Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  The French and the British were traditional enemies - they declared war formally on each other four times between the last years of the seventeenth century and the time of the American Revolution - and they were also bitter rivals for territory, not only in areas that became the United States and Canada, but also in India and the West Indies and Africa. And each time there was a big formal war between the French and the British in Europe, there was pretty much a smaller war in America and Canada. King William’s War was pretty much a sidebar of the War of the League of Augsburg, fought in Europe between military forces under William of Orange and King Louis XIV; Queen Anne’s War, which ran from 1701 to 1713, was an offshoot of the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe; and King George’s War, running from 1745 to 1748, was related to the War of the Austrian Succession. In America, both countries courted Indian tribes as allies, but the French used their Indian allies more savagely and successfully because they fought along with them in frontier fashion, firing from behind trees and other hiding places and not standing and posing in colorful uniforms as open and ridiculously visible targets.

  The French and Indian War was the crucial one as far as the Western Hemisphere was concerned because it ended with the French being pretty much driven out of America and Canada, and Washington was involved in the war’s first battle. He and his men ran into a French scouting party in southern Pennsylvania on May 27, 1754, and in the battle that followed, they killed ten French soldiers and captured twenty-one others, with only one loss on their side. Washington expected the French to retaliate and quickly built a small outpost that he called Fort Necessity, sitting where Uniontown, Pennsylvania, is located now. The main French force wasn’t far away; the French had taken over a fort originally built by Virginians, also located near the present site of Pittsburgh, and had named it Fort Duquesne, and as predicted, several hundred French soldiers and Indians showed up on July 3. Washington had more men than the French, about 400 soldiers, but the more experienced French and Indian fighters captured the fort the next day. They didn’t do anything vengeful, however; they just sent the Virginians back to Virginia and even let them take their guns and their ammunition back with them.

  Washington had been promoted to lieutenant colonel by this time, but then the British did one of those things that revealed their underlying contempt for the colonists: They decreed that any colonial officer of captain’s rank or higher had to be demoted so that he wouldn’t outrank any British captain or major or whatever. Washington quit immediately and went back to Mount Vernon, but then, when the French and Indian War grew hotter, he felt some patriotic stirrings - toward old King George at that time, of course - and offered to serve as aide-de-camp to Major General Edward Braddock, who was the commander in chief of the King’s forces in America and who was getting ready to attack the French at Fort Duquesne. Washington’s offer was accepted, and he was quick to warn Braddock that frontier fighting was different from the battles fought in previous wars and that the French and their Indian friends couldn’t be expected to meet British troops face-to-face and wearing uniforms as colorful as British dress gear. But Braddock shrugged off the advice and led his men toward Fort Duquesne in exactly the same way as Howe later sent his troops toward the Americans on Breed’s Hill.

  He marched his men, 1,400 regular British troops and 700 colonial soldiers, in beautiful order toward the French fort, looking so gorgeous that he would have gotten a lot of applause if he were doing it as part of a present-day international parade along Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. He also used heavy transport for his cannons and other equipment instead of pack horses, totally contrary to the advice of Washington and other colonial officers, toward most of whom he was openly contemptuous. He moved so slowly and laboriously that he finally began to fear that the French would have plenty of time to send masses of reinforcements to Fort Duquesne, and then, when he was at a place called Little Meadows, with something like eighty more miles of rough country still ahead of him, he switched to pack horses and left his wagons behind with one of his two regiments, moving ahead with a force of 1,459 men.

  But it was too late. The French and Indians didn’t wait until the British reached Fort Duquesne; they waited, hiding behind trees and in ravines, until the British and American troops were struggling across the Monongahela River, and then suddenly descended on the troops, the French soldiers shouting and yelling and the Indians emitting bloodcurdling war whoops. There were only about 900 men in the French force - a small number of French soldiers and some Canadians, but a large number of Indians - so they were outnumbered by the British and colonial soldiers, and the battle became a quick and terrible slaughter of the British and the Americans. Despite the constant warnings of the colonial soldiers that frontier warfare should be expected, and not fancy face-to-face warfare by the book, the British were totally stunned and unprepared for the attack, and large numbers of the soldiers turned and ran, followed by Indians who killed them, paused only to take scalps, and then hid momentarily and returned to kill some more. Most of the British officers were braver than their men and stayed to fight, but they, too, were cut down because they insisted on remaining open targets while the French and the Canadians and the Indians fired at them from behind trees.

  When the battle was over, the British and the colonials counted 977 dead or wounded, including sixth-three of the eighty-nine officers present. The commander of the French forces, Daniel Hyacinthe Marie Liénard de Beaujeu, also died in the battle, shot down early in the fight, but then so did General Braddock; he had four horses shot out from under him and then fell wounded himself, hanging on for four days before he succumbed. Washington was luckier: He had two horses killed as he rode them, and four bullets passed through his clothing, but he was unharmed.

  Shortly afterwards, Governor Dinwiddie asked Washington to return home and take command of the Virginia militia because he was afraid that the French and Indians would start attacking some of Virginia’s more isolated western settlements; Washington refused at first, but then agreed, and was promoted to full colonel and regimental commander. The French and Indian War dragged on until 1760, the climactic battle taking place on the Plains of Abraham, a level area adjoining Quebec, in which both the British commander, General James Wolfe, and the French commander, General Louis- Joseph de Montcalm-Gozon, Marquise de Saint-Véron, were killed. But the battle was a decisive victory for the British, who took Quebec, and the French gave up the next year and Canada became British territory.

  Washington didn’t remain in military service until the end of the war; he resigned his commission in 1758 to join the Virginia House of Burgesses, the colony’s governing body. Thereafter, until he joined the Continental Congresses and became commander of the American forces, he devoted himself to increasing his wealth; leading a nine-week expedition into the Ohio Valley in 1770 and claiming 20,000 acres for the soldiers he’d commanded, and himself, as compensation for their part in the French and Indian War; and to some romantic expeditions.

  Some of these didn’t amount to much. Back in 1752, when Washington was twenty, and a young woman named Betsy Fauntleroy, the daughter of a burgess and judge from Richmond County, Virginia, was sixteen, Washington fell deeply in love with her and pursued her vigorously, even managing to get her father to try to convince her that the marriage would be a good one. But young Betsy wasn’t the least bit interested, and after a while Washington gave up, and in 1756, en route to Boston on a military matter, he stopped off in New York and met and fell in love with Mary Philipse, at twenty-six, two years older than he was, and the daughter of a man who owned a lot of New York land. He stayed in New York for a week and ended up proposing to her. Some cynical historians have speculated that what Washington really fell in love with was the fact that Mary was the heiress to 51,000 acres, but I doubt it; Washington enjoyed acquiring wealth and property, but he wasn’t a fanatically mercenary and grasping type, and he was, on the other hand, clearly a romantic young fellow who fell in lov
e easily and deeply. In any case, the New York lady wasn’t ready to accept him any more than the Virginia lady, which turned out to be a good thing in a way because her sentiments became pro-Britain while Washington’s, of course, turned more and more toward independence from the mother country. She later married Roger Morris, who was equally pro-Britain.

  Washington’s next love affair was with Sarah Cary Fairfax, who was called Sally and was eighteen when he first met her; but this one was totally hopeless because she was already married to his friend and neighbor, George William Fairfax. Sally was very beautiful, very intelligent, and very charming, and a romantic correspondence apparently went on between them for quite a long time, continuing even when Washington became engaged to be married himself, when he was twenty-six, to a twenty-seven-year-old widow named Martha Dandridge Custis. Here some historians guess that the romance with Sally Fairfax never went beyond flirtation, while others, perhaps more romantic types themselves, believe it went a lot further than that. One thing that’s sure is that, though Washington married Martha Custis on January 6, 1759, he was still writing love letters to Sally as late as September 1758 because one such letter has survived. Again, though, it’s just as well that the relationship with Sally didn’t take hold and become official, with Sally somehow ridding herself of George Fairfax and marrying George Washington, because she proved to be pro-Britain. In 1773, in fact, after the Boston Tea Party, the Fairfaxes became so alarmed with events in America that they left for England and remained there the rest of their lives.

  Martha Dandridge, born in New Kent County, Virginia, in June 1731, had married a wealthy planter named Daniel Parke Custis when she was eighteen, and they had two children together. Custis died in 1757, leaving no will, but Martha inherited his 17,000 acres despite this fact, which made her the wealthiest woman of marriageable age and situation in Virginia. Her marriage to Washington, therefore, made him richer still, again causing speculation among some historians that love wasn’t his only motivation in proposing, but Martha was reported to be a woman of considerable beauty, charm, and that not-so-common-quality common sense, and the marriage seems to have been a very happy one.

  Washington was a big, healthy man who was, as I’ve said, six feet two inches in height and weighed 170 pounds in his prime and 200 pounds later in life, but he and Martha had no children together, possibly because his bout with smallpox in Barbados, or a siege with mumps that some people say he had as a boy, made him incapable. But he was very fond of Martha’s children and treated them as his own, and he and Martha grew closer and closer through the years. Martha was never comfortable or happy away from him, and she made many difficult and dangerous trips to see him and stay with him at his headquarters during the Revolutionary War. And when Washington died on December 14, 1799, she became almost a recluse and died herself three years later.

  Washington knew, incidentally, that he was dying. He made the mistake of traveling around his plantation through snow and sleet the day before, then came back to his house and dealt with some correspondence and had dinner without changing his wet clothes, and woke up the next morning with chills and a very sore throat. He thought that his aches and pains would go away, but they didn’t, and three doctors were called: his friend and personal physician, Dr. James Craik, and two consultants, Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown and Dr. Elisha Cullen Dick. Naturally, the doctors practiced the primitive medicine of the period; they diagnosed his problem as quinsy, which is an abscess near a tonsil, and proceeded to treat the ailment by bleeding him four times, which made things worse. Finally, Washington dismissed the doctors, and at about ten o’clock on the evening of the fourteenth, he told his aide, Tobias Lear, “I’m just going.” Then he gave Lear instructions for his burial, and as he was trying to take his own pulse, he died.

  His will was forty-two pages long, written in his own handwriting five months before his death. He left his estate of about $500,000 - an astonishingly high amount for those days - to Martha for her use during her lifetime, and he left very desirable tracts of land to his two grand-children, George Washington Parke Custis and Nellie Lewis. He gave his personal servant, William, an annuity and freed him, and ordered that all the other slaves be freed after Martha’s death. He was owed money by his brother-in-law, Bartholomew Dandridge, and by the family of one of his brothers, Samuel, and forgave these. He had stock in the Bank of Alexandria and in an outfit called the Potomac Company, and willed the first of these for a school for indigent children and the second for the start of a university. Tobias Lear got a rent-free residence for life; another brother, Charles, got a gold-headed cane that had been given to him by Benjamin Franklin; Dr. Craik got his desk and chair; and pistols taken from the British during the Revolutionary War went to Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roche Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. (I don’t think Washington used the full name in his will since that would have made it forty-three pages long.) And five of his nephews each got one of his swords, his will requesting that they never be used “for the purpose of shedding blood except it be for self-defence, or in defence of their country and its rights . . .”

  Washington’s only military experience before the Revolutionary War, in short, was his service during the French and Indian War, and it’s a miracle that it proved to be enough. It would have been a miracle even if Washington had been the best-trained soldier in the world, because he had basically poor material to work with when he took on the difficult - some of his contemporaries thought impossible - assignment of going to war against the British.

  First of all, it wasn’t the usual kind of war, with one nation going to war against another nation. The thirteen colonies weren’t really an integrated nation at all, not yet; due to the transportation of the time, the geographical distances between them made them almost like separate countries leading separate, and in many ways very different, kinds of lives, so much so that, until they started to get together in the Continental Congresses, many of the leaders from one colony barely knew the leaders from another colony - and in many cases didn’t know them at all.

  Second, a lot of them didn’t like each other all that much. The soft-spoken, polite Virginians put a lot of stress on good manners, so some Virginians were appalled by the people from Massachusetts, considering their blunt, clipped speech and their attitude of “let’s get down to brass tacks without a lot of bowing and scraping and formality” as boorish. Even Washington was heard commenting now and then on what he considered to be the bad manners of many of the Yankees. It was that way all around. Aristocratic colonists considered New Yorkers too steeped in business and too fanatic about making money, while New Yorkers considered the aristocrats lazy and indolent and living off the sweat of other people; city people considered the German farmers in Pennsylvania ignorant and the eighteenth-century version of rubes and hicks, and farm people considered town people the eighteenth-century version of city slickers; and in North Carolina, upland people hated lowland people and vice versa, and the two groups didn’t want to have anything to do with each other. In other words, they were like people since the beginning of time, suspicious of and disliking each other’s differences, and maybe a little more that way than most. Anyway, they certainly weren’t people who fitted together naturally to do that job of winning the war.

  Third, I hope you don’t have the mistaken idea that most colonists rallied immediately to the cause of independence. I’ve mentioned some of Washington’s friends and neighbors who decided in favor of the Crown, and they were by no means the exceptions to the rule. There were also a lot of people who wouldn’t fight because of religious reasons. So Georgia stayed away because the people there were having their own troubles with the Creek Indians and were generally favorably inclined toward England because the King came through with funds to fight the Indians, and New Yorkers were about equally divided between men ready to join the Revolution and men loyal to old George III, and Quakers wouldn’t fight at all. So when the Revolutionary War started, there were probably 25,000 men who j
oined up on the British side, and a much larger number of Americans who stayed out of the fighting entirely.

  WASHINGTON ALSO HAD plenty of trouble with the men who did join the Continental Army. Many of his officers got their commissions by buying them, or by talking some of their neighbors and friends who’d joined up at the same time into appointing them as their commander, and the neighbors and friends soon got tired of being commanded by that fellow who’d lived down the road and refused to take orders from him. Other enlisted men just turned around and went home without leave when they received news of illness or other troubles back home, or when they learned that there was no one around on their farms to do the harvesting, or when they grew lonely for their wives and children, or even just because the weather was turning bad.

  Washington never showed anything but a calm exterior throughout the war, but there’s no question about the fact that he grew frantic at times and felt that the only way to keep things from falling apart completely was to adopt some harsh measures. He sent men out to bring departing soldiers back and got permission from the Continental governing body to punish disobedient soldiers, and soldiers who’d sneaked away and were brought back to duty, with as many as 500 lashes, but it didn’t help a whole lot. And there were times like the time he arrived in New York, in August 1776, and found that he had only 8,000 men to call upon, whereas the British had 35,000 men there plus 20,000 about to land on Long Island and join them.

  Many of the battles after Washington took command in 1775 were what you might call informal skirmishes between colonists and British soldiers in different parts of the country, sometimes because they just happened to meet up with each other, and, of course, there had been no formal statement of independence at that point. But, in March of 1776, the Americans captured and controlled Boston, and that was when General Gage sailed back to England with his tail between his legs. The victory, naturally, was encouraging and inspiring to colonists everywhere in the country, and it might be said to be the start of the more formal war.