Soon Washington was up to his ears in problems. The ranks were swelling, but with exasperating slowness; after two months his force was only at one-third prescribed strength, and the great majority of these men had been recruited earlier in the year for Braddock’s campaign. In addition, there were not enough supplies even for that number of soldiers. Ammunition was scarce, and many men were without shoes, much less the ostentatiously romantic raiment that Washington had designed for his army—a blue coat faced and cuffed in scarlet and silver for each man, as well as a red waistband and a silver laced hat. These frustrations paled beside the problem posed by the Indians, however. They seemed to rampage at will through settlements all over the northern Shenandoah. By dividing into small parties, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen reported, the Indians had virtually rendered the army of Virginia powerless. “They go about and commit their outrages at all hours . . . and nothing is to be seen ... but desolation and murder heightened with . . . unheard of instances of cruelty.” Everywhere he went, Stephen continued prosaically, he discovered the “Smouk of the Burning Plantations darken the day, and hide the neighbouring mountains from our Sight.”24
No one could have worked with greater diligence than did Washington in the first months of his command. He seemed to be everywhere at once, riding hard from the Maryland border to southernmost Virginia, then to Williamsburg, and finally back to the beleagured West. He rattled off orders in all directions: get shoes, blankets, and tents in Philadelphia; procure rum in the West Indies; distribute supplies left behind by Braddock’s army; find additional men in Annapolis; cut firewood now so it will be properly aged by winter! Orders were issued to secure more powder, lead, flints, and paper. Purchase horses, wagons, flour, and provender from the settlers, he directed; if the farmers refused to sell, impress these commodities. On occasion he took command of squads engaged in this unpleasant, at times hazardous, undertaking, for civilians who had not yet been reimbursed for the property they had “sold” Braddock a year earlier were understandably reluctant to part with still more of their possessions. On one such foray Washington was confronted by angry yeomen who threatened to “blow out my brains” before they permitted the confiscation of a neighbor’s property. The colonel unsheathed his sword and called their bluff; he got the nag he had come for. It was one of two close calls he experienced. Once he narrowly escaped an ambush laid by Shawnees in the southwestern Virginia wilderness. Luck was with him and nothing happened, for the Indians were momentarily indisposed just as Washington rode past; he later learned that only minutes after he passed by a less fortunate soldier had been gunned down on this same murky path.25
Washington had no more than undertaken his duties before his letters reassumed the pleading—even peevish—air that had characterized his missives during his previous command. Twice he even threatened to resign if matters did not go his way. Only three weeks after he arrived at Winchester he told the governor that he would quit if the assembly did not redesign the military code so that he might impose draconian punishments upon his recalcitrant and insolent (or so he portrayed them) soldiers. Two months later a command problem elicited a similar threat. Upon his arrival at Fort Cumberland that autumn he discovered about fifty Maryland soldiers under the command of Captain John Dagworthy. The men were a welcome sight, but Colonel Washington was troubled by Dagworthy. Once he had held a royal commission; did he now outrank a colonel whose commission came from a colonial governor? Washington was certain of only one thing: he would not take orders from a captain. He hurried to Williamsburg to huddle with Dinwiddie and the speaker of the House of Burgesses, John Robinson. Both sided with their colonel. The governor quickly wrote Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts, the acting commander in chief of all British forces in America, arguing that Dagworthy outranked Washington only if the king specifically had ordered the Maryland captain to Fort Cumberland; Dinwiddie also requested that Shirley issue George Washington a brevet commission in the British army. What followed was confusing. Weeks, then months, elapsed without word from Shirley. Finally, news arrived that he had directed Governor Sharpe of Maryland to resolve the matter. Washington expected the worst, but Sharpe declared that Dagworthy had no jurisdiction over the troops of Virginia. But neither Washington nor Dinwiddie saw Sharpe’s orders, and Dagworthy continued to act as though he still was in command. His act fooled Washington. Thoroughly flustered, Washington made two decisions: he would ride to Boston and urge Shirley not only to curtail Dagworthy’s powers but to grant him a royal commission; if either appeal failed, he resolved to resign upon his return to Williamsburg.26
Washington’s longing for a royal commission is not difficult to understand. If he could procure a commission with at least the rank of major—and he would accept no lower rank—he would outrank any colonial with whom he was likely to come into contact. Besides, the salary would be about twice that he was receiving from Virginia, and, in addition, a royal commission provided for half-pay for life upon retirement.
Leaving his troops and a troubled frontier behind, Colonel Washington, spiffily attired in the uniform he had designed, set out for New England in February 1756. He was accompanied by two servants and his aide, Captain George Mercer, and for a time a British officer tagged along too. The redcoat, in fact, left the earliest description of Washington, a curious depiction, in many respects at odds with every account compiled during these years. He did portray Washington as tall and strong, but he also characterized him as having dark hair with a swarthy complexion, so much so that he looked “like a Forrener.”27
This was a long and arduous trek for the men, spanning more than a thousand miles across a winter landscape. Once Washington was twenty-five miles or so north of Mount Vernon, moreover, he was on unfamiliar territory. A ride of several days, past the tiny hillocks of eastern Maryland, then over the Delaware flatlands, across myriad creeks and rivers, each mile plunging the little party deeper into the grip of winter, brought them to Philadelphia. There Washington paused briefly to shop for clothing. The city was a new experience for him. He had thought Williamsburg was a metropolis, but now he was in a city more than twenty times the size of the little capital of Virginia. Colonel Washington must have been struck by the vibrancy of this rambunctious urban center, although as a resolute agrarian he must also have recoiled at its sprawl: by the standards of colonial America Philadelphia was a huge, distended city, a place that splayed out for almost twenty blocks from the docks and warehouses along the riverfront to the forests on its western flank.
Washington did not linger long before he again was on his way. He crossed the Delaware into New Jersey, then rode east to Perth Amboy, where he booked passage on a small sailing craft bound for Brooklyn. He paused for a few days in New York, another big, energetic mercantile center, lodging there with Beverley Robinson, the brother of the speaker of Virginia’s assembly. He spent some of his time sightseeing and playing cards and backgammon with his host and his merchant friends, but more than anything else his time was occupied by Robinson’s sister-in-law, Mary Eliza Philipse. It was not difficult to see why. Attractive and single, Polly, as everyone called her, was quite a wealthy young lady. (She, in fact, owned fifty-one thousand acres of prime New York real estate.) Washington escorted her to a dance, then to the Exhibition Hall to see a mechanical contrivance that depicted aspects of men and women at work and at play since antiquity. Soon, however, he was off for Boston. A cold, wet ride through the Manhattan farmlands and on into Connecticut brought him to New London, where he found space on a vessel bound for Massachusetts. He arrived in Boston four weeks after departing Virginia, a fact noted by a local newspaper, which referred to him as “a gentleman who had deservedly a high reputation for military skill and valor, though success has not always attended his undertakings.”28
Washington was reasonably confident that he would succeed in this mission. Through Braddock he had met Shirley once before, at a military conference in Alexandria. He had found him to be a “gentleman and [a] great politici
an,” and he believed that Shirley had liked him as well.29 However that might be, stalking men of influence was something at which Washington was quite skilled.
Two days after his arrival in town Washington was shown into Shirley’s presence. As servants bustled in from time to time with tea and additional firewood, the earnest young man and his host chatted for hours about a faraway war. The governor questioned Washington about conditions on the Virginia frontier; Washington made his pitch. The atmosphere was cordial, friendly even, certainly a contrast with the icy mood that recently had prevailed in the governor’s office in Williamsburg. Late in the day, when long shadows had begun to jut out over the Boston snow, the meeting ended. Shirley would make a decision within a week, he announced; in the meantime he invited the Virginian to stick around, and he introduced him to some of his friends, with whom, on subsequent evenings, Washington played cards. (The big city sharks clipped him for £5, roughly the cost in those days of an expensive pair of shoes.) After a five-day wait, Shirley summoned Washington back to the governor’s palace. His decision: he lacked the power to grant Washington a royal commission, but he did hand him a document declaring that Dagworthy could exercise no authority over the troops of Virginia; indeed, if Captain Dagworthy remained at Fort Cumberland, he was to take orders from Colonel Washington. The governor’s decision was both good and bad news for Washington. He had gotten Dagworthy out of his hair, but he had failed to secure the royal commission that he coveted. In addition, as he was leaving Shirley told him that he had just learned from London that Governor Sharpe was to be the commander of all troops raised by Maryland, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia.30 After a long, difficult trip he had discovered that Shirley no longer was in a position to help him.
As soon as the meeting ended Washington departed Boston. Once again he paused briefly in New York, and again he escorted Polly Philipse on a couple of outings. When he was ready to leave he also discovered that he was out of money. In the course of his travels he had spent so much—trips to tailors’ and hatters’ shops alone ran up a bill of almost £60—that he had to borrow nearly £100 from Beverley Robinson to see himself home. He reached Williamsburg at the end of March, sixty days after his departure from Mount Vernon.31 On the long ride home he had reconsidered his decision to resign if he failed with Shirley. As in his clash with Dinwiddie six months earlier, he was willing to accept half a loaf. He remained in the army of Virginia.
Washington returned home just in time to find that the spring weather had encouraged the Indians to again take up their tomahawks. He rushed back to the frontier, where he found his army no more effectual than it had been in the last campaign. Nor was their much hope that it could be made efficacious. He believed he needed two thousand men to adequately staff Virginia’s frontier garrisons, yet he had less than a quarter of that number. He pleaded with Dinwiddie to call up militia units, and the governor responded by mustering the trainbandsmen from ten western counties. More than a thousand militiamen reached the front, yet that number was only a small percentage of the total summoned by the governor. According to Washington many militiamen started west but soon returned home, fearing to travel alone over roads that were infested with the enemy. Moreover, in Colonel Washington’s estimation, many of the men who did reach the war zone were marginal soldiers at best. In fact, he and his officers kept fewer than half the militiamen who arrived, sending the remainder home. All along Washington had hoped that his ranks might be filled with conscriptees, sturdy citizen soldiers yanked from the trainband muster rolls. But that, too, proved illusory. Under Virginia law a conscriptee could escape service by paying a £10 fee. Most men chose that course over carrying a musket, and by midsummer only 254 draftees were under arms. That left the young commander with a force composed primarily of militiamen and volunteers, the first a “poor resource [and] a very unhappy dependance,” while the other was hardly better. Still, Washington set to work to make soldiers of the men who arrived, seeking to mold them through the imposition of an iron discipline. Probably influenced by what he had seen in Braddock’s army, Washington instituted brutal floggings—up to five hundred lashes—for offenses as disparate as gambling and dereliction of duty. He hanged two habitual deserters. And he promised Dinwiddie that in the future he would act with even more “rigor.” In the meantime he dashed off letter after letter to the governor complaining of his worthless soldiers and a multitude of additional difficulties: the troops were inadequately trained; the men had no respect for their officers; the militiamen were called up for too brief a period; the men were poorly paid, although if the government stopped squandering money and put it into pay for the troops all would be well; he lacked the necessary tools to construct fortifications; civilians refused to cooperate.32 On top of everything else Washington disagreed with the strategy decreed by his government.
Washington, as well as the officials in Williamsburg, knew that only a successful strike against Fort Duquesne would eradicate the Indian problem. Both also knew that such a bold move was out of the question unless Virginia received help from its neighbors, as well as from Great Britain. In the interim Washington and the politicians agreed on the need to fight a defensive war, a design to be facilitated by the construction of a string of forts in the frontier region. However, the two disagreed on how to implement this strategy. Washington favored the erection of several installations, built at intervals of fifteen to eighteen miles, each garrisoned by about one hundred troops. The budget-minded politicians wanted fewer forts, each staffed by only a few soldiers. Colonel Washington also would have liked to dispatch his men periodically from these installations on what today would be called “search and destroy” missions; the legislators—whom he privately referred to as “Chimney-corner politicians”—ordered a purely defensive posture. Finally, Washington urged the withdrawal of Virginia’s troops from Fort Cumberland, a citadel in Maryland which only siphoned off soldiers needed in Virginia. The council, however, not only voted to maintain the fort, but to enlarge its garrison.33 Obviously, the colonel possessed little real power.
Six months after he took command (a period in which he had been with his troops only about 25 percent of the time), Washington still was unable to report any success in pacifying the frontier. Nor were there any particular accomplishments to announce after another six months elapsed. The Indians were “like wolves,” he reported, a tough, resourceful foe, unequaled in their cunning or their capacity for deprivation. He also had to tell Dinwiddie that they had surfaced in greater numbers throughout the spring of 1756 than during the autumn following Braddock’s defeat. Now Washington spoke of relocating the western inhabitants, placing them in villages where they might be more easily guarded. He also called on the government to resort to conscription, and he urged legislation that would permit the use of indentured servants in his army. Remorsefully, too, he told Dinwiddie that Virginia’s frontier now was at the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Shenandoah was lost—at least for the time being. For all this Virginia had paid a high price. Nearly one-third of the troops who served under Washington in 1756 had been killed or wounded fighting in twenty separate engagements. And that did not take into account the province’s cataclysmic losses at the Great Meadows or in the disaster that befell Braddock.34
Months of stinging reverses seldom are met with equanimity. Sooner or later people begin to ask questions. Colonel Fairfax anticipated a backlash against the young commander, and he had endeavored to prepare Washington. To forestall the almost certain hostility it would create, Fairfax cautioned his young friend about his habit of incessant carping. But to no avail. Washington’s orders and his correspondence in this period read as though they were penned by someone who combined the unpleasant qualities of a pompous martinet and a whining, petulant brat. Enough contemporaries apparently saw him in the same light, and Fairfax’s prescience was borne out in the fall of 1756. The dam burst when the Virginia Gazette published an essay anonymously authored by the “Virginia Centinel.” That writer blaste
d Washington—though he never mentioned the colonel by name—as inexperienced and unsuited to command. He accused Washington of having abused the militiamen, while vacillating between overly harsh and too lenient treatment of his volunteers; the officers, the essayist continued, had indulged in “all manner of debauchery, vice, and idleness,” and, while the frontiersmen suffered, a general air of revelry and debasement had enveloped headquarters.
That unidentified penman was not alone in criticizing Colonel Washington. Stories about the army and its commander crept through Virginia that year. Though the frontier was in flames, it was whispered, Washington had lived and entertained regally in a rented house in Winchester. The army was dispirited, some said, and the low morale was due not only to its lack of military success. Part of the problem arose from Washington’s frequent absences. In addition to his long trip to Boston, several visits to Belvoir and Mount Vernon had kept him from headquarters, as did jaunts to look after his property on Bullskin Creek. Even when he was in Winchester, it was said, he lived apart from his troops, and he frittered away his time with indulgences, such as his fencing lessons.35 To make it even worse, there was more than a kernel of truth in each allegation. And, for certain, morale was low in the army of Virginia.
Through Fairfax and Speaker Robinson, as well as from Dinwiddie, Washington learned of the gossip. The episode is significant mostly for what Washington did not do, and, presumably, for the lessons he must have learned from his behavior. His initial reaction was to threaten to resign, a response that had grown stale. He had made the same threat when he encountered Dagworthy, then again both before and after his meetings with Shirley. Of course, he did not resign. He did compose a response to the “Centinel,” but instead of publishing it he forwarded it to his brother Austin, asking him to send it to the Gazette only if he believed such a move was advisable. Wisely, Austin destroyed the rejoinder.
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