George Washington

by Stephen Brumwell

  Such precautions would be badly needed. One thing was already clear: not only would the expedition lack aid from the formidable southern Indians, but it could anticipate little support from the local tribes of the Ohio. Already disenchanted by the events of the previous summer at Fort Necessity, they were further alienated by Braddock’s arrogance and indifference toward them and their interests. The general’s attitude was recalled with bitterness by Shingas, the same Delaware sachem who had met Washington at the Logstown council in November 1753. In company with representatives of the Shawnees and Mingos, “King Shingas” had approached Braddock to discover his plans for the Ohio Country once the French had been ousted. Braddock had replied bluntly that “the English should inhabit and inherit the land.” When Shingas then asked “whether the Indians that were friends to the English might not be permitted to live and trade among the English and have hunting ground sufficient to support themselves,” Braddock was blunter still, stating “that no savage should inherit the land.” After the general refused to change his uncompromising stance, Shingas and the other chiefs responded “that if they might not have liberty to live on the land they would not fight for it.” Only a handful of Mingos, including Washington’s old acquaintances Monacatoocha, White Thunder, and Silver Heels, stayed on to scout for the army.51

  While the fuming Braddock impatiently awaited essential supplies from Winchester, a detachment of about 600 men under his efficient but irascible deputy quartermaster general, Sir John St. Clair, was pushed forward to clear a path for the main army and establish an advanced supply depot. They found the going even harder than anticipated. One redcoat of the 48th Foot reported that it was necessary to halt every hundred yards to “mend” the road, sometimes blasting rocks to make it viable for the “great quantity of wagons.” They slogged doggedly onward “over rocks and mountains almost unpassable,” fueled on a wilderness diet of rattlesnake, bear, and deer.52

  By June 5, after six days of strenuous road building and two days of rest, St. Clair’s contingent had reached no farther than the Little Meadows, just twenty-two miles west of Fort Cumberland. Meanwhile the stalled “grand Army” still at the base camp was growing sickly as “the bloody flux”—dysentery—began to take a grip, as it inevitably did in crowded, static encampments. In addition, intelligence from Pennsylvania that the French were sending reinforcements to the Ohio from Canada led Washington to believe that Braddock’s army would “have more to do than go up the hills to come down again.”53

  During this enforced lull, Washington took the opportunity to renew his own campaign to engage the correspondence of Sally Fairfax, sending off his third appeal since leaving Mount Vernon. He had actually seen Sally in May while en route to Williamsburg to collect Braddock’s gold. On that occasion, while Sally had expressed a desire to be informed of Washington’s safe return to camp, she had asked that any letter should be sent to an “acquaintance,” rather than to her in person. Washington had taken that “as a gentle rebuke and polite manner of forbidding my corresponding with you.” This inference, which was borne out by the fact that Washington had “hitherto found it impracticable to engage one moment” of Sally’s attention, did little to quash his hopes of a correspondence that would, as he wrote, “remove my suspicions, enliven my spirits, and make me happier than the day is long.”54

  Washington was nothing if not persistent in his approaches to the married Sally, who seems to have deliberately withheld her own letters to avoid encouraging his attentions. Despite much speculation, there is no evidence that their relationship was ever consummated physically.55 Given the close-knit world of the Virginian gentry, in which the merest whiff of scandal would have been detected and commented upon by letter writers and diarists, an affair is certainly unlikely. However, in terms of Sally’s role as a powerful motivating force for the young Washington, the sexual issue is irrelevant: indeed, his attitude toward her resembled that of a medieval knight-errant, a courtly lover keen to win some token of favor through conspicuous deeds of bravery.

  Leaving in staggered divisions, the rump of Braddock’s army finally moved out from Fort Cumberland between June 7 and June 10, 1755. Its progress was glacial, sometimes covering just two miles a day across the mountainous terrain. After it became obvious that the army was hobbled by its dependence upon heavy wagons, a council of war resolved to cut back on wheeled transport and increase the use of packhorses to carry supplies. Officers, including Washington, cheerfully gave up their own baggage horses for “His Majesty’s service.”56

  Yet the army’s rate of advance remained unacceptably slow. On June 16, after halting at the Little Meadows, Braddock faced the fact that something more drastic needed to be done. He summoned yet another council of war but, before it met, sought Washington’s candid opinion. On the previous day, Washington had been seized with violent fevers and headaches, so severe that he had been forced to dismount and accompany the army in a covered wagon. By Washington’s own recollection, it was nonetheless he who suggested the plan that was swiftly adopted: a flying column formed from about 1,300 elite troops, accompanied by the minimum of artillery and ammunition wagons necessary for the job, should forge ahead. The balance of the army, under Colonel Thomas Dunbar of the 48th Foot, would follow with the heavy transport and the rest of the ordnance as soon as it could.57

  The advance guard began its march on June 18. During the next five days Washington traveled onward by cart while his illness “continued without intermission.” By June 23, when they reached the Great Crossing of the Youghiogheny River, Washington was so sick that he received “the General’s positive commands” not to stir until he had recovered. Even then, only the doctors’ warning that to push on would risk endangering his life, combined with Braddock’s solemn word of honor that he would be brought up in time to join the final assault on Fort Duquesne, persuaded Washington to obey and to await the reserve troops.

  While Washington sweated out his fever, Braddock’s advance guard pushed on. By June 25, it had reached the Great Meadows, where Washington’s command had surrendered almost a year before. The feeble fortifications had been leveled, but, as a British officer reported, the ground remained strewn with the bones of men who had died there. The next day, the troops encountered another ominous scene. Resting under a rocky hill where the enemy had encamped the night before, they examined trees stripped of bark, on which the Indians had used red paint to depict “the scalps and prisoners they had taken with them”; the French had contributed graffiti of their own, huffily described by Captain Orme as “threats and bravados with all kinds of scurrilous language.”58

  Such attempts at intimidation did nothing to halt the slow yet inexorable advance of Braddock’s force. The sickly Washington was desperate to be in at the kill: writing to his friend Captain Orme on June 30, he confessed that he would rather lose £500 than miss the campaign’s climactic battle. By July 2, when the rear division under Dunbar had almost reached the Great Meadows, Washington could describe himself as “tolerably well recovered.” He attributed his improvement to a liberal dose of “Dr. James’s Powders.” Prescribed on Braddock’s personal orders before they parted, this popular remedy had lived up to its reputation as the era’s cure-all: within four days, as Washington informed his brother Jack, his fevers and other complaints had eased, and he had hopes of catching up with the general, now twenty-five miles ahead of him.59

  Still too weak to mount his horse, Washington resumed his jolting journey by covered wagon along the rough track that Braddock’s advance column had hacked deep into the backcountry. When he finally caught up with the army on July 8, the mood of the general and his men was buoyant, and with good reason. Since leaving Fort Cumberland they had negotiated more than 120 miles of primeval wilderness, laboriously hauling wagons and artillery over daunting mountain ranges and blazing a trail through dark, forbidding forest. It was an impressive logistical feat. Along the way, fear of Indian ambush had been ever present. Yet thanks to Braddock’s careful dispos
itions, the dreaded enemy had done no more than scalp stragglers. Security along the way had been so intensive that on July 6, jittery scouts had gunned down one of their few tribal allies, the son of Monacatoocha, after mistaking him for a hostile warrior.60 Such episodes were regrettable but had failed to halt the army’s momentum. A formidable force of British redcoats and blue-coated American provincial troops, complete with artillery, was now poised within twelve miles of its objective, Fort Duquesne. Overwhelming victory surely lay within its grasp.

  The next morning, July 9, 1755, the long column began its final, methodical approach. Washington now resumed his place as one of Braddock’s three aides-de-camp. Although his fever had subsided, he remained far from well. Before mounting his horse, Washington was obliged to strap cushions to his saddle, presumably because his disordered bowels had brought on an agonizing attack of piles.

  Remarkably, the army now drawing ever closer to the Forks of the Ohio included a veritable cluster of men whose destinies were to be intertwined with Washington’s. The commander of Braddock’s advance guard, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage, would rise to head the British Army in North America during the opening phase of the Revolutionary War, opposing Washington at Boston. By then, two other redcoat officers present that day, Charles Lee of the 44th Foot and Horatio Gates of the New York Independent Company, had switched their allegiance to the revolutionary cause, becoming Washington’s colleagues and, ultimately, his rivals. Daniel Morgan, a humble teenaged wagon driver in 1755, was one of Washington’s most effective subordinates during the War of Independence, leading a corps of crack-shot riflemen against the British. For good measure, Morgan’s first cousin and fellow teamster under Braddock was none other than Daniel Boone, destined for future fame as the quintessential American frontiersman.

  Briton or American, cultivated gentleman or unlettered bullwhacker, every last man of Braddock’s weary command knew that the campaign’s final phase was fast approaching. In order to avoid a defile, which offered a prime site for a French and Indian ambush, Braddock resolved that his army should instead follow an alternative route involving a double crossing of the snaking Monongahela River. Though the river was shallow, its banks were steep and readily defendable, so the risk of attack there was real enough. But by early afternoon, both crossings had been completed without incident. These hazards now safely behind them, Braddock’s men breathed a collective sigh of relief and marched steadily onward into the silent forest.

  This calm was deceptive. The French had no intention of relinquishing Fort Duquesne without a fight, although it had taken the inspired oratory of a tough young Canadian officer, Daniel de Beaujeu, to convince their skeptical Indian allies that even now all was not lost and that Braddock’s seemingly unstoppable force could be confronted, halted, and beaten.

  Stripped to the waist, Beaujeu loped off at the head of 850 men—French soldiers, Canadian militia, but mostly greased and painted tribal warriors—along the rough forest trail leading to the Monongahela. About six miles from the fort, they suddenly spotted the red uniforms of Braddock’s advance guard some 200 yards off. Both sides stood, momentarily astonished. Gage’s grenadiers were the first to react, presenting their muskets and sending several volleys crashing through the woods. The range was long for inaccurate smooth bore weapons, but a chance shot killed Beaujeu. Robbed of their charismatic leader, the French and Canadians hesitated and looked set to recoil before Braddock’s juggernaut. But another experienced officer, Jean-Daniel Dumas, promptly stepped forward to steady them. The Indians meanwhile had fanned out into the open woods on either side of the track, concealed themselves behind trees, and commenced a withering fire upon Gage’s exposed men. All the while, these warriors kept up their spine-tingling war whoops. It was a terrifying sound that none who survived that afternoon would forget.

  With casualties mounting and unnerved by an enemy who remained unseen but who could be heard all too clearly, the advance guard fell back in disarray. It collided with the main body of Braddock’s army, still marching up the forest track. The effect was catastrophic. In the words of Washington’s report to Dinwiddie, the British regulars were “immediately struck with such a deadly panic, that nothing but confusion and disobedience of orders prevailed among them.”61 This harsh verdict is borne out by other eyewitness accounts, yet the redcoats’ response is understandable: for soldiers trained for conventional European campaigning, there could be no more traumatic introduction to the bewildering and peculiarly savage conditions of American wilderness warfare. Indeed, for one of Braddock’s veteran “old standers,” Private Duncan Cameron of the 44th Foot, the Monongahela was the “most shocking” fight that he had ever experienced: as Cameron had already survived the harrowing siege of Cartagena in 1741, the intensive firefights at Dettingen in 1743 and Fontenoy in 1745, and the savage close-quarters combat at Culloden in the following year, his assessment is telling.62

  As their disorder increased, so the regulars instinctively huddled together. Swathed in thick gunsmoke, they fired mechanically and blindly, shooting down their own hapless comrades. Victims of this “friendly fire” included many of Washington’s fellow Virginians, who attempted to fight the Indians in their own fashion by breaking ranks and seeking cover behind trees. As Washington put it in a famous epitaph, they “behaved like men, and died like soldiers.”63 The Virginian troops killed that day included several officers who had served under Washington throughout the previous campaign: the Scot William Polson, the Frenchman William La Péronie, and the Swede Carolus Gustavus de Spiltdorf were among them.

  Amid the chaos, Braddock’s officers spared no pains to rally their men and fight back as best they could. Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Burton of the 48th Foot led about 100 of his regiment against a dominating hill to the right of the track, but when he was wounded the attack petered out.64 In all, some sixty officers were killed or wounded. But while others fell fast all around him, Washington somehow escaped unscathed, despite four bullets through his coat and two horses shot beneath him.

  Not content with rebuffing Braddock’s army, the exultant French and Indians now sought to annihilate it, attempting to surround the fear-crazed troops bunched on the narrow track. By about 4 p.m., when Braddock himself was mortally wounded, his men could take no more. A formal retreat was ordered but swiftly became a frenzied rout. As Washington reported to Governor Dinwiddie, the traumatized survivors instantly broke in headlong flight, “like sheep before the hounds.” The efforts of Washington and his brother officers to rally them were futile: as well to try stopping the rampaging “wild bears of the mountains,” he wrote.

  By now Washington was Braddock’s only unwounded aide-de-camp. He placed the stricken general in a “small covered cart” and, accompanied by the last of the troops, managed to get him across the nearest ford of the Monongahela. When the bleeding Burton and some other officers succeeded in rallying about 100 survivors on high ground, described by Orme as a “very advantageous spot,” Washington was sent to halt the fugitives already farther down the track. Crossing the river’s second ford, he soon encountered Lieutenant Colonel Gage attempting to restore order there. As Washington rode back to the hill chosen for the rear guard’s stand, he met Braddock and his escort coming toward him; as most of the demoralized troops had melted away, there had been no option but to follow them.65

  Braddock’s defeat had been total. Some two-thirds of his force were killed or wounded. The injured who could not be carried off were slaughtered and scalped where they lay. An unlucky handful were captured by the Indians, led off in triumph to Fort Duquesne, and ritually tortured to death by fire.66 The survivors faced a harrowing retreat through the woods to reach Dunbar’s reserve column, camped some forty miles off near the spot where Washington had bushwhacked Jumonville just over a year before.

  Although drained by illness and reeling from all the exertions and anxieties of the past day, Washington was now charged by Braddock with the task of riding ahead to contact Dunbar, “to make arr
angements for covering the retreat, and forwarding on provisions and refreshments to the retreating and wounded soldiery.” That night’s ordeal remained seared in Washington’s memory. Decades later, he recalled how the sights and sounds he encountered could scarcely be described. Indeed, the piteous appeals of the wounded men who littered the route “were enough to pierce a heart of adamant.”67

  General Braddock died four days later, near Washington’s old battleground at the Great Meadows. Washington, who received Braddock’s sash and pistols as keepsakes, supervised the interment. The army then marched over the grave, to obliterate all sign of the burial and thus prevent Braddock’s body becoming the object of a “savage triumph.”68

  Beyond doubt, Braddock’s defeat was a disaster for British prestige. But despite all the shock and recriminations, George Washington emerged with an enhanced reputation. A year earlier, at Fort Necessity, he had presided over a demoralizing and politically embarrassing defeat from which it was hard to salvage anything more than a reputation for personal courage. At the Monongahela, Washington had participated in a far bloodier rout, only to become a genuine hero. As a mere aide-de-camp, this time Washington shouldered no share of blame for the disaster. On the contrary, he had behaved impeccably, and his conspicuous gallantry did not go unnoticed by the burgeoning Anglo-American press. From Philadelphia to London, newspaper readers once again encountered the name of George Washington.