In the midst of these frustrations, Washington forwarded to the governor his officers’ complaints that their pay was too low, a grievance he seconded, describing himself as “slaving dangerously for the shadow of pay.” He offered to serve for no reward other “than the satisfaction of serving my country,” and concluded with a bracing gust of realism: “Upon the whole, I find so many clogs upon the expedition that I quite despair of success.”15
Although the officers and soldiers in Washington’s service were receiving lower pay than Trent’s men (who had been hired as laborers) or those in the independent companies, Dinwiddie’s response was tart: Objections to pay, he noted, “should have been made before engaging in the service. The gentlemen very well knew the terms on which they were to serve and were satisfied then with it.” The governor told Washington to control the men he commanded.16
Dinwiddie’s message came from Winchester, where the governor was to confer with Tanaghrisson and other chiefs of the Ohio Indians, hoping to recruit Indian allies to buttress Virginia’s too-small numbers against the French. Colonel Fairfax and two other Executive Council members were there too.17
Thus, for several months in the late spring and early summer of 1754, Virginia’s colonial government largely revolved around Washington and his grumbling soldiers in the western forests. In that heady moment, he was squarely in the unforgiving spotlight of history. From an exposed position, Washington faced a much stronger enemy who might be a short march away. His supply system was dodgy and his soldiers poorly trained. No matter how much he scanned the eastern horizon, it never filled with reinforcements. If he did not withdraw his men in time, they could be at the mercy of the enemy.
Chapter 7
Blooded
By May 29, Washington had much to tell Dinwiddie. Stung by the governor’s criticism on the pay issue, Washington affirmed he would stay in the service despite its hardships, boasting that he had “a constitution hardy enough to encounter and undergo the most severe trials.” He acknowledged the governor’s generosity toward him, adding he despised the “black and detestable” sin of ingratitude. After devoting twelve hundred words to other matters, he reached the major news: He had fought the French, and he had won.1
Tanaghrisson had warned that the French soon would attack Washington’s force, which was hacking slowly through the woods to Redstone Creek. The Virginians camped at Great Meadows, a rare clearing. Washington had his men remove bushes to afford open fields of fire, leaving what he called “a charming field for an encounter” with the enemy. An alarm in the middle of the night proved to be false. It was Virginia deserters running away, not a French attack.2
On May 27, Christopher Gist reported that the French were nearby. Tanaghrisson sent word that he was tracking some of the enemy. In a heavy nighttime rain, Washington led forty men out to join the hunt. Blundering through the inky darkness, the Virginians strayed from the path, tripping over roots, rocks, and one another. At sunrise, they found Tanaghrisson a short distance from the French camp. Washington resolved to attack.
The French slept without sentries, sheltered on one side by a tall rock wall. Washington divided his small force. Captain Stephen took soldiers to the top of the rock face, which allowed them to fire directly down on the French. Washington led others to the high end of the camp. Tanaghrisson and his Indians took the low end.
The skirmish lasted barely fifteen minutes, long enough to start a world war and three centuries of controversy. Washington began by leading his men down on the camp. When enemy soldiers scrambled for weapons, he said, the Virginians opened fire, driving the French before them. Stephen said the Virginians advanced with bayonets because rain had soaked their gunpowder. The French later insisted that they called out that they were a peaceful, diplomatic mission. One claimed they never raised their guns, an assertion refuted by the Virginians’ loss of one dead and two wounded. The French suffered ten dead and one wounded; twenty-one others were captured.3
The ratio of French killed and wounded—ten to one—signals an irregularity; in combat, the injured ordinarily outnumber the dead by two or three to one. The ratio in this skirmish suggests that Frenchmen tried to surrender, but the youthful Virginia commander could not control his Indian allies, who did most of the killing with tomahawks. An especially grisly encounter involved Tanaghrisson’s telling the wounded French commander, “You are not dead yet, my father,” splitting his skull, then washing his hands with the Frenchman’s brains. Several days later, Washington confirmed the basic sequence of the scrap, relating that his Indian allies “served to knock the poor unhappy wounded in the head and bereaved them of their scalps.”4
When the killing was done, the survivors protested that they were a diplomatic party, a claim that became a sore point when France insisted that Washington assassinated a peaceable diplomat. The French commander, the Sieur de Jumonville, did carry a demand that the British vacate French lands, but that was not his only mission. He also was instructed to “see what is transacting” in the Ohio valley and report his observations—in short, diplomacy plus intelligence-gathering.5
Washington insisted the French were spies, stressing that they came in force (thirty-three men), not as a small diplomatic party like the one he had led months before. Rather than approach Washington directly, Jumonville had lain concealed nearby for two nights, sending off runners to report intelligence about the Virginians. Captain Stephen and Tanaghrisson concurred. The French had “bad hearts,” the Indian leader said, “and if we were so foolish as to let them go again, he would never . . . have come to us but in a hostile manner.”6
Washington denied that the French called out to stop the attack. “I was the first man that approached them,” he wrote, and they “immediately . . . ran to their arms and fired briskly till they were defeated.”7
Washington had ample justification for attacking Jumonville’s party. For two years and more, the French had seized British traders. They rejected Dinwiddie’s demand to vacate the valley, boasted that they would drive off the English, recruited Indian allies, and seized the Forks by force.8 Under the circumstances, Jumonville’s contingent could hardly be surprised by a British attack. Being caught unprepared was their failure.
The encounter exhilarated Washington. He had seen combat, held steady, and won. He boasted to his brother Jack of “a most signal victory,” adding that he escaped injury “though the right wing where I stood was exposed to and received all the enemy’s fire.” He added that he heard bullets whistle and found “something charming in the sound.” When that letter appeared in the London Magazine—something an ambitious officer might arrange—King George II commented drily: “He would not say so, if he had been used to hear many.”9
American newspapers reported Washington’s exploits, including the Jumonville incident. The Virginian became a man to watch. In early July, a Philadelphia paper published an excerpt from a letter he supposedly wrote: “If the whole detachment of the French behave with no more resolution than this chosen party did,” the letter crowed, “I flatter myself we shall have no great trouble in driving them to . . . Montreal.” From a stockade built at Great Meadows, he reported, he could repel five hundred men.10
The letter was wrong. The bloodletting was only beginning. The French were stronger than Washington was. They would not leave the Ohio valley anytime soon.
* * *
Governor Dinwiddie sent Washington a medal and pushed for other British forces to join him. Colonel Fry had been slowed by an “indisposition.” The South Carolina company was creeping up the Potomac. North Carolinians and two independent companies from New York had gone missing. Totaling nine hundred men, those groups might jointly recover the Forks if they arrived before the Virginia commander did something reckless. Dinwiddie warned Washington against a “hazardous attempt against a too numerous adversary.”11
Just two days after the Jumonville encounter, Colonel Fry died in a fall from
a horse. Dinwiddie promoted Washington to full colonel, then named James Innes, commander of the North Carolinians, as commander in chief. Washington expressed gratitude for his promotion, professing to be “happy under the command of an experienced officer and a man of sense.”12
With Innes still in transit, Washington had his hands full. Impressed with the fighting skills of Indians, he sought tribal allies. Early in June, Tanaghrisson brought some eighty Mingoes to the Great Meadows, including women and children, while another chief displayed French scalps to Indian villages, trying to demonstrate British determination.13
A week later, Captain James Mackay arrived in camp with his South Carolinians, but they soon became a disruption. Mackay, who had held a king’s commission for fifteen years, denied Washington was his superior. In truth, provincial officers like Washington did not ordinarily command those with a king’s commission. Yet Mackay took an extreme position, refusing even to recognize the daily password set by Washington for sentries. His men refused, with Mackay’s backing, to join the roadbuilding work. Fearing that the squabble “will be a canker that will grate some officers of this regiment beyond all measure,” Washington appealed to Dinwiddie to bring Mackay to heel. After proclaiming Innes in charge, Washington as his second, and Mackay as their subordinate, Dinwiddie urged all three to “lay aside any little punctilios in rank.”14
The Virginians who had been with Colonel Fry finally reached Washington’s camp, straining further its limited food supplies. After the first week of June, Washington had no flour, only parched corn and some meat from lean cattle. By month’s end, the soldiers went without meat or bread for six days.15
Washington, still hoping to reclaim the Forks, did not withdraw. By mid-May, the French fort there stood chest-high, with a thickness of twelve feet of earth and stone. Scouts estimated the French strength at between 600 and 1,000 men, double or triple Washington’s numbers.16
Washington’s attempt to recruit more Indian fighters failed. He twice dispatched men to clear the road to Redstone Creek and the Monongahela. Mackay’s South Carolinians again refused to work, idling at the Great Meadows stockade, renamed Fort Necessity.17
That last decision—working toward the Monongahela at the end of June—moved Washington’s force in the wrong direction despite Dinwiddie’s warning that he should fear a surprise, that “the French act with great secrecy and cunning.” Scouts reported that more than a thousand Frenchmen and Indians would soon be on the march. The British work party in the woods, starving, straggled back toward Fort Necessity. Undernourished soldiers had to haul cannon by hand. On July 1, they arrived, too worn to withdraw farther.18
Fort Necessity, however, offered little safety. The circular stockade, fifty-three feet in diameter, stood at the center of open ground. It consisted of split oak logs sunk into the ground, roughly seven feet high, with trenches along its sides. At a key point, the woods were less than a musket shot away. A modern military expert has called the site “so poorly sited and so dubiously constructed . . . that only an amateur or a fool would have thought it defensible.” Washington’s error might be charged to inexperience, though Captain Mackay, a soldier since Washington was seven years old, also did not see the structure as a trap. Tanaghrisson did. On the day after the work party reached the fort’s illusory shelter, the Indians left, uninterested in noble defeats. Even Tanaghrisson left, calling the fort “that little thing upon the meadow.” When the battle began, not a single Indian stood with the British.19
A French force of seven hundred, led by the slain Jumonville’s brother, took nearly a week to reach Fort Necessity. After waiting in the woods through the night of July 2, they attacked in a morning rainstorm. Washington’s outnumbered men were deepening their trenches when the enemy emerged from the forest. The British colonists drew up in formation as French musket fire began, but then the French retired into the woods. The colonists ducked into their trenches and waited for a frontal assault that never came. The enemy shrewdly chose to shoot from cover in the forest.20
As Washington saw the battle, the colonists faced an “enemy sheltered behind the trees, ourselves without shelter, in trenches full of water, in a settled rain, and the enemy galling us on all sides.” What Washington had called a “charming field for an encounter” turned out to be a killing field for his men.21
British muskets misfired in the rain. That problem was so common in the eighteenth century that a special tool was used to clear from a gun barrel the damp powder, ball, and cartridge. The tool (a “screw” or “worm”) was a coil attached to the end of a ramrod. When inserted into the barrel and twisted, the ramrod-plus-screw would hook the jammed material so it could be pulled out. Washington’s men, however, had only two screws, which meant that many huddled quietly during the fight, unable to return fire, hoping not to be shot.
The firing kept up until late afternoon, Washington recalled later, “when there fell the most tremendous rain that can be conceived—filled our trenches with water.” The defenders’ casualties piled up. French bullets sheared splinters from the stockade and propelled them deep into the soldiers’ flesh. By the battle’s end, one-third of Washington’s men would be dead or wounded. After a day of receiving French fire, surrounded by corpses and the groans of the wounded, Washington’s men plundered the rum supply. Some got drunk.22
Although the French held the upper hand, the weather hampered them too. Their ammunition ran low and their Indian allies announced they would leave in the morning. Reports falsely claimed that British reinforcements were approaching. The French decided that they had avenged Jumonville and did not need to exterminate their foes. At nightfall, under a flag of truce, they offered to accept Washington’s surrender.23
Washington initially thought it was a trick. Why would the enemy relent when his position was so hopeless? Persuaded that the overture was genuine, he sent two officers to negotiate terms. One was Jacob Van Braam, the Dutchman who spoke French. Washington remained in the stockade to try to maintain order.24
Having little leverage for bargaining, the colonial officers returned near midnight with a document prepared by the French—in French, of course—and titled “Capitulation.” Washington relied on Van Braam to translate it in the rain, surrounded by a nightmarish collection of corpses, drunks, and wounded. The candlelight faltered and the ink on the agreement ran.25 In return for withdrawing from the Ohio country for one year, the defenders would be allowed to leave with their wounded and their weapons. That last provision, affording Washington the “honors of war,” was critical to the proud Virginian. The agreement also required that Washington deliver two officers as hostages until he had relinquished the prisoners taken when Jumonville was killed.
Washington and Adam Stephen always maintained that Van Braam never mentioned a key provision in the document: the statement in the first article that the French had acted to “revenge the assassination of” Jumonville.26 The term was political dynamite, an admission that the attack on Jumonville was unwarranted. Three years later, France published the treaty as justification for its decision to go to war. A British general called the capitulation document “the most infamous a British subject ever put his hand to.” Washington fervently insisted “we were willfully, or ignorantly, deceived by our interpreter in regard to the word assassination, I do aver, and will to my dying moment; so will every officer that was present.” He was paying a high price for his ignorance of the French language.27
In the morning, the colonists departed. Washington and Mackay reported their own losses accurately: thirty dead and seventy wounded. To protect their reputations, they vastly inflated French casualties to three hundred killed and wounded. Few were fooled by the lie. The official French tally was three killed and seventeen wounded.28
* * *
Washington’s loss was a strategic setback, compounded by the diplomatic bungle of the capitulation. The most telling criticism came from Tanaghrisson, who complained that Wa
shington tended to “command the Indians as his slaves.” The Indian said that he and his fellows left Fort Necessity “because Colonel Washington would never listen to them, but [was] always driving them on to fight by his directions.”29
Sir William Johnson of New York, that colony’s leading agent with the Iroquois, feared that the defeat would drive tribes into the arms of France. He insisted that Washington “should rather have avoided an engagement until our troops were all assembled.” A British observer lamented that provincials like Washington “have no knowledge and experience in our [military] profession; consequently there can be no dependence on them!”30
Washington’s blunders were plain. He had put weak, underfed men in harm’s way, clearing a road to Redstone Creek that was not yet needed, ignoring reports of the enemy’s strength. He stayed in an indefensible position rather than withdraw to find reinforcements and replenish his supplies. In a paternal letter, Colonel Fairfax made these points. The legendary Duke of Marlborough, he wrote, had ordered “many wise retreats . . . that were not called flights.”31
Governor Dinwiddie confided privately that “Washington’s conduct was in many steps wrong, and did not conform to his orders from me.” The Virginian, he continued, should not have engaged the enemy without reinforcements. But Dinwiddie did not dissent when the House of Burgesses voted its thanks to Washington and his officers “for their late gallant and brave behavior in the defense of their country.” Dinwiddie, after all, had placed Washington in command and sent him off with not enough men or support, hoping to stitch together a victory from stray units cobbled together at the last moment. If blame were to be assigned for the defeat at Fort Necessity, the governor would receive a healthy slice.32
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