Scully’s determined stand and his arrival in camp “in a bloody condition” was duly reported by Colonel Bouquet in a dispatch to Forbes and also featured in the Reverend Barton’s diary, which noted anything of unusual interest.30 Barton was curious to see Fort Cumberland and arrived there on the evening of September 6 to find Washington and Lieutenant Colonel George Mercer of the 2nd Virginia Regiment encamped with 850 of their men. Both officers treated Barton and his companions to “a very polite reception, and generous, hospitable, entertainment.” On the morning of Sunday, September, 10, Barton preached a sermon, “by desire of Colonel Washington from Nehemiah 4-14.”31 Washington’s choice of text is perhaps significant and, given the ongoing row over the roads, suggestive of his prevailing Virginian, rather than broader British, loyalties:
And I looked, and rose up, and said unto the nobles, and to the rulers, and to the rest of the people, Be not ye afraid of them: remember the Lord, which is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, and your houses.
The next day, Washington unexpectedly received a “short, but very agreeable” letter that immediately pushed the fortunes of the Old Dominion and Fort Duquesne into the background. Dated September 1, it was from Sally Fairfax. Before the start of the campaign, and with a view to his impending marriage to Martha Custis, Washington had ordered an extensive remodeling of Mount Vernon. When George William Fairfax wrote to update Washington on the progress of the renovations, his wife Sally apparently took the opportunity to tease her old admirer about his brisk courtship; as Washington phrased it—in words that may repeat Sally’s—“the animating prospect of possessing Mrs. Custis.”
As usual, Sally’s note has vanished, but she saved Washington’s reply.32 It makes for revealing reading. Written as Washington was once again poised to lead his men into danger, it indicates that, whatever else he had pledged to Martha Custis and for all the painting and plastering at Mount Vernon, his heart still belonged to Sally Fairfax. Washington professed himself a “votary to Love,” but the object of his affections was not his intended bride. His words leave no doubt of that:
I acknowledge that a lady is in the case—and further I confess, that this lady is known to you. Yes Madam, as well as she is to one, who is too sensible of her charms to deny the power, whose influence he feels and must ever submit to. I feel the force of her amiable beauties in the recollection of a thousand tender passages that I could wish to obliterate, ’til I am bid to revive them. . . . You have drawn me my dear Madam, or rather have I drawn myself, into an honest confession of a simple fact. Misconstrue not my meaning—’tis obvious—doubt it not, nor expose it.
In her letter, Sally had declared that she was happy, leading Washington to make a curious confession for a man about to marry: “I wish I was happy also.”
The conclusion that Sally Fairfax, rather than Martha Custis, remained the real object of Washington’s affections in the summer of 1758 is confirmed by his next letter to her.33 This was written in response to Sally’s reply, again missing, to his latest testament of love. Washington opened with a telling question: “Do we still misunderstand the true meaning of each other’s letters? I think it must appear so, though I would feign hope the contrary as I cannot speak plainer without—but I’ll say no more, and leave you to guess the rest.”
But what Washington went on to say, after updating Sally with news of Forbes’s campaign, was plain enough to anyone remotely familiar with Joseph Addison’s play Cato, a tragedy first performed in London in 1713, and especially admired in British North America. Rather than participating in the campaign against Fort Duquesne, Washington wrote, he would consider his time “more agreeable spent believe me, in playing a part in Cato . . . and myself doubly happy in being the Juba to such a Marcia as you must make.” As Marcia was Cato’s daughter, and Juba the Numidian prince obliged to hide his love for her, the message was obvious.
The fortnight that separated Washington’s two impassioned letters to Sally Fairfax must have found him in emotional turmoil; that same period proved a dramatic watershed for Forbes’s campaign. During August the controversial road from Raystown had been pushed across the daunting barriers of Allegheny Mountain and Laurel Hill; by September 1, an advance guard of 1,500 men was constructing the next fortified depot on Loyalhanna Creek, fifty miles from Fort Duquesne.
Given the rugged terrain, this was steady progress; but it was too slow for some. Riding back into Raystown on the evening of September 10, the Reverend Barton encountered a depressing atmosphere: “The season is far advanced,” he noted. “The leaves begin to fall, the forage to wither, and cold nights to approach. All these circumstances concur to damp our spirits, and make us uneasy.” It required the physical presence of General Forbes to dispel the gloom. He finally arrived in camp on September 15, escorted by dashing light horsemen and stolid Highlanders. Forbes was, as Barton reported, “in a low state,” so ill that he was slung in a contraption resembling a horse-borne sedan chair. Yet the appearance of the frail, sickly Scot worked wonders on his jaded army: he smiled at the crowds who turned out to greet him, and the troops seemed “inspired with fresh spirits,” with every face now cheerful.34
Washington lost no time in writing to Forbes, passing on good wishes for his recovery; the general appreciated the sentiment, “being quite as feeble now as a child almost.” For all his pain, Forbes had not lost his dark sense of humor: hearing that Colonel Byrd was also sick, he advised him to come to Raystown, “where I should hope to prove a better physician than he will probably meet with at Fort Cumberland.” Byrd, another victim of dysentery, was too weak to move, but Washington visited the general, arriving in camp on the evening of September 16, accompanied by clattering troopers of Captain Stewart’s light horse. He returned to Fort Cumberland next day with orders to march the Virginians into camp.
On September 21, Washington, Byrd, and the rest of their men finally joined Forbes’s army. They found the general in somber mood, and with good reason: on the previous evening he had received disheartening news from Loyalhanna. In a rare lapse of judgment, Bouquet, the advance guard commander, had approved a proposal from the ambitious Major James Grant of Montgomery’s Highlanders to lead a reconnaissance in force against Fort Duquesne. Besides reconnoitering that post, there was talk of retaliating against the “Indian rabble” that had launched irritating raids on Loyalhanna. Beyond that, Grant’s mission was vague: as Bouquet told Forbes, the major’s actions were to be “guided by the circumstances.”35
Major Grant had left Loyalhanna on September 9 at the head of a picked detachment of about 800 regulars and provincials, including more than 150 men from Washington’s 1st Virginia Regiment under Major Lewis and all the available Indians. Pausing at a forward entrenchment established by Washington’s old antagonist John Dagworthy, now a lieutenant colonel, by the evening of September 13, Grant’s troops were within striking distance of their objective. Present among the Virginians was young Ensign Thomas Gist, the son of Washington’s wilderness guide Christopher Gist. He remembered that they had been ordered to wear their white shirts uppermost, so that they could easily identify each other in the dark. That ploy followed standard European practice for nighttime assaults, which were accordingly known as “camisards”; but now it had another unexpected and disconcerting effect. As they marched silently down toward the fort, each holding onto his leader’s shirttail, the moonlight glittered on their musket barrels and played upon the pale, flapping shirts “in a movement” that, as Gist recalled, “made some of the soldiers observe that we looked more like ghosts.”36
By sunrise on September 14, Major Grant had penetrated close to his target without detection but was flummoxed about what to do next. After burning some of the fort’s outbuildings and apparently with the object of rallying his own scattered detachments, he proceeded to rouse the garrison and its tribal allies by ordering his drummers to beat and his bagpipers to play. During the bush fight that followed, Grant’s divided
command was soundly defeated and scattered in confusion. A stubborn stand by Captain Thomas Bullitt and fifty of his Virginians, who had been posted to guard the baggage horses and provisions, gave the survivors a chance to get away. Finally overwhelmed, Bullitt and the last of his men were forced into the Ohio River; the captain escaped, but many others drowned. The portly Grant, who like Forbes was a veteran of the last war in Flanders and one of his most experienced subordinates, refused to flee, declaring “his heart was broken and he could not survive the loss of that day.” He was captured sitting despondently on a log.37
As a senior officer, Major Grant received scrupulously courteous treatment from his captors, reflecting the established international code of conduct between gentlemen. Other, less exalted prisoners were not so lucky. Thomas Gist, who was shot across the forehead and through the right hand before being captured by a Wyandot—or Huron—warrior, saw comrades forced to run from the edge of the woods to the fort. These “poor unhappy fellows” were pursued by Indians and met by others from the fort wielding tomahawks, knives, swords, and clubs. Screaming and yelling, the warriors “beat and drove” their victims “from one side of the cleared ground to the other, till the unhappy men could not stand; then they were tomahawked, scalped, and in short was [sic] massacred in the most barbarous manner that can be imagined.”
In hellish scenes that recalled those enacted in the wake of Braddock’s defeat three years earlier, a handful of prisoners were burned alive. To his “unspeakable grief and terror,” Robert Kirkwood of Montgomery’s Highlanders, who had been captured by Shawnees after being lamed by a blast of buckshot, witnessed five captives “burned in the most cruel manner.” Kirkwood’s account is corroborated by that of a twelve-year-old boy who escaped from Fort Duquesne on December 2 after two years of captivity. He had seen “a prodigious quantity of wood” carried into the fort, which was used to burn “five of the prisoners they took at Major Grant’s Defeat, on the Parade.”38
Grant’s raid was a bloody outing for Washington’s regiment. In a letter to his friend and neighbor George William Fairfax—written on the very same day that he pledged undying love for Sally—Washington described it as “a heavy stroke.” On the official casualty returns, of the 174 Virginians who participated, no fewer than 68 were marked down as killed or missing, presumed dead. It was widely conceded that the Virginians had fought bravely, and, although Washington played no part in the action, he took great pride in his men’s sterling performance. “It is with infinite pleasure,” he wrote to Fairfax, “I tell you that the Virginians, officers and men, distinguished themselves in the most eminent manner.” General Forbes himself had complimented Washington publicly on his men’s good behavior; combat had also forged bonds of comradeship between the Virginians and Highlanders, who were “become one people, shaking each other by the hand wherever they meet.”39
In his letters home, Washington neglected to mention that Forbes had also taken the opportunity to castigate both him and Byrd for their blatantly partisan stance over the rival roads. Already exasperated by tidings of Grant’s debacle, the general’s temper was not improved when he learned of a letter penned by Lieutenant Colonel Stephen reporting opinion that the road from Loyalhanna to the Ohio was “now impracticable.” Quite why Stephen had written such a thing Forbes was at a loss to know, but he assured Bouquet that Washington and Byrd would prefer it to be “true than otherways, seeing the other road (their favorite scheme) was not followed out.” In confronting the colonels, Forbes had not minced his words:
I told them plainly that, whatever they thought . . . in our prosecuting the present road, we had proceeded from the best intelligence that could be got for the good and convenience of the army, without any views to oblige one province or another; and added that those two gentlemen were the only people that I had met with who had showed their weakness in their attachment to the province they belong to, by declaring so publicly in favor of one road without their knowing anything of the other.
Indeed, for all Washington’s mutterings, Forbes had never heard a Pennsylvanian say a word, good or bad, about the road. As for himself—and for Bouquet, too—the “good of the service” was all that mattered, with the jealousies and suspicions of the provinces not worth “one single twopence.”40
Despite this tongue-lashing, Washington was unrepentant and remained convinced that Forbes had taken the wrong route. Writing to Virginia’s new lieutenant governor, Francis Fauquier, on September 25, he reported, “Our affairs in general appear with a greater gloom than ever.” Washington could see no prospect of opening up the rest of the new road that campaign, and therefore no “favorable issue to the expedition.” 41
Not everyone shared such pessimism. Even the jarring blow of Grant’s defeat failed to discourage the resilient Forbes for long; as anticipated, the fortified camp at Loyalhanna minimized the effects, allowing the advance guard to hold its ground. Back at the sprawling Raystown complex, where the bulk of the army now waited to move forward, camp life resumed its familiar routines of drill and discipline. Amid all the continuing delays, boredom and homesickness bred desertion. At a general court-martial held on September 24, eight provincials were found guilty of quitting their units. Serving alongside regulars, they were subject to the full force of military law: three were sentenced to floggings ranging from five hundred to nine hundred lashes; the others were to be shot. Forbes approved the punishments, but of those marked down for death, four were reprieved after their officers interceded for them: those spared included John Hanna, a red-headed Irishman from the 1st Virginia Regiment, on whose behalf Washington himself had spoken up. John Doyle of the Pennsylvania Regiment would provide an example for the rest.42
On September 26, the Reverend Barton walked with Doyle to the place of execution. In eighteenth-century armies, punishment functioned as a grim, instructional theater. Doyle gave a bravura performance. As Barton reported with approval, he “behaved with uncommon resolution; exhorted his brother-soldiers to take example by his misfortunes; to live sober lives; to beware of bad company; to shun pretended friends, and loose wicked companions.” Above all, he implored them never to desert. When he saw the six-strong firing squad, Doyle knelt down and stripped off his coat, inviting them to come close and aim for his heart. He shunned the proffered blindfold but looked his executioners, “who advanced so near that the muzzles of their guns were within a foot of his body,” full in the eye. Here the drama departed from the script. At a signal from the sergeant major the executioners fired, but aimed so low that Doyle’s “bowels fell out, his shirt and breeches were all on fire, and he tumbled upon his side, raised one arm 2 or 3 times, and soon expired.” It was a “shocking spectacle” to all, and a “striking example” for Doyle’s fellow soldiers—so shocking and striking, in fact, that Barton ended his journal abruptly at that precise point.43
Doyle’s execution was intended to discourage desertion as the army prepared to resume its lumbering progress. In orders issued two days later, Forbes acknowledged that his men had already “gone through a great deal of fatigue,” but as “the advance posts of the army [were] almost at the enemy’s nose,” he placed his confidence in their “alacrity and steadiness in carrying on the rest of the service that we may show our enemies the danger of rousing Britons fired and animated with love of their King and Country.”44
Despite the primacy of his Virginian interests, Washington still nurtured some flicker of the broader British patriotism that Forbes sought to kindle. When the general appealed for advice on formations to be adopted when the army made the last lunge for its objective, Washington prepared a detailed response, giving his thoughts “on a line of march through a country covered with wood, and how [it] may be formed, in an instant, into an order of battle.” His accompanying drawings, executed with all the precise penmanship of a trained surveyor, proposed a formation that maximized security on the march, while retaining enough flexibility to respond swiftly to attack. The scheme, which was accompanied by two m
eticulously detailed plans, was calculated for a short forced march, taking along field artillery but no cumbersome wagons. It envisaged a 4,000-strong force, spearheaded by a vanguard of 1,000 picked men organized in three divisions, followed by two brigades and a rear guard. On the march, the column would be covered by small flanking parties. If the enemy attacked from the front, some 600 men would screen the flanks while the elite vanguard fanned out to the right and left, taking cover behind trees and seeking to execute an aggressive pincer movement. Washington was confident that the enemy would find this “different from any thing they have ever yet experienced from us.” Elements of the “order of battle,” notably the reliance upon a long, thin line to outflank and encircle the enemy, reflected tactics that the innovative Bouquet had already tested at Raystown, although it’s unclear whether he and Washington collaborated on them.45
The prospects for putting such theories to the test improved on October 14, when Washington received orders to march his Virginians to reinforce Bouquet. This move was prompted by news of a determined French descent upon Loyalhanna two days before. Aiming to capitalize on Grant’s defeat and deliver a blow capable of halting Forbes’s advance until the spring, the commander at Fort Duquesne, Captain François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery, sent out a raiding party of 600 French and Indians under Captain Charles Philippe Aubry. They surprised the camp while Bouquet was away searching for an easier route over Laurel Hill; in his absence, the defense was orchestrated by the Pennsylvanian Colonel James Burd. Despite outnumbering their assailants, Burd’s men got the worst of a three-hour-long fight and were forced back behind the camp’s stout stockades. They eventually rebuffed the assault, thanks to the firepower of their artillery, but nonetheless sustained heavier casualties than the raiders and lost their priceless draught horses. Bouquet and Forbes were both deeply troubled by an episode in which the enemy showed such apparent contempt for the odds against them.46
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