George Washington

by David O. Stewart

  Though the battle was catastrophic for Britain and for Virginians on the frontier, it brought renown to Washington. Because he was only a staff aide at the Monongahela, the failure was not his; because he had been brave and stood with Braddock to the end, he was acclaimed a hero, the only one on the British side, an avatar of colonial competence and courage. Press reports detailed the horses shot from under him, the bullet holes in his uniform, and Washington “behaving the whole time with the greatest courage and resolution.” He received admiring letters from Colonel Fairfax and others, who recommended that Washington command a new Virginia Regiment.51

  Better yet, Braddock’s failure eclipsed Washington’s defeat at Fort Necessity, where at least his men had been outnumbered. Braddock was a professional soldier with double the force of his foe, yet failed miserably. Colonel Dunbar’s scamper to winter quarters was a final point in Washington’s favor. Though only twenty-three, Washington stood as the colony’s leading military figure. He would command again.

  Washington felt matters moving his way. Three weeks after the battle, he wrote to his brother Austin, who soon would attend a session of the House of Burgesses. Other burgesses would ask Austin about his brother. In a message aimed at Virginia’s powerful men, Washington wrote that he was “so little dispirited at what has happened, that I am always ready, and always willing to do my country any services that I am capable of.” Washington’s passion for a military career was back.

  But this time, he insisted, he must be paid fairly, and he had leverage to make that happen. He reviewed for Austin his previous unsatisfactory compensation. He would not serve again, he wrote, “upon the terms I have done, having suffered much in my private fortune beside impairing one of the best of constitutions.” Until summoned back into command, Washington found important duties to perform as military adjutant for the Northern Neck. He scheduled reviews of militia companies in nine counties, where he commanded exercises from horseback, impressive in his trim uniform. He made a stirring impression. He always did.52

  * * *

  One myth died on July 9, 1755, and another was born.

  The expiring myth was about British military superiority. Two regiments shrank to a terrified mass, then were butchered. Braddock led thirteen hundred men that morning. By the end of the day, two-thirds were dead or wounded. Three days later, Braddock himself was dead. The attackers—mostly men despised by the British as savages—suffered twenty-three dead and fifteen seriously wounded.53

  Aside from British blunders, the battle’s shocking element was the effect of Indian warfare on British regulars, whose discipline vanished at the sight of scalping. Washington wrote brother Austin that the battle was “so scandalous that I hate to have it mentioned.” No survivor, certainly not George Washington, would again consider British soldiers invincible.54 The myth that stirred to life was of the hero Washington, a stranger to fear, blessed by the gods. He had dashed from Braddock’s side and back, delivering orders through hours of blistering gunfire, his life in danger every moment. He was the tallest man on the field, on horseback, unmistakable to friend and foe. A horse was killed beneath him and another wounded. Each time he remounted. A bullet pierced his hat. Others went through his clothes. Not one touched his flesh. As each aide to Braddock fell, as each senior officer crumpled, Washington kept on. Was he the child of destiny?

  Washington admitted he had benefitted from “the miraculous care of Providence.” He wondered whether his survival had any meaning beyond battlefield luck:

  I have been protected beyond all human probability and expectation, for I had 4 bullets through my coat and two horses shot under me yet although death was leveling my companions on every side of me, escaped unhurt.55

  Praising Washington’s courage, an American gushed, “I cannot sufficiently speak the merit of Washington.”56

  The myth spread widely, embraced by colonists who were otherwise starved for good news about the struggle on the frontier. A Virginia preacher recounted Washington’s heroism at the Monongahela. In a sermon, he applauded “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.”57 The message, which would be reprinted around the country twenty years later at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, was that a higher force watched over Washington, who was indeed a child of destiny.

  The myth took flight in a tale supposedly told by Washington’s friend Dr. James Craik, who had been with the army on the Monongahela. Dr. Craik, the tale goes, recounted the following speech by an Indian leader at the battle:

  I called to my young men and said, mark yon tall and daring warrior? He is not of the red-coat tribe—he hath an Indian’s wisdom, and his warriors fight as we do—he is alone exposed. . . . Our rifles were leveled, rifles which, but for him, knew not how to miss—’twas all in vain, a power mightier far than we, shielded him from harm. He cannot die in battle. . . . The Great Spirit protects that man, and guides his destinies—he will become the chief of nations, and a people yet unborn, will hail him as the founder of a mighty empire.

  Dr. Craik allegedly related this tale at the Battle of Monmouth Court House, concluding: “I have often told you, of the old Indian’s prophecy. Yes, I do believe, a Great Spirit protects that man—and that one day or other, honored and beloved, he will be the chief of our nation . . . Never mind the enemy, they cannot kill him, and while he lives, our cause will never die.”58

  Like Achilles dipped in the River Styx, like Alexander slicing the Gordian knot, like King Arthur drawing Excalibur from the stone, Washington seemed fated to be more than others could be. The power of myth is that it is impervious to reason or facts. Though he was very mortal and all too conscious of his own failings, Washington understood that power.

  Chapter 10

  The Naked Frontier

  Having thrashed a British army, the Ohio Indians swiftly drove western settlers off the land, seizing anything valuable that was left behind. For two years, Braddock’s road became a highway for Indian raiding parties.1

  Within three weeks of the Monongahela disaster, Indian raids killed thirty-five settlers. A large band attacked a private fort on the Greenbrier River, killing thirteen; another incident nearby exacted a similar toll. For a third time, Lord Fairfax called out the Frederick County militia; again, no one answered his call. When George William Fairfax, as militia colonel, jailed several resisters, their friends pulled down the jail and freed them. By October, at least one hundred Virginians had been killed or taken captive in the Shenandoah valley.2

  The raiders’ atrocities spread terror. In one attack, they delivered a farmer’s head to his neighbor. The colonial government could not help. Virginia’s forces, Adam Stephen reported, were “obliged to let the enemy pass under our noses without ever putting them in bodily fear,” which added “to the contemptible opinion the Indians have of us.”3

  Dinwiddie did not summon other county militias, because he wanted farmers to till their fields while also casting their “watchful eye over our negro slaves.” Virginia needed a formal military force. In August, the General Assembly approved £40,000 to pay for a new Virginia Regiment consisting of 1,000 soldiers and 200 mounted rangers.4

  Expecting to command the new regiment, Washington wrote to his worried mother: “If it is in my power to avoid going to the Ohio again, I shall, but if the command is pressed upon me by the general voice of the country, and offered upon such terms as can’t be objected against, it would reflect eternal dishonor upon me to refuse it.” Mary surely understood that her firstborn was going back to war.5

  Washington spelled out his terms in a letter to an Executive Council member. He must have a role in appointing officers and a fund to pay incidental expenses. And his political masters had to understand how difficult frontier warfare was. Service under these terms would preserve “the chief part of my happiness, i.e., the esteem and
notice the country has been pleased to honor me with.”6

  He had correctly judged his position. Governor Dinwiddie’s ensuing instructions to Washington as “Commander in Chief of the Virginia Regiment” allowed him to appoint his adjutant, quartermaster, aide-de-camp, and secretary, plus “such other inferior officers as you shall find absolutely necessary.” Washington would command sixteen companies. The assembly showered him with funds, approving £300 for past expenses, plus a salary of 30 shillings a day, another £100 a year for future expenses, and a 2 percent commission on regimental purchases.7 Despite having won no significant military victory, he was the only Virginian considered for the position.

  A familiar problem arose: enlisting soldiers. “I dread the recruiting,” Governor Dinwiddie confessed. Those who lived far from the frontier had little interest in fighting. Those on the frontier preferred to move east or to stay home to protect their families. Expecting such reluctance, the assembly created a complex scheme. For the first ninety days after the law took effect, the regiment would accept volunteers. If too few stepped forward, county magistrates would draft unmarried men from the militia, then deserters and married men who had abandoned their wives and those “who have no visible way of getting an honest livelihood.” A draftee could escape service by paying £10.8

  Consequently, only poor men served. As a clergyman wrote in mid-1756, “no person of any property, family or worth” enlisted in a regiment consisting of “worthless vagrants, servants just out of servitude, and convicts,” all “utterly unacquainted with the woods and the use of firearms.”9

  Washington tried to impose standards for his soldiers. He prescribed a minimum height of five-foot-four, except for those who “are well made, strong, and active,” but none subject to fits or having “old sores” on their legs. A regimental roster in 1756 listed more than five hundred men. Five had only one eye, one was missing two fingers, several were in their forties and one was sixty, while descriptions ranged from “a fawning, cringing behavior” to “a clownish look.” Half were foreign-born. Their average height was five-foot-five, which meant their commander towered nearly a head above most. Only seven were six feet tall.10

  Few soldiers enjoyed their service, its slow pay and poor supplies. Of more than twelve hundred who served in 1756 and 1757, only seventy-six signed up for a second year. In those years, the regiment never reached its authorized strength of 1,000. Desertions continued. The soldiers feared Indians more than they feared their officers.11

  For the next two years, Washington’s task was the military equivalent of holding back a river with his bare hands. He would fight no battles and have no opportunities for glory. Instead, he bore the drudgery of administration, garrison duty, and keeping together a force that was ill paid, ill supplied, and poorly motivated, facing an enemy with superior skills at the only style of warfare it conducted: hit-and-run raids. Again and again, Washington would know the wisdom of Adam Stephen’s remark that sending European-style soldiers after Indians was like sending a cow to catch a hare.

  * * *

  By late August 1755, Washington assumed his command with a blizzard of orders intended to improve the soldiers’ skills. He directed that recruits be drilled in the “new platoon way of exercising” with regular target practice. Washington also began a battle over supplies with the “irresolute” commissary.12

  He modeled his administration on Braddock’s system. Creating a military bureaucracy from scratch, managing the logistical challenges of the frontier, was a slow process. He had to oversee the acquisition of everything: “shoes, white-yarn stockings, blankets, kettles, tomahawks, . . . cartridge paper, stationery,” plus “a proper assortment of Indian goods” to use as gifts. Until then, as John Carlyle of Alexandria observed, Virginians “really never knew what taxes was, nor the great inconvenience attending war.”13

  Washington’s goal was to stop the Indian attacks. The Indians, Adam Stephen reported, “commit their outrages at all hours of the day,” bringing “desolation and murder heightened with all barbarous circumstances, and unheard of instances of cruelty. . . . The smoke of burning plantations darken the days and hide the neighboring mountains from our sight.”14

  The Virginians had no viable strategy. Through the autumn, Washington’s plan involved searching out the invaders and punishing them in a fight. He ordered his captains “frequently to send out strong parties to scour the woods and mountains.” Yet those proved to be fools’ errands. The Virginians were no match for Indians in the forest. Repeatedly, the Virginians arrived too late or walked into ambush. Within a year, Washington concluded that the Virginia Assembly’s plan for a chain of frontier forts was an expensive irrelevance.15

  His problems multiplied. As new recruits neared the frontier, Washington wrote to the governor, they deserted “constantly, and yesterday while we were at church 25 of them collected and were going off . . . but were stopped and imprisoned.” Supplies were inadequate. Colonial law did not define the discipline he could impose. Fort Cumberland, the only fortified outpost in the region, was in Maryland, so Washington’s authority there was doubtful. This ambiguity rubbed Washington raw when a Maryland commander, Captain Thomas Dagworthy, denied that Washington was his superior. “I can never,” Washington wrote to the governor, “submit to the command of Captain Dagworthy.” Dinwiddie agreed but could issue no order to Dagworthy. The governor asked London to grant king’s commissions to Virginia officers, which would place Washington above the Marylander.16

  Washington scrounged for supplies and began to build quarters for the men. Many settlers had left, terrified by the Indian raids. “Everything,” Washington wrote from Winchester in early October, was “in the utmost confusion.” The people, he confided, “are really frighted out of their senses.” A Virginian reported “mothers with a train of helpless children at their heels straggling through woods & mountains to escape the fury of these merciless savages.”17

  The horrors were nurtured by an enemy willing to mutilate the dead. When eighty Virginia soldiers marched to Fort Cumberland, they found one farm owner “half out of the grave, and eaten by the wolves.” After Washington joined the column, they reached a farm where a woman, young man, and boy had been scalped. At a third farm, three people had been scalped and thrown into a fire; their brains stuck to their clothing. After one brutal raid, a survivor wrote, “I’m in so much horror and confusion I scarce know what I am writing.”18

  Preaching calm, Washington published a newspaper exhortation that residents return with “the utmost security; that the five companies of rangers, and an independent company . . . are stationed in the best manner . . . and the men under Colonel Washington, will all be disposed of, so as to answer the same purpose.” If the settlers had fought back, he continued, “a small number of them, with a proper spirit, might easily have destroyed” the attackers. In a notice three days later, Washington denounced reports by “timorous persons” that Indians had laid waste to the country. “The Frontiers will be so well guarded,” he pledged, “that no mischief can be done, either to [the settlers] or their plantations.”19

  Few believed him, nor should they have. In private, he acknowledged that the populace ignored him. No orders were obeyed “but what a party of soldiers, or my own drawn sword enforces.” Forced to commandeer horses and wagons, Washington faced threats to “blow out my brains.” Washington never backed down. He ordered the jailing of any civilian who resisted the regiment’s seizures.20

  To restore his manpower, he promised amnesty for deserters who returned. Then he announced that those who did not return by November 30 would be prosecuted as felons. He tried shame, placing deserters’ names in the newspaper. Finally, he imposed harsh punishments; five were sentenced to receive a thousand lashes apiece.21

  Cold weather brought relief, as the raiders returned to their home fires for the winter. Washington took advantage of the respite to order a military manual from England, Humphrey Bland�
�s A Treatise of Military Discipline. He recommended that his officers read it too.22

  * * *

  Through the bloody autumn of 1755, Washington kept a sharp eye on Virginia politics. The House of Burgesses, called into session in early November, approved an issuance of paper currency that Governor Dinwiddie opposed. Exasperated with “mutinous and unmannerly” lawmakers, he called new elections for December.23

  Elections interested Colonel Washington. Five months before, marching with Braddock, he wrote on the subject to his brother Jack. John Carlyle, he wrote, had asked “in a bantering way” whether Washington would seek a seat from either Fairfax County, where Mount Vernon stood, or Frederick County on the frontier. (Owning land in both counties, Washington could be a candidate in either.) Washington confided, “I should like to go for either, but more particularly for Fairfax, as I am a resident there.” Their brother Lawrence had served in the House and brother Austin did now, as had their grandfather and great-grandfather.24

  Washington moved cautiously to avoid stepping on Fairfax toes. He asked Jack to find out if George William Fairfax intended to run in the county named for his family. If George William would not be a candidate, Washington wrote, “I should be glad to take a poll, if I thought my chance tolerably good.” To gauge his opportunity, Washington asked Jack to snuffle out the views of Carlyle, George Mason, and other local worthies, “without disclosing much of mine.” If his prospects appeared favorable, Washington authorized his brother to “declare my intentions and beg their assistance”; if unfavorable, “I would have the affair entirely dropped.”

  Washington stressed that in order to conceal his ambition unless the path was open, Jack should pursue his inquiries “with an air of indifference and unconcern” until he was satisfied there was support for a Washington candidacy. Ten days later, before Jack could have pursued the inquiry with the prescribed indifference, Washington impatiently pressed for “an answer as soon as possible.” If Washington ran in Fairfax, he could refer to the poll sheet he had retained from his brother Lawrence’s contest seven years before.25