Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

  Nearly two-thirds of Braddock’s officers and staff were killed or wounded during the three-hour battle. The ratio was similar for enlisted men. One credible count put total British casualties at 976 out of 1469, compared with only about 40 for the other side. Of all the British units engaged in combat, only the Virginian rear guard fought effectively by breaking rank and shooting from behind trees, even though this tactic led some British regulars to mistake the crouching Virginians for the enemy and fire at them. “You might as well send a Cow in pursuit of a Hare as an English Soldier . . . after Canadeans in their Shirts, who can shoot and run well, or Naked Indians accustomed to the Woods,” the rear guard’s captain complained afterward.26 “The Virginians behavd like Men, and died like Soldier’s,” Washington advised Governor Dinwiddie, adding that out of about 150 Virginians, “scare 30 were left alive.”27

  Nothing but total exhaustion could stop the flight back toward the support column, then some fifty miles behind. They “broke & run as Sheep before Hounds,” Washington wrote to Dinwiddie about the British regulars, “and when we endeavored to rally them in hopes of regaining the ground and what we had left upon it, it was with as little success as if we had attempted to have stopd the wild Bears of the Mountains.”28 Gleaning the battlefield for treasure and trophies, the Natives had no intention of pursuing the fleeing troops, but the terrified survivors had no way of knowing this. Unable to rally them, Washington returned to Braddock, who ordered him to ride through the night to the support column and instruct its commander, Thomas Dunbar, to cover the retreat. “The shocking Scenes which presented themselves in this Nights march are not to be described. The dead—the dying—the groans—lamentation—and crys along the Road of the wounded for help,” Washington commented, “were enough to pierce a heart of adamant.”29

  Two more days brought most of the able-bodied survivors back to Dunbar’s camp. Aside from Braddock, who arrived in a cart, virtually all of those unable to walk were left to die or be killed. The combined British force still vastly outnumbered the French at Fort Duquesne, especially after most of the Native warriors left with their plunder, but neither Braddock nor Dunbar gave any thought to resuming the attack. They ordered their men back to Fort Cumberland. Braddock made it only as far as Great Meadows, where he died from his wounds. His body was interred under the roadway in an unmarked grave that the troops marched over so that no one could find and molest the body. However much Washington disparaged the British soldiers, the defeat resulted from bad leadership, both strategic and tactical, for which he, as a mere aide-de-camp, bore little blame. Indeed, Washington emerged from the debacle with an enhanced reputation for courage and survival, if not success, on the battlefield.

  “I Tremble at the consequences that this defeat may have upon our back settlers,” Washington wrote to Dinwiddie from Fort Cumberland on July 18. “Colo. Dunbar, who commands at present, intends as soon as his Men are recruited at this place, to continue his March to Philia[delphia] for Winter Quarter’s; consequently there will be no Men left here unless it is the shattered remains of the Virginia Troops; who are totally inadequate to the protection of the Frontiers.”30

  Washington did not exaggerate the danger. Upon hearing of the defeat, Franklin warned, “We have lost a Number of brave Men, and all our Credit with the Indians; and I fear these Losses may soon be productive of more and greater.”31 This last point was critical. Two weeks after Braddock’s calamity, the commander at Fort Duquesne wrote to his superior, “I have succeeded in setting against the English all the tribes of this region who had been their most faithful allies. . . . They find themselves engaged in the war, so to speak, in spite of themselves.”32 Thrown on their own resources in the face of this war and without hope of an intercolonial defensive union, Pennsylvania and Virginia—the two principal colonies at risk from these attacks—turned more than ever to Franklin and Washington for military leadership.

  BY 1755, Philadelphia was British North America’s largest city and Pennsylvania its most prosperous colony for small family farms. These farms were spreading out far beyond the environs of Philadelphia to cover a broad arc of fertile land stretching from Easton and Bethlehem through Lebanon to York, with many of these communities populated by German-speaking immigrants, the so-called Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch or, later, Pennsylvania Dutch. With Braddock’s army defeated and Dunbar showing no inclination to use its remaining rump for defensive purposes, these once secure central Pennsylvania communities and the scattered frontier settlements beyond them stood in the line of fire from France’s Native allies.

  Since its founding, Pennsylvania had relied on friendly relations with local tribes to expand through fair purchases and equitable treaties. More recently, several rapacious land deals (such as the infamous 1737 Walking Purchase, in which the proprietors’ agent used runners and a prepared trail rather than forest walkers to claim a vast tract under the odd terms of an old treaty that supposedly transferred land as far west as a man could walk in a day and a half) had strained relations with the Natives. The French, now imbedded with a line of forts within the colony’s western border, could inflame these tensions by supplying guns and ammunition to the Natives.

  Pennsylvania’s peculiar politics added to the problem. The colony’s influential English Quakers retained their religious objections to warfare. They had lost absolute control over the colonial assembly, however, and most proved willing to pay taxes for defense so long as others did the fighting. The frontier settlers most at risk were unassimilated immigrants who spoke a foreign tongue—prejudice against them ran deep. And the Penn family, the colony’s proprietors in London who appointed the resident governor with veto power over laws, still refused to pay taxes on its remaining land holdings even though, being mainly on the frontier, they were at risk in any war with the French. In such a crisis, with the frontier likely to explode after Braddock’s defeat, Pennsylvanians had learned to turn to one person for salvation. Already larger than life, the proverbial self-made man, Franklin was the inventor, orchestrator, producer, and promoter for any public project. Although by no means an expert in military affairs and notably down-to-earth for such an extraordinary person, he had organized the colony’s last-ditch defenses in the previous war with France and stood ready to do so again. He became the man of the hour.

  Upon learning of Braddock’s defeat, Pennsylvania governor Robert Hunter Morris called the colony’s assembly into session. “There are Men enough in this Province to protect it against any Force the French can bring,” he declared, “but they have neither Arms, Ammunition, nor Discipline, without which it will be impossible to repel an active Enemy whose Trade is War.”33 In short, legislation was needed to raise and disburse funds for defense and to organize a militia. As simple as this might sound, all three steps split the colony along established fault lines. A quick way to raise revenue was by a property tax, but, since the proprietors refused to pay taxes on their holdings, the assembly (which held that all should pay their share) had not imposed one since 1717. When the assembly now promptly passed one for defense without exempting the proprietors’ land, the governor, acting under orders from the proprietors, just as promptly vetoed it. The bill contained the added twist that the assembly would control disbursements, while the proprietors claimed this power for their appointed governor. A militia bill soon followed—the first in Pennsylvania history—but to meet objections from Quaker and antiproprietor members, it provided that participation was voluntary and that the enlisted men would elect (rather than the governor appoint) company officers and company officers would choose regimental commanders. These features further antagonized the proprietors.

  The clear leader of the war party within the assembly and a principled foe of proprietary privilege, Benjamin Franklin stood behind these measures and the subsequent compromises that readied Pennsylvania for war. Indeed, during the legislative session, Franklin served on every committee dealing with the crisis, drafted the critical legislation, wrote the assembly’s repl
ies to the governor’s messages, and put his spin on matters in the Pennsylvania Gazette.

  “Why will the Governor make himself the hateful Instrument of reducing a free People to the subject state of Vassalage,” Franklin wrote on behalf of the assembly in reply to Morris’s veto of the bill taxing the proprietors’ land for defense.34 When the governor objected to the term “vassalage,” Franklin added, “Vassals fight at their Lords Expense, but our Lord would have us defend his Estate at our own Expense! This is not merely Vassalage, it is worse.”35 In dozens of such exchanges over various war measures, Franklin got the better of Morris at every turn and foreshadowed the arguments later used against King and Parliament during the American Revolution. “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety,” Franklin wrote in defense of a revised revenue measure that retained the principle of equal taxation, “deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”36

  Franklin and Morris dueled over the rights of English citizens versus principles of proprietary rule even as the warfare worsened. Cowed by the French and disenchanted with the British following Braddock’s defeat, the Iroquois Confederacy largely remained neutral while the Delaware and other Natives allied with the French targeted isolated cabins and peripheral villages on the Pennsylvania frontier. First came word of a massacre at Penn’s Creek—fourteen killed and scalped; eleven captured. The survivors petitioned the government about their land, “We are not able of ourselves to defend it for want of Guns and Ammunition.”37 Then a similar account from the Lebanon Valley, including the lurid detail of finding “four Indians sitting on Children scalping, 3 of the Children are dead, and 2 are alive with the Scalps taken off.”38 In November, the governor wrote from Philadelphia that Native war parties had pushed to within seventy miles of the city and “laid waste” to major farming settlements.39 Refugees streamed in from the frontier and, in protest, at least twice placed bodies of scalped settlers on the State House steps. Then came news of a massacre of Moravian missionaries at Gnadenhütten, followed by the rout of a relief party sent to the site.

  “We are all in Flames,” Franklin wrote to Peter Collinson in England.40

  Against the backdrop of defeat and despair, Franklin and Morris brokered the compromises that allowed for Pennsylvania’s defense, particularly after the Quakers largely withdrew from the assembly. A contribution of income from past-due rents in lieu of a cash payment by the proprietors allowed a revenue measure to become law late in 1755, with Franklin serving as one of the commissioners charged with distributing the funds for defense. At virtually the same time, Morris consented to a voluntary militia with elected officers, with Franklin later chosen as the commanding colonel for the one-thousand-man Philadelphia regiment. Morris gave Franklin further power in January 1756 by placing him in charge of the large frontier county of Northampton, site of Gnadenhütten and other recent attacks, with total authority over its defenses—earning him the local title of “general.”41

  Franklin’s fiftieth birthday, January 17, 1756, found him leading 150 soldiers north to Gnadenhütten, which they reached the next day. “Forty Dollars will be allow’d and paid by the Government for each Scalp of an Indian Enemy,” Franklin told his men in line with a new official policy that outraged Quakers.42 A larger bounty was placed on the heads of the Delaware chiefs. Taking extreme precautions against ambush, Franklin oversaw the construction at Gnadenhütten of a log stockade, 125 feet long and 50 feet wide, with two swivel guns and three interior cabins. When finished, he directed the erection of two more stockades, one fifteen miles east and one fifteen miles west, resulting in a line of forts garrisoned by some five hundred men securing Pennsylvania’s northern frontier. By spring, settlers were returning to their farms in the region. Confronted with a military crisis unprecedented in Pennsylvania history, Franklin’s strategy worked.43

  No sooner had Franklin gotten this project well under way than he was called back to Philadelphia for the next legislative session, where he again led the antiproprietor forces intent on a stout defense. On his way from Virginia to Boston to meet the interim commander of British forces in America, Massachusetts governor William Shirley, George Washington reached Philadelphia at roughly the same time as Franklin and remained for a week. The two apparently met often to discuss frontier defenses. Franklin likely also raised his objection to the British army’s enlisting indentured servants and apprentices without compensation to their masters, in the hope that Washington would convey his concern to Shirley. It was during Washington’s stay that officers of the Philadelphia City Regiment elected Franklin as their commanding officer. Both men were now colonels in their colony’s military and leaders in frontier defense. They met and corresponded frequently during the balance of 1756.

  WITH VIRGINIA in as much immediate danger from the French as Pennsylvania, Washington had resumed command of his colony’s military forces in August 1755. He had little choice. In response to the loss of Braddock’s army, Governor Dinwiddie reconstituted the Virginia Regiment with an authorized force of a thousand men funded by the Virginia assembly. Nearly everyone looked to Washington as its leader.

  Amid the flood of bad news for the frontier, his reputation for courage in battle had only grown, especially in the colonial press, where tales of his home-grown heroism contrasted with denunciations of British military ineptitude and cowardice. “Yor Name is more talked off in Pensylvenia then any Other person of the Army and every body Seems willing to Venture under your command,” the frontier guide Christopher Gist wrote to Washington, adding that “Mr. Franklin” told him that if Washington asked the Pennsylvania assembly for aid defending the frontier, “you would now get it Sooner then any one in Amerrica.”44

  To accept command, Washington demanded control, and got it. His commission read, “Colonel of the Virga Regimt & Commander in Chief of all the Forces now rais’d & to be rais’d for the Defence of” Virginia, and it carried authority to appoint officers, buy supplies, and recruit soldiers.45 Washington even designed the uniform for officers, which (in his words) “is to be of fine Broad Cloath: The Coat Blue, faced and cuffed with Scarlet, and Trimmed with Silver.”46 From London, he ordered ruffles and silk stockings for his own costume and livery suits emblazoned with his crest for his enslaved personal attendants. In the Virginia Regiment, Blacks could not serve as soldiers with guns but could die as servants without them. Officers proved easier to attract than soldiers, and soon the Virginia Regiment was top-heavy in command without ever securing a full complement of men, even after Virginia imposed a draft, which suffered the customary loopholes for those with wealth. Discipline proved a problem as well, leading Washington to lobby for, obtain, and sometimes impose the death penalty for desertion or disobedience. Until he secured that ultimate deterrent, he advised his chief lieutenant, Adam Stephen, “You must go on in the old way of whipping stoutly,” and added the comment, “I must exhort you in the most earnest manner to strict Discipline, and due exercise of arms.”47 That was Washington’s way: discipline and training.

  During these months when each commanded forces in his own colony, Franklin exhibited a different style of leadership from Washington. Eschewing fancy dress and formal uniforms, Franklin spent his time on the frontier sleeping with his men on cabin floors and sharing food sent to the front by his wife. And when he heard that townspeople had prepared a hero’s welcome for his return, Franklin slipped into Philadelphia after dark to avoid the show. Departing on a later date, he was surprised by a mounted escort that he did not request or want. Describing himself as “totally ignorant of military Ceremonies, and above all things averse to making Show and Parade,” he attributed the display to his popularity—“the people happen to love me”—but went on humbly to allow that “Popular Favour is a most uncertain Thing.”48

  Washington evoked an opposite response, at least from many of those he ordered about. “In all things I meet with the greatest opposition no orders are obey’d but what a Party of Soldier’s or my own drawn Sword Enfor
ces,” he said of local resistance to his martial-law orders, adding that once when commandeering a horse, its owner threatened “to blow out my brains.”49 Franklin, in contrast, gained cooperation by reasoned appeals and pragmatic solutions, such as when he boosted chapel attendance by authorizing the military chaplain to distribute rum after divine services. Where Washington’s regiment was chronically undermanned, Franklin’s was oversubscribed.

  They had precisely the same job: to secure the frontier. For Washington as much as Franklin, this meant the unglamorous task of building and maintaining a line of forts on the wilderness edge of civilization, and trying to keep hostile forces out. In the defense of Virginia, Fort Cumberland in Maryland served as the northern terminus of this line, which stretched south through the Shenandoah Valley to the North Carolina border. Winchester, then Shenandoah’s only town and site of one of his farms, served as headquarters for Washington. He dreamed of marching on Fort Duquesne and cutting off the problem at its head but never had enough men to defend the border fully from Native raiders, much less carry the war to the French.

  Washington’s initial series of meetings with Franklin in 1756 resulted from a row over rank at Fort Cumberland, pitting his Virginia colonelcy against a Maryland captain with a regular army commission, that Washington carried all the way to the supreme British commander in Boston. He met with Franklin on the journey both up and back, and later when Franklin traveled to Virginia on post office business. These meetings were cordial but rushed, as each had other places to go or business to accomplish, but they led to an exchange of letters, most of which are lost. In one, Franklin alerted Washington that “the Delaware Indians,” as he called them, had rejected Pennsylvania’s peace offering “and resolv’d to continue the War.”50 During their meetings, Franklin and Washington likely discussed strategy and tactics at length, with Washington coming to espouse a Franklinian view of intercolonial military cooperation. For his part, Franklin always saw Washington as the better commander.