George Washington

by Stephen Brumwell

  Washington’s well-publicized exploits, and not least his miraculous survival amid the mayhem that had claimed so many lives, suggested to some that the tall young Virginian was destined for greater things. Just five weeks after the battle, the Reverend Samuel Davies interrupted a sermon to draw attention to “that heroic youth, Colonel Washington, who I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto preserved in so signal a manner for some important service to his country.”69 Decades later, American newspaper editors would remind their readers of the reverend’s prescience.

  For many colonial Americans, “Braddock’s Defeat” marked a watershed in their relationship with the Mother Country. During another five years of bloody warfare with New France and her Indian allies, British redcoats would more than redeem the reputation they had lost during that nightmarish afternoon near the Monongahela River. Nevertheless, the stubborn Braddock and his stiffly disciplined regulars were taken to characterize a hidebound and increasingly irrelevant Old World; the resilient Washington and his self-reliant Virginia “Blues” typified the New. However simplistic and misleading, in 1755, this message was widely believed. In 1775, it would resonate more strongly still.

  3

  Defending the Frontier

  As the shocking news of Braddock’s defeat spread through Britain’s American colonies, Washington rode from Fort Cumberland to Mount Vernon and collapsed, exhausted, into bed. He had barely done so before a letter arrived from his neighbor, Colonel Fairfax, congratulating him on his deliverance. It included a postscript written by Sally, thanking heaven for Washington’s safe return and gently chiding him for his “great unkindness in refusing us the pleasure of seeing you this night.” If he did not call at Belvoir first thing next morning, then the Fairfaxes would come to him.1 Given Washington’s persistent but totally futile attempts to engage Sally Fairfax’s correspondence during the Braddock campaign, her sudden show of interest must have been as vexing as it was flattering. Washington was now the hero of the moment and the toast of Virginian society, but his flirtation with the married Sally continued in its familiar pattern, delicious yet ultimately frustrating.

  Far from tranquil Mount Vernon, on the exposed frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania, the consequences of the massacre on the Monongahela were all too soon apparent. As Washington recalled many years later, the “very avenue” that had been so laboriously hacked to the Forks of the Ohio by Braddock’s army now offered a ready conduit for retaliatory raiders against the frontiers of Pennsylvania, but “more especially those of Virginia and Maryland.”2 The Shenandoah Valley, where Washington had first ventured as a young surveyor, now lay wide open to Indian war parties. Settlers who had established isolated farmsteads in the sixty-mile swathe of forest between the town of Winchester and the advanced outpost of Fort Cumberland bore the brunt of raids that left burned cabins and scalped and mutilated bodies behind them and which spread terror in a wave that sent refugees scuttling eastward.

  In the midsummer of 1755, Britain’s few regular soldiers on the continent were either demoralized by their recent introduction to frontier warfare under Braddock or based far to the north, in New England, New York, and Nova Scotia. Virginia must look to its own defense, and the colony’s Assembly voted £40,000 to reconstitute the Virginia Regiment on an enlarged strength of 1,000 men organized in sixteen companies, plus another 200 or so skilled woodsmen to serve as “rangers”; if insufficient recruits were forthcoming within three months, the regiment would be completed by drafting militiamen.

  Given his public profile, which was now higher than ever thanks to his exploits on the Monongahela, Washington was the obvious choice to command the Virginian force. There can be little doubt that Washington, ambitious for distinction and recognition, wanted the job. While he had no intention of thrusting himself forward for what promised to be a thankless task involving “insurmountable obstacles” likely to cost him whatever reputation he had already acquired, his correspondence makes it clear that he would feel duty bound to accept such a responsibility if it were offered to him—provided the terms were honorable, of course.3

  On August 14, 1755, Governor Dinwiddie commissioned the twenty-three-year-old Washington as both colonel of the Virginia Regiment and commander in chief of all the forces to be raised for the colony’s protection. Washington had discretion to select his own staff officers, to contract for all necessary supplies, and to act defensively or offensively as he considered best. These were extensive powers, but they brought commensurate responsibilities that would soon drive him to distraction. Washington had been ordered to establish his headquarters at Winchester, “the nighest place of rendezvous to the country which is exposed to the enemy.” Recruits were to assemble there and at Fredericksburg and Alexandria.4

  From the outset, Washington’s orders to his officers made it clear that his regiment would aspire to high standards of training and discipline. His major, Andrew Lewis, was urged to make sure that the muster rolls were called three times a day, with the recruits trained as often in “the new platoon way of exercising” that formed the cornerstone of the British Army’s regulation drill for delivering volley fire. Significantly, they were also to undertake regular shooting practice at individual targets, “that they may acquire a dexterity in that kind of firing”: this was to be a flexible unit, competent in “conventional” tactics, but also capable of “irregular” bush fighting. And in all things, Major Lewis was to ensure that “good regular discipline” was observed, in line with the established “Rules and Articles of War.”5

  In mid-September, Washington assumed his new command with a tour of inspection, riding from Winchester back to the familiar Fort Cumberland on Wills Creek. This strongpoint still held a residue of Virginian, Maryland, and North Carolinian troops from Braddock’s campaign; it now became the base for the rump of the Virginia Regiment, under its lieutenant colonel, the fiery Adam Stephen. Upon his arrival at Fort Cumberland, Washington formally appointed his officers, drawing heavily upon fellow veterans of the previous year’s fighting. Ever a stickler for appearances, Washington was determined that they should match his own exemplary sartorial standards. Like the Virginian companies that had served under Braddock, the colony’s revived regiment wore coats of blue faced with red. Besides an ordinary soldier’s uniform for rough work on detachment and scouts, each officer was to provide himself with a far more splendid “suit of regimentals” for duty in camp or garrison. This was to be “of good blue cloth; the coat to be faced and cuffed with scarlet, and trimmed with silver.” A scarlet, silver-laced waistcoat, blue breeches, and, if possible, a silver-laced hat completed the ensemble.6

  It was one thing to organize a Virginia Regiment on paper and to announce a corps of gaily uniformed officers, quite another to find the humble rank and file needed to fill its companies. From the outset, the recruiting net was flung wide, falling far beyond the Old Dominion. For example, Captain Joshua Lewis was ordered to Annapolis in Maryland and to any other center of population in that colony where there was a prospect of drumming up men; his junior officers were to range even farther afield, trawling the “back parts” of both Maryland and Pennsylvania for manpower.7

  From Fort Cumberland, Washington resumed his tour of inspection, dropping down through the Shenandoah Valley for some 120 miles to Fort Dinwiddie, a strongpoint on Jackson’s River garrisoned by a company of his regiment under Captain Peter Hog. By early October he was back in Alexandria. In Washington’s absence, the garrison at Fort Cumberland had come under increasing pressure from enemy raiders.

  With recruitment sluggish, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen lacked the manpower to intercept Indian war parties that crossed the mountains, leaving the settlers below his post dangerously exposed. “It sits heavy upon me,” he wrote, “to be obliged to let the enemy pass under our noses without ever putting them in bodily fear.” So many hostiles were lurking around the fort that all contact with the inhabitants was cut off. As Stephen reported, “Nothing is to be seen or heard of, but desolati
on and murders heightened with all barbarous circumstances and unheard of instances of cruelty.” The smoke from the burning farmsteads soon hung so thick that it screened the very mountains from the garrison’s sight.8

  Given the enemy’s ability to bypass Fort Cumberland with impunity, it was soon clear to Washington that, far from establishing any outer defensive cordon to the west of the Allegheny Mountains, simply safeguarding the Shenandoah Valley itself would be challenge enough. This fact was underlined in early October, when Washington returned to his base at Winchester, just over the Blue Ridge Mountains and only seventy miles from peaceful Alexandria. There he soon encountered a scene of panic and confusion as shoals of terrified backcountry settlers sought sanctuary in the town. Washington offered to head the local militia against the Indians, but they were understandably unwilling to leave their own families undefended.9

  Chaos bred defiance: as Washington informed Dinwiddie, his orders to requisition wagons for essential supplies had to be enforced at sword point and in the face of threats to blow his brains out. The frontier folk were fiercely independent and suspicious of authority; this was scarcely the kind of deference that a Tidewater gentleman like Washington expected. Even the men of his regiment were proving truculent, with desertion rife. Indeed, unless the Virginia assembly passed a military law with enough teeth to curb “the growing insolence of the soldiers, [and] the indolence, and inactivity of the officers,” Washington warned that he would be obliged to give up his command.

  Thoughts of resignation were soon forgotten, however, when fear-crazed messengers arrived, warning that whooping hostiles were now within just miles of Winchester itself. Washington finally managed to muster some forty militiamen and rangers and led them out into the forest. This tense patrol ended in farcical anticlimax: the hubbub that had triggered the reports stemmed from the antics of a trio of drunken Virginian light horsemen, “carousing,” cursing, and firing off their pistols in the woods.10

  Yet the hysteria was real enough and proof of the psychological potency of the French and Indian terror tactics: for every one of the seventy or so settlers reported killed or missing in the first wave of raiding, scores more were left displaced and traumatized. Even small bands of tribal warriors could wreak havoc out of all proportion to their numbers. As Washington emphasized time and again during his frontier command, in the wilderness the Indians held all the cards: cunning, vigilant, and able to live off the land, they were “no more to be conceived, than they are to be equaled by our people,” he warned. Indeed, the only “match” for Indians were more of their own kind.11

  Washington explained to his old friend Christopher Gist, who had been given a captain’s commission to recruit a company of “active woodsmen” intended to go at least some way to meeting the shortfall of skilled forest fighters, that Indian allies were never “more wanted than at this time.” But the disasters at Fort Necessity and on the Monongahela, which had dealt devastating blows to British and Virginian prestige, ensured that none came forward that autumn. Hearing rumors that Andrew Montour, a renowned Pennsylvanian scout, was marching against the French outpost of Venango at the head of 300 warriors, the desperate Washington tried to divert some of them to Fort Cumberland. Calling upon his experience of frontier diplomacy, he hoped that Montour would extend his hearty welcome to his old acquaintance Monacatoocha and others, assuring them how happy it would make him, “Conotocaurious,” to take them by the hand and “treat them as brothers of our great King beyond the waters.”12

  Washington’s gambit came to nothing. Meanwhile, and just a month into his command, he faced another, and no less galling, frustration. This chafed at Washington’s most sensitive spot, his finely tuned sense of honor. The problem surfaced in late October, after Washington rejoined the core of his regiment at Fort Cumberland: although nominally supreme commander of Virginia’s forces, he was now apparently outranked by John Dagworthy, a mere captain of Maryland troops.

  Dagworthy headed just thirty men at Fort Cumberland, yet he claimed to possess something that Washington craved but still lacked: a commission from King George himself. Back in 1746, Dagworthy had gained a captaincy in provincial forces recruited for a projected expedition against Canada. That attack never took place, the troops were disbanded, and Dagworthy accepted a cash lump sum in lieu of his half pay as a retired officer. But in 1755, he was still citing his defunct commission to pull rank on officers holding colonial appointments, including Lieutenant Colonel Stephen.

  It was a state of affairs that Washington found intolerable and which he resolved to redress through official channels. Meanwhile, he avoided an unseemly confrontation by the simple expedient of quitting Wills Creek as soon as possible. Pausing only long enough to order the companies of rangers under Captains William Cocks and John Ashby to construct two small bastioned stockades on Patterson Creek, intended to go some way to filling the undefended void between Forts Cumberland and Dinwiddie, Washington rode back to Winchester and then on to Williamsburg to enlist Governor Dinwiddie’s backing against Dagworthy.13

  Although exasperated that Washington and Stephen had let the situation arise in the first place, Dinwiddie was quick to appreciate the potentially disastrous implications of such wrangling. He reported the problem to Lieutenant Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts, who had become Britain’s stop gap commander in chief in North America after Braddock’s death. Dinwiddie feared that the insult to Virginia was grave enough to discourage the House of Burgesses from backing the war effort. The best solution, he felt, would be to award Virginia’s highest-ranking officers temporary, or “brevet,” commissions in the regular army so they could not be outranked by awkward juniors.14

  While awaiting Shirley’s adjudication, Washington was able to enjoy such modest social pleasures as Williamsburg offered; its round of balls provided a marked contrast to the hardships of the frontier zone some 150 miles off. Washington’s hopes that royal commissions would soon be on their way were bolstered by reports that highly exaggerated accounts of the Virginians’ exploits at Braddock’s defeat were circulating in London. Already convinced that “strict order” was the very “life of military discipline,” Washington was further heartened to learn that Virginia’s Assembly had passed a bill authorizing stiffer punishments for men of the colony’s regiment found guilty of serious offenses: previously, only treason carried the death penalty; now a soldier could also forfeit his life for mutiny, sedition, desertion, and striking a superior. Earlier that summer, Virginia’s legislators had already approved draconian corporal punishment for those same crimes: while “not extending to life or members,” this nonetheless permitted the same savage floggings of up to a thousand or more lashes that were inflicted upon the redcoats, earning them the grim nickname “bloody-backs.” As Washington put it to Lieutenant Colonel Stephen, “We now have it in our power to enforce obedience.”15

  By the autumn of 1755, the men of Washington’s Virginia Regiment were already under what amounted to British Army discipline. Elsewhere in British North America, a very different regime prevailed: while theoretically facing the death penalty for the most serious military crimes, the provincial troops raised in New England served under far milder discipline, with corporal punishment limited to the biblical thirty-nine lashes.16

  But as 1755 drew to a close, the Virginia Regiment could hardly afford to hang even the most hardened reprobate: with fewer than 500 men, it mustered below half of the official number voted by the Assembly. That autumn’s recruiting drive had been a dismal failure: as Washington complained, several officers had been out for six weeks or even two months “without getting a man,” instead frittering away their time “in all the gaiety of pleasurable mirth” with friends and relations. At the appointed rendezvous at Alexandria on December 4, he told Dinwiddie, ten recruiting officers produced just twenty men between them: if he had anything other than Virginian paper currency, which was shunned beyond the Old Dominion, he would send officers to “Pennsylvania and the borders of
Carolina,” where he was confident recruits could be found. The situation was so dire that Washington hoped that Virginian soldiers who had joined the regular 44th and 48th Regiments during the Braddock campaign, but had since deserted, might reenlist with him if they were granted indemnity.17 But in slave-owning Virginia, even now certain recruits remained unacceptable. When Captain Hog reported the presence of “mulattos and negroes” in his company at Fort Dinwiddie, Washington was adamant that they should be barred from carrying arms, instead serving only as “pioneers or hatchetmen”—in other words, manual laborers.18

  Fear of a slave revolt in the eastern Tidewater counties underpinned the Assembly’s reluctance to order a major mobilization of Virginia’s manpower to fight the war on the western frontier.19 Lack of numbers dictated the strategy that Washington would adopt in 1756, and long after. In the New Year, he formally sought Dinwiddie’s directions about whether to “prepare for taking the field—or guarding our frontiers in the spring,” but in reality there was no alternative to a defensive stance. Even had the Virginia Regiment boasted its full complement of 1,000 men, any strike against Fort Duquesne was ruled out by a dearth of artillery and of skilled engineers capable of conducting a siege. With no prospect of an offensive, further steps were taken to shore up Virginia’s shaky frontier; besides the two new forts on Patterson Creek, Washington had ordered Captain Thomas Waggoner and sixty men to build and garrison two more stockades on the South Branch of the Potomac. In addition, he began lobbying for Virginia’s evacuation of Fort Cumberland and its replacement by another “strong fort” within the Old Dominion. In Washington’s opinion, not only was Fort Cumberland poorly sited in defensive terms, but it presented an “eye sore” to Virginia—a veiled reference to the ongoing affront to Washington’s authority posed by the stubborn Dagworthy.20