that the Burgesses had refused to increase their wages. The officers exploded, drafting a strong letter of protest to Dinwiddie, complete with veiled threats to resign. Washington refused to sign the document, but he did transmit it to the governor, accompanied by a letter of his own in which he announced that he would henceforth serve without remuneration rather than accept his “shadow of pay.”42
At times Virginia’s little army found the impenetrable forest more unyielding than any human foe they were likely to encounter. Indian trails and deer paths offered the start of a road, but these byways had to be widened for the army’s supply wagons and cannon; hour after hour, sweating in a May heat made almost unbearable in the airlessness of a thick, primeval forest, the men felled trees, sawed limbs, hacked at the ubiquitous, recalcitrant underbrush. Two weeks of this kind of work advanced them only twenty miles, to a place called the Great Meadows, still twenty-five miles short of the Ohio. Washington paused there for three days, sending out scouting parties each morning. One patrol after another returned empty-handed. Then Gist rode in. He had seen French troops nearby. Soon Indians arrived with similar reports. Though probably outnumbered, Washington wanted to fight. First, though, he sought out the Half King. A battle was imminent, he told the sachem. Reinforcements were coming, enough to do the job, Washington added, stretching the truth. Would the Indians join the Virginians? Yes, the Half King responded, divulging his implacable hatred for the French, whom, he now claimed, had murdered, then boiled and eaten his father. Washington, thus, would fight. The fact that war had not been declared seemed not to have bothered him. The French presence, he reasoned, was an act of war, and, anyway, his orders were to “drive the French from the Ohio.”43
Led by Indian guides, Washington set out at night with forty men, marching single file along a narrow forest path. The men clattered along, often stumbling in the darkness. At sunrise they rendezvoused with the Half King, who had shown up with only fifteen braves. Though probably disappointed at this meager allied force, Washington did not demur. He had the Half King send out some braves to scout for the French. Now the minutes dragged by. The soldiers, forbidden to talk or to smoke, nervously checked and rechecked their equipment. The commander stood off to one side, alone, quiet, anxious. Finally, the scouts returned. A party of French soldiers—only about forty—was camped about a half mile ahead, resting, apparently unsuspectingly, in a littl
e depression beneath a rocky eminence. Washington divided the force into three groups. He took command of a column that would approach from the right; Adam Stephen was placed in charge of the left, and he directed the Indians to creep to the rear of the French. Slowly, quietly, they stole to within a hundred yards of the enemy. Colonel Washington studied the French position, checked the deployment of his men. The seconds seemed like hours. Finally, he was ready. He lept up screaming the command to attack. The Virginians fired. Caught completely off guard, the French scurried for their muskets and dived for cover, but the surprise was too complete. They got off only four or five shots; some did not even fire, but simply attempted to flee, though most only succeeded in rushing into the arms of the Indians posted along the escape route. The fight was over in a few minutes. Ten French soldiers were dead, among them their commander, Sieur de Jumonville, an officer who, the French later would insist with considerable justification, was only acting as an ambassador, much as Washington had six months before. One Virginian was dead, two or three wounded. Though he could not have realized it, Washington and his men had just launched the French and Indian War—the Seven Years’ War, as the Europeans would refer to it. His immediate concern was his twenty-two prisoners. He sent them back to Dinwiddie with the suggestion that they be hanged.44
Washington hurried back from Laurel Mountain to Great Meadows in a euphoric mood. For the first time, he subsequently wrote, he had “heard the bullets whistle” and he had found “something charming in the sound.” He soon learned, too, that Colonel Fry was dead, the victim of a fall from a horse; Dinwiddie had named Colonel James Innes to be his successor, and he had promoted Washington to the rank of colonel. There was no time for exultation, however. A French counterattack now was a certainty. Colonel Washington’s first act, therefore, was to write Innes urging that reinforcements be sent immediately. Then he set his men to constructing a fort, a rude, jerry-built stockade that he dubbed “Fort Necessity.” While this work proceeded about him, he wrote a long account of his victory to Dinwiddie. He had something else on his mind too. When he returned from his skirmish with the French he had found a letter from the governor awaiting him. It was Dinwiddie’s response to his pleas concerning his officers’ pay, and the governor had unsparingly upbraided the young warrior. Indeed, in Washington’s adult life no other person ever dared be so directly critical or cavalier toward him on so many occasions as did Dinwiddie. In this instance the governor confessed his disappointment and suggested that perhaps he had misjudged the young commander’s character. He noted that no such complaint had arisen from Colonel Fry or his men. “The Hardships complained of,” he growled, “are such as usually attend on a Military Life, and are consider’d by Soldiers rather as Opp’ties of Glory than Objects of Discouragem’t.” Wounded deeply, Washington shot back that his complaints were not frivolous or unfounded, but he also carefully heeded Fairfax’s former advice: he did not wish to lose a patron. “I am much concern’d that your Honour should seem to charge me with ingratitude.... I retain a true sense of your kindness and want nothing but opportunity to give testimony to my willingness to oblige....”45
Meanwhile, trapped by his own obstinancy in this no man’s land, Washington awaited the French retaliation. Part of his time was consumed by diplomatic overtures toward the Indians in the area. Using the Indian name “Conotocarious,” an appellation meaning “town taker” or “devourer of villages,” a title the natives had hung on his great grandfather during the Indian war of 1676, Washington endeavored to persuade the sachems of several tribes to help resist the pending French attack. The initial consequence of his labor, however, was that just enough tribesmen—a fair number of whom, in reality, were French spies—moved into Fort Necessity to assist in seriously depleting the Virginians’ provender. While Washington was engaged with the Indians, reinforcements arrived, though far fewer than the five hundred men that the Virginia colonel had expected. Three companies of Virginia volunteers marched in, bringing his troop strength to nearly three hundred men and officers. Shortly thereafter a spit-and-polish company of buckskin-clad colonials and a few regulars under Captain James Mackay, a Scotsman, reached the Great Meadows. Unfortunately, he arrived with precious little food and no cannon. However, he did possess a commission from the Crown, which meant that his captaincy outranked Washington’s provincial colonelcy. The young Virginian was not about to take orders from anyone other than another Virginian, and he quickly wrote Dinwiddie that he simply proposed to treat Mackay’s force as independent from his command. The following day Washington ordered his men to resume the long-postponed trek to Redstone Creek, cutting a wilderness trail along the way. This put some distance between the rival commanders, for Mackay remained at Great Meadows.46
To add to Washington’s woes, news arrived during the march that the Delawares and the Shawnees were siding with the French. Alarmed, he immediately summoned local sachems to a parley. For three days at Gist’s trading post on Chestnut Ridge, near present-day Mount Braddock, Pennsylvania, Washington, assisted by the Half King and numerous respected traders, negotiated with forty Indian leaders. “We have engaged in this War, in order to assist and protect you,” Washington told them with a straight face. His pleas were not very persuasive. The Indians that had defected—“those treacherous Devils,” he called them in private—could not be won back. Even the Half King seemed now to be wavering. The size of the French force, and Washington’s pitiful shortage of supplies and men, apparently convinced the recalcitrant native chiefs that the Virginians were doomed.47
A week later more jolting news arrived. Reliable sources reported the presence of a Franco-Indian force of perhaps sixteen hundred men at Fort Duquesne on the Ohio; all indicators pointed to an imminent march by this huge force to flush the Virginians from the Ohio country. Oddly, Washington now decided to make his stand here, at Gist’s trading post. He recalled his road-clearing troops from the west, and he implored Captain Mackay to hurry to his assistance. By June 29 everyone was in place, but on that day Washington, troubled by second thoughts, called a council of war. Noting that Fort Necessity contained more stores—which afforded a better chance for withstanding a siege operation—and that the few remaining Indian allies preferred to take their chances inside that citadel, the officers voted to return to the Great Meadows. The retreat began at once, a hurried, forced, nightmarish trek on empty stomachs across twelve miles of rugged Allegheny terrain. When his hungry legion at last reached its little fortress, Washington discovered that one-third of his men were too ill for duty.48
Throughout the night of July 1, and all the following day, the bone-tired soldiers frantically tried to strengthen the stockade. There was no sign of additional reinforcements. Washington knew that he could not survive a siege, but he refused to retreat. He obstinately clung to his little fort, apparently preferring to die—and to sacrifice the lives of his men—rather than to retreat and live, and face the possible invective and jeers of those on the home front. At daybreak the next day, as his men sought shelter from a cold, unrelenting rain, the first reports reached Washington that the French had been sighted just four miles away; a second report a few hours later estimated French strength at 900. Washington had an effective fighting force of 284, all of them huddled inside the tiny, circular walls of the fort, hoping against hope that its ten-inch-thick white oak walls would save them. At 11:00 A.M. a sentinel first glimpsed the advancing Frenchmen; moments later the blue-coated Europeans opened fire.
It took the French an hour or so to fight to within sixty yards of the fort. From there the sharpshooters took over, killing not only Virginians but their horses and cattle—and even their dogs. Washington was left without hope of retreat, and without a supply of meat. During the remainder of the day the adversaries exchanged potshots. Heavily outnumbered and exposed to a steady, deadly fire from three sides, the Americans got the worst of it. By nightfall about one-third of Washington’s army was dead or wounded, and, according to one of Virginia’s officers
, half the others, convinced that they would be dead in a few hours, had broken into the liquor chest and were proceeding to drink themselves into a state of insensibility, perhaps the best condition to be in when one fell into the ungracious hands of the Indians.49
At twilight the French proposed surrender talks. Washington wavered, then he sent van Braam, still his translator, to listen to their terms. It was raining hard again when the Dutchman returned. He and the colonel huddled by a wildly flickering candle, squinting to decipher the rain-soaked document. The terms seemed generous: since France and Great Britain were not officially at war, the Virginians would be permitted to surrender with honor; moreover, they would be shielded from the Indians, and they would be allowed to return to Virginia in exchange for the repatriation of the French prisoners sent there earlier by Washington. It took Washington three hours to make up his mind, then he accepted. Either he was misled by van Braam—whom he later declared was “little acquainted with the English tongue” (still later he changed his story and alleged that the interpreter had willfully deceived him in order to save his skin)—or he was so relieved at the Gallic munificence that he ignored the wording of the preamble to the surrender terms. That short statement pronounced the English guilty of the “assassination” of Jumonville. At any rate, Colonel Washington signed the articles of surrender on July 4, and immediately thereafter departed for Virginia, unwisely leaving his journal behind for the French to find and to publish, a document which, according to his foe, demonstrated that the British were solely responsible for the outbreak of hostilities.50
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