Having reached familiar territory, one final ominous episode awaited Washington and Gist. At the Forks they met a party of friendly Natives who had recently come across the scene of the massacre by pro-French Ottawas of a British settler’s family, with the parents and five children scalped and their bodies left to be eaten by their hogs. It was the sort of tragedy that had often occurred on the frontier during the last war between the French and the British, and would become common again during the coming one.
Within a year, the western reaches of Pennsylvania and Virginia would stand at the center of widening war. Their citizens would turn to Franklin and Washington for leadership and, by doing so, bring together these two men—the former rich in experience; the latter brimming with youthful ardor. “Washington was one of the few prominent members of America’s founding generation—Benjamin Franklin was another—who were born early enough to develop their basic convictions about America’s role in the British Empire within the context of the French and Indian War,” historian Joseph Ellis observed.50 It gave them a shared vision that shaped their approach toward colonialism, independence, and American nationalism.
Racing from the Forks of the Ohio to Williamsburg in two weeks, Washington delivered the terse French response and his own detailed report to Governor Dinwiddie on January 16, 1754. Recognizing the propaganda value of Washington’s account, Dinwiddie immediately ordered it typeset and published for wide distribution. Nothing less than a clarion call for war, the hastily written Journal of Major George Washington was widely serialized in colonial newspapers and reprinted as a small book in London, with its poor spelling, crude grammar, and blunt style simply adding to its credibility and sense of urgency. The narrative value alone assured its popularity, but the theme of French belligerence and treachery made it useful for stirring colonists for the inevitable war ahead. “On his veracity the most cogent arguments for Colonial military action were based,” biographer James Thomas Flexner wrote of Washington. “He was the physical embodiment of the war party.”51 Almost overnight, this publication transformed the young militia officer into a frontier hero—a reputation that the coming French and Indian War would further burnish.
THE PUBLISHED VERSION of Washington’s Journal reached Philadelphia by March 1754, and found an interested reader in Franklin. Of course, Franklin had led local efforts to defend Pennsylvania from the French and their Native American allies during King George’s War in 1747. Three years later, he wrote “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” an influential essay which argued that, because of abundant cheap land on the frontier and the tendency for people to marry young and have many children when economic conditions permit, the population of Britain’s American colonies would double every two decades and, simply by natural increase, exceed that of England within a century—which it did. Although this essay celebrated the expansion of America within the British Empire, some passages suggested that growth might lead to independence and several admonished Britain to defend and extend the frontier. “How careful should she be to secure Room enough, since on the Room depends so much the Increase of her People,” Franklin wrote of the motherland. “So vast is the Territory of North-America, that it will require many Ages to settle it fully.”52
Furthermore, in September 1753, when French activities in the Ohio Country increased with the building of the forts that sent Washington west later that same year, Pennsylvania appointed Franklin as one of three commissioners sent to negotiate with Native American leaders from the region toward maintaining or gaining their allegiance. Meeting with representatives of the friendly Iroquois Confederacy, the wavering Delaware, and other Ohio Valley tribal groups at the frontier town of Carlisle, the commissioners provided material support, including guns, and won a tentative pledge of support. Franklin wanted to do more for the Natives and left the four-day conference deeply committed to the defense of the frontier at a time when Pennsylvania’s self-interested proprietors and pacifist Quaker officials remained reluctant to act decisively. He later published his transcriptions of the sum of the speeches given at this and other treaty negotiations, creating an important record of Native American oratory.
A gifted advocate for any cause that he favored, Franklin saw an ally in Washington and recognized the value of his Journal in alerting Pennsylvanians to the threat posed by the French. Franklin clearly endorsed the Virginian’s efforts and embraced his call to arms. Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette soon began running stories based on Washington’s Journal, including the French commandant’s belligerent response to Dinwiddie’s letter, accounts of the massacre of British settlers by pro-French Natives, and Washington’s reports of both the French military buildup in the Ohio Country and French efforts to seduce “our Indians” to their side.53 Based on his reputation as a military organizer gained in the prior war with France, his leadership position in the colonial assembly, and his influence as a writer and publisher, Franklin became as much the physical embodiment of the war party in Pennsylvania as Washington was in Virginia. The coming French and Indian War would reinforce the political stature of both men. At first fighting for Empire, their cause became America.
Two
Lessons from the Frontier
WASHINGTON’S REPORT FROM THE FRONTIER that France had launched a military occupation of the Ohio Country and refused to withdraw prompted immediate responses from Williamsburg, Philadelphia, and London. These responses pulled Franklin and Washington into converging efforts by then adjacent colonies with overlapping claims to the frontier.
With the Ohio Company already scrambling to fortify the Forks of the Ohio, Virginia formed a regiment, promoted Washington to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and sent him with two thin companies of raw recruits as the vanguard of a larger force to defend the frontier. Having previously attempted to reinforce and extend its alliances with the Native peoples of the Ohio Country through negotiations and payments at Carlisle, Pennsylvania began pushing a plan formulated by Franklin to forge a coordinated response to the French by establishing a formal intercolonial union. With all its American colonies imperiled by the rising French threat in the Ohio Country, Britain dispatched two regular army regiments from Ireland under the command of General Edward Braddock to drive the French out of the region once and for all. With both men drawn into all three of these responses, the lives of Franklin and Washington began intertwining.
ON MAY 28, 1754, Washington’s green Virginia troops drew first blood in what would become the global Seven Years’ War between the far-flung British and French Empires. The war lasted nine years in North America, where British colonists called it the French and Indian War. They had never seen such carnage.
It all began some fifty miles south of the Forks of the Ohio. Approaching that point in late May with about 160 armed men and light artillery, Washington heard that “a Body of One Thousand French and upward”—the actual count was perhaps half that number—had driven off thirty or so Ohio Company agents engaged in building a crude fort at the Forks of the Ohio and begun constructing more formidable fortifications of their own, Fort Duquesne.1 This was to become the anchor of French interest in the Ohio Country and the linchpin in a chain of forts linking Canada and Louisiana.
With ill-advised bravado, Washington led his small band relentlessly forward, cutting a crude road over the forested mountains dividing the Potomac and Monongahela River valleys as a route for further troops, supply wagons, and cannons to mount an assault on Fort Duquesne. The road would run from the confluence of Wills Creek with the North Branch of the Potomac, at the present site of Cumberland, Maryland, to the place thirty-eight miles south of modern-day Pittsburgh where Redstone Creek joins the Monongahela. Driving rains swelled the rivers and slowed progress. Some days they covered only a few miles; other days none at all.
Washington received repeated reports from Native informants and retreating British traders of the mounting French buildup ahead and of forces sent out to halt his advance. He sent regular dispatches bac
k to Governor Dinwiddie calling for more men and sent letters to the leaders of Pennsylvania and Maryland alerting them that France had taken the Forks of the Ohio and asking for their colony’s help to recover it. “I have heard of your Honour’s great zeal for His Majestys Service; and for all our Interest’s on the present occasion,” he implored the Pennsylvania governor, and he admonished Maryland’s executive that French aggression in Ohio “should rouse from the lethargy we have fallen into, the heroick spirit of every free-born Englishman.”2 Washington also wrote ahead to the Iroquois Half King Tanacharison and other Native leaders calling on their support, only later to discover that some were shifting sides in response to French promises and threats.
Little immediate help came from either direction, even though Dinwiddie pledged that reinforcements were on the way under the command of Colonel Joshua Fry, whom the governor had entrusted with overall command of the Virginia Regiment. A small force of South Carolina regulars was also coming but, even without them, Washington opted to press on with road building in the hope of reaching Redstone Creek, where the Monongahela River offered direct water carriage to the Forks of the Ohio. His recruits, Washington complained, generally “are of those loose, Idle Persons that are quite destitute of House, and Home, and, I may truely say, many of them of Cloaths.” Some could shoot but most lacked discipline. “In short,” he wrote, “they are as illy provided as can well be conciv’d.”3
Crossing over the main ridge of mountains and into what became southwestern Pennsylvania, the Virginians reached a large clearing in the forest known as Great Meadows. After removing some brush and improving two natural entrenchments, Washington depicted it as “a charming field for an Encounter” and began sending out scouting parties looking for enemy forces.4 On May 27, the trusted guide Christopher Gist brought word that fifty French soldiers had visited his nearby farm a day earlier, prompting Washington to dispatch half his men in hot pursuit. Toward evening, a messenger arrived from Tanacharison stating that he had followed footprints to a rocky hollow or glen where a small French force had taken shelter.
Washington divided his remaining men, leaving some to guard the supplies while he led forty others on a rainy, nighttime trek though the pitch-black forest to meet Tanacharison and a dozen Native warriors. Acting in consort, the colonial and Native fighters surrounded the French position and racked it with fire from above. Accounts vary as to which side fired first, but the Virginians quickly got the better of it. With ten on their side dead within fifteen minutes, including their young leader Joseph Coulton de Villiers, sieur de Jumonville, the twenty-one surviving French soldiers surrendered, claiming they were merely emissaries sent to convey a summons directing the Virginians to leave French territory. The two nations were not yet at war.
Branding Washington as an assassin, the French asserted that de Jumonville was shot in cold blood while trying to deliver that summons. Other reports had Tanacharison splitting the officer’s skull with a tomahawk and scooping out the brains. Various accounts agree that Native warriors scalped all the fallen Frenchmen, with Virginian reports adding that Washington stopped them from scalping the survivors. He sent those survivors as prisoners of war to Virginia, where he was again hailed as a hero. In a letter to his brother John, Washington wrote of standing in the line of enemy fire: “I heard Bulletts whistle and believe me there is something charming in the sound.”5
The reaction was more muted in Britain. Dinwiddie had orders to reclaim the Ohio Country without precipitating a war. The French should have an opportunity to withdraw peacefully, which Washington had not given them. After reading Washington’s letter in a London magazine, a battle-hardened King George II commented that the young Virginian might not find the whistle of bullets so charming if he heard it more often. The rebuke was clear but also clearly wrong. While Washington may have hated war, he was always drawn to warfare. And he vehemently denied the assertion that de Jumonville and his men were emissaries. “Instead of coming as an Embassador, publickly, and in an open Manner,” Washington noted in his journal, “they came secretly, and sought after the most hidden Retreats, more like Deserters than Embassadors.” He branded their claim to have called out their status before taking up arms as “an absolute Falshood.”6
THE FRENCH COMMANDER at Fort Duquesne was de Jumonville’s older brother. Seeking revenge, he reacted swiftly by sending an overwhelming force of Canadian troops and Native warriors against the Virginians. Both Dinwiddie and Tanacharison urged Washington to retreat, but he instead merely fell back to Great Meadows, where he ordered his men to build a split-log stockade with supplementary low breastworks and trenches. Dismissed by Tanacharison as “that little thing upon the meadow,” Washington called it Fort Necessity.7 Although in an expanse of open space, the surrounding forested hills were close enough to shield snipers and heavy summer rains could quickly turn trenches into mudholes. While even determined attackers probably could not storm the fort against armed defenders, those defenders could not rush out against attackers, who were likely capable of picking them off one by one with musket fire from protected positions. In short, Fort Necessity was a foreseeable death trap against a large, well-armed force. Washington expressed confidence, however. “We expect every Hour to be attacked by superior Force, but shall if they forbear one day longer be prepared for them,” Washington wrote in his May 31 letter to his brother John. “We have already got Intrenchments & are about a Pallisado’d Fort, which I hope will be finished today.”8
Reinforcements trickled in from the east. Some two hundred raw Virginia recruits arrived without their commander, Joshua Fry, who had died in a fall from his horse. With this chance occurrence, one of so many that advanced his career, Washington assumed overall command of Virginia’s frontier troops with the rank of colonel.
Another hundred soldiers came from South Carolina under a Scottish officer, James Mackay, who by virtue of his king’s commission outranked Washington and maintained independent authority over his troops. Rather than dig in for the coming fight, Washington directed his men to resume road building toward Redstone Creek with the ultimate object of capturing Fort Duquesne and driving out the French. The French instead used that road to attack Fort Necessity.
In late June, as a force reported to include some eight hundred Canadians and four hundred Natives approached, the colonials fell back to Fort Necessity and their own Native allies fled. By this point, Tanacharison considered Washington rash and the campaign hopeless. The assault began shortly before noon on July 3, scarcely five weeks after the bloodletting at what became known as Jumonville Glen. Although the actual size of the enemy force was not as large as first reported, it was more than adequate to rain down death on the fort from protected positions in the surrounding hills and forest. Washington first tried to fight in the open outside the fort, but when heavy musket fire began, his undisciplined Virginians ran for cover, forcing Washington and the South Carolinians to follow. Fort Necessity offered limited protection from bullets, especially after a midafternoon rainstorm flooded its trenches and drenched stored gunpowder. By nightfall, a third of the defenders were dead or wounded, many of the survivors drunk, and all their horses and cattle slaughtered by enemy fire. When the French commander offered reasonable terms for capitulation, Washington and Mackay had little choice but to accept them.
In line with French claims to the Ohio Country and in the absence of a formal state of war between Britain and France, the commander simply demanded that the British troops withdraw across the mountains and return those captured in the prior battle. They could take what they could carry, including their insignia and flags. The first sentence of the articles of capitulation, written in French by the French commander, stated the essence of the agreement. “Our Intentions have never been to trouble the Peace and good Harmony subsisting between the two Princes in Amity,” it declared, “but only to revenge the Assassination committed on one of our Officers, bearer of a Summons, as also on his Escorte.”9 Not knowing French, Washingt
on later claimed that he did not understand the meaning of the French word “l’assassinat” or that, by signing the document, he confessed to a dark and dishonorable act.10 Yet the word clearly appeared in the document and its meaning was plain to anyone who read French. French propagandists made the most of it in the run-up to the Seven Years’ War, just as British propagandists would during the American Revolution.
On July 4, 1754, twenty-two years before that day in July became associated with American independence, Washington, Mackay, and their remaining men marched out of Fort Necessity and into an uncertain future. War was coming, they certainly knew, and British prospects in the Ohio Country looked bleak so long as the colonies were divided and lacked sufficient support from Britain. As news of the capitulation spread, others realized this as well, including Franklin (who trumpeted the story in his Gazette) and the government in London. Although harshly criticized in Canada and France for his actions at Jumonville Glen—“There is nothing more unworthy and lower, and even blacker, than the sentiments and the way of thinking of this Washington,” the governor-general in Quebec wrote11—the young colonel’s reputation for bravery on the battlefield remained undiminished in Virginia. Along with Franklin, he would play a key, ongoing role in ensuing events.
FRANKLIN SAW WASHINGTON’S ON-THE-GROUND REPORTS from the frontier as proof that the thirteen colonies needed to join in common cause. Indeed, no sooner had Franklin learned from Washington’s letter to the Pennsylvania governor that the French had taken the Forks of the Ohio than he began shopping around an earlier idea for an intercolonial defensive confederation—a first step toward the sort of union that he would later work with Washington to craft. Their purpose, Franklin editorialized in the Pennsylvania Gazette about the French, is “to establish themselves, settle their Indians, and build Forts just to the Back of our Settlements in all our Colonies, from which Forts . . . they may send out their Parties to kill and scalp the Inhabitants, and ruin the Frontier Counties.” British settlers were already fleeing the frontier, Franklin wrote, and British traders being captured along with their goods. The settled regions were next, he warned.
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