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  On October 30 Dinwiddie ordered Washington to venture into the West, contact friendly Indians, and proceed to the French forts. There he was to present a nicely phrased ultimatum from Dinwiddie, politely inviting the “frog-eaters” (as the English called the French) to clear out. While awaiting their reply, he was also supposed to gather as much intelligence as he could about the other side’s strength, dispositions, and intentions.

  Washington trekked into a literally howling wilderness—winter roared in ahead of schedule. He was accompanied by Ohio Company trader Christopher Gist; Jacob van Braam, a Dutchman who claimed to speak French; a scalawag who said he could interpret the Indians’ languages; and four others who eventually deserted him. With Gist’s help, Washington enlisted a few Indian allies, slogged through rain and sleet, forded torrential rivers, and reached Fort LeBoeuf (Erie, Pennsylvania) on December 11, 1753. The local commander received him with great courtesy. He invited Washington to cool his heels for three days as he prepared a reply to Dinwiddie’s ultimatum, which he forwarded to his superiors in Canada.

  The French officers wined and dined the Virginian. He reported later that the wine, which they drank by the gallon, loosened their tongues. They told him “that it was their absolute design to take possession of the Ohio, and, by G——, they would do it; for that although they were sensible the English could raise two men for their one, yet they knew their motions were too slow and dilatory to prevent any undertaking of theirs.” Or at least that was how the message came through the Dutchman’s translation; Washington spoke no French. He understood well enough, however, that the “rosbifs” (as the French called the English) were being told to go to hell. The official letter to Dinwiddie said much the same, but more politely.11

  Washington hurried back to Virginia’s capital, the muddy little village of Williamsburg. His horses were worn out, so he decided he could make better time on foot. Leaving the rest of his party behind, he and Gist set out through storms and hostile Indians. Twice he came close to drowning, and once he narrowly dodged a musket ball. Gist became crippled by frostbite, and Washington left him at an Ohio Company post. He pressed on alone to Williamsburg, where he reported to Dinwiddie in early February 1754.

  There he wrote a formal report to the lieutenant governor. After many pages of chipper boasting, its ending betrayed youthful uncertainty and hunger for approval. “I hope what has been said,” Washington pleaded, “will be sufficient to make your Honour satisfied with my conduct; for that was my aim in undertaking, and chief study throughout the prosecution of it.” Dinwiddie was satisfied; he ordered the report published, along with his praise of it, to justify the war he was starting.12

  Dinwiddie was in over his head and not bright enough to realize it. France and England were at peace, and he was about to blunder them into war. Moreover, Virginia had not mounted a military expedition since the previous century. Nobody in the province understood what a campaign would involve, let alone what it would cost. Nevertheless, the lieutenant governor called the Assembly into session to get it to pay for a war the burgesses did not want. They debated until April, when the Assembly voted some money, but not enough. Meanwhile Dinwiddie sent emissaries to the Indian tribes, and to other colonies, appealing for support. He did not get much.13

  The lieutenant governor appointed Washington a lieutenant colonel of the militia, and commander of the expedition. Meanwhile, in early spring Dinwiddie had dragooned about forty carpenters and militiamen into going to the Forks to build a fort. In April 1754, Washington, wearing a tailor-made uniform, set out from Alexandria at the head of 160 underpaid, disgruntled militiamen and wagoneers. He had been authorized 200, but he was lucky to assemble the force he did. As his little army cut its way through the forest at a rate of two or three miles a day, it became apparent that Washington also was in over his head, but not mature enough to realize it.

  The men at the Forks faced starvation, because the Delawares refused to provide food. That was a sensible move on the Indians’ part, because early in May about a thousand French soldiers arrived at the Forks with eighteen cannons. The forty Virginians surrendered and headed home. The French started building a professionally engineered fortification, named Fort Duquesne.

  Washington was encamped in a grassy valley split by a swift stream, called Great Meadows. He ordered his men to cut timber and erect a circular stockade, which he called Fort Necessity. It was not big enough to enclose even his small complement, so he surrounded it with a ring of shallow trenches. The whole thing was commanded by wooded hills all around, where the French could pepper it with musketry and bombard it with cannonballs.

  The commander at Fort Duquesne kept an eye on Washington’s progress through Canadian and Indian scouts. In late May he sent out a party of about thirty-five, commanded by a young, popular, and well-connected ensign, Joseph-Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville. His instructions were to deliver an ultimatum telling the Virginians to leave the country. When Washington first learned from Indians of Jumonville’s approach, he sent half his force off in the wrong direction. Receiving further information, he took forty-seven men—half of what he had left at the fort—and went looking for the French party at night in a driving rain.

  Before dawn the next day, May 28, the Virginians reached a friendly Indian camp, less seven men who had gotten lost in the dark. The rain had stopped, and Washington ordered his men to reload their muskets, while Indians scouted the location where they believed the French were camped. It was a rocky glen, and as the French were rousing from their sleep, Washington posted his troops around three sides of the hollow while the Indians closed off the only way out. Exactly what happened next has been the subject of debate ever since, but it is certain that Washington had no control over the events.

  A shot rang out, then the Virginians fired at least two volleys down into the Frenchmen, who tried to retreat into the surrounding woods but were halted by the Indians. Washington had given no order to fire, but when a French officer called for quarter, he ordered a cease-fire. Resistance had been ragged, and only three Virginians were wounded and one dead; fourteen Frenchmen, including Jumonville, lay wounded at the bottom of the glen. The bleeding ensign tried to explain, through an interpreter, that his mission was peaceful, but before he could present his ultimatum an Indian leader tomahawked him, reached into his open skull, and pulled out the young officer’s brain. That was the signal for the other Indians to begin slaughtering the wounded, scalping, beheading, and dismembering their helpless victims.

  Washington, who had been a passive observer rather than a commander, came to himself and ordered his troops to surround and protect the French survivors, one wounded, the others not. He hustled twenty-one prisoners out of the glen while the Indians finished their work. A French fugitive who reached the Forks claimed that Washington had fired on a flag of truce—an atrocity of war. The massacre shook the young Virginian commander to his core. He sent a terse report back to Dinwiddie, papering over what had really happened, but he was fully aware that he had entirely lost control of a situation he assumed he could command by virtue of his rank alone.

  Washington could more rightly be described as amateurish than as atrocious. When new arrivals just after the skirmish raised his manpower to about 400, he set out through the forest to attack Fort Duquesne and its garrison, grown to more than 2,000 men. For the next two weeks his little army struggled to move baggage, supplies, and nine swivel guns, and got nowhere. Wagons broke down, horses died, the men wore out, and the last Indian allies went home. On June 28, Washington learned that a large French and Indian force was headed his way, and he turned back. The retreat was worse than the advance, the men carrying whatever stuff could be salvaged after the last of the horses died. The whole force collapsed on the ground at Fort Necessity on July 1, 1754.

  The next night it began to rain. Few of the men had any shelter while the valley turned into a swamp. By the morning of the third, fewer than 300 men were fit for duty. The enemy, about a thousand s
trong, attacked in late morning, led by a savvy veteran named Coulon de Villiers, Jumonville’s older brother. Washington expected a conventional infantry slugfest of volleys and bayonet charges, but the French and Indians dispersed into the surrounding cover and blasted the Virginians with musket fire. The rain resumed, drowning the Virginians’ muskets. The French, under trees, kept their powder dry and poured hell onto Fort Necessity. Musket balls smacked into its timbers, splatted into the sodden ground, and thunked into human flesh. Washington walked untouched through the storm of lead, not knowing what to do.

  His lack of control became obvious at nightfall. Discipline disintegrated, and soldiers broke in to the rum supply. Over half of them were soon falling-down drunk, thanks to their fatigue and empty stomachs. De Villiers called on him to surrender and leave the territory. Using as intermediary the same Dutchman who had been with him at Fort LeBoeuf, Washington signed articles of surrender at midnight. He did not realize that he had just confessed to the murder of Jumonville—van Braam was not much of a translator.

  Out of the 300 combatants at his disposal on July 3, Washington had lost thirty killed and seventy wounded, many severely; French and Indian losses were negligible, only three dead. The exhausted, hung-over survivors of Fort Necessity carried their wounded out of the place and prepared to drag themselves back to Virginia. The defeat was total. “Whatever may have been the feelings of Washington, he has left no record of them,” the historian Francis Parkman observed. “His immense fortitude was doomed to severer trials in the future; yet perhaps this miserable morning was the darkest of his life. He was deeply moved by sights of suffering; and all around him were wounded men borne along in torture, and weary men staggering under the living load. His pride was humbled, and his young ambition seemed blasted in the bud. It was the fourth of July.”14

  I WISH EARNESTLY TO ATTAIN SOME KNOWLEDGE OF THE MILITARY PROFESSION

  Leaving his bleeding and destitute corps at an Ohio Company post, Washington went on to Williamsburg, where he arrived in the middle of July, begging for supplies and medical care. He discovered that he was a Virginia hero despite the defeat. His performance had not been discreditable, given his inexperience and the meager support he had received from his government. He had demonstrated a remarkable ability to get men to follow him in impossible circumstances. Later he showed an equal talent for learning from experience. In the short run, the burgesses refused to cough up any more money, and other Virginians ignored Dinwiddie’s calls to join new military units.

  Dinwiddie appealed to other colonies to join in a renewed campaign against Fort Duquesne. They also ignored him. The governor ordered Washington to renew the attack, despite his protests that mere rumors that the campaign would resume caused men to desert. In the end, everyone still alive went home, with few exceptions. Washington went back to Mount Vernon, not returning to Williamsburg until the fall, for the regular meeting of the Assembly. There he learned that Major General Edward Braddock would arrive in the spring of 1755, with two regular regiments behind him. He would command all regular troops already in the colonies, along with all colonial levies. Some money and supplies already had reached Virginia.

  The ambitious Dinwiddie was not about to wait for the professionals. With the governors of Maryland and North Carolina, he cooked up a plan for a campaign against Duquesne that fall. Maryland’s governor, Horatio Sharpe, a veteran of the regular army, would command. Claiming he was following orders from London—this was a lie—Dinwiddie told Washington that the Virginia Regiment would be disbanded into its separate companies, to be attached to other units. Washington would drop in rank to captain. His pride wounded, he resigned and stormed back to Mount Vernon. Sharpe realized that Washington was the best military talent Virginia had. If he wanted to lead a campaign into the wilderness, with winter approaching, he needed the young fellow’s knowledge and experience. He wrote to Mount Vernon, offering face-saving conditions to get Washington to rejoin, but the proud young man would not budge. Sharpe cancelled the expedition.15

  When Braddock arrived in Virginia in late February 1755, Washington wasted no time skirting around Dinwiddie. “I must be ingenuous enough,” he told Braddock’s chief of staff, “to confess that…I wish earnestly to attain some knowledge of the military profession and, believing a more favourable oppertunity cannot offer than to serve under a gentleman of General Braddock’s abilities and experience.” When the British commander and his aides met him, he charmed them with his eagerness and his knowledge of the western country. Washington got what he was after. Braddock, an aide wrote him, would be happy to take him along as a volunteer aide-de-camp, treated as if he were a colonel.16

  Braddock was a squat, elderly soldier whose military experience had been mostly on the parade ground. He was a blunt, foul-mouthed officer who loved to argue for the sake of arguing. He was always short of money but scrupulously honest and as brave as a lion. “Desperate in his fortune, brutal in his behavior, obstinate in his sentiments,” as a contemporary said of him, “he was still intrepid and capable.” Benjamin Franklin remarked after his death that the general was a brave man who might have done well in a European war. “But he had too much self-confidence; too high an opinion of the validity of regular troops; too mean a one of both Americans and Indians.”17

  Braddock liked Washington and encouraged him to consider going after a commission in the regular army. During the course of the campaign he ensured that the Virginian understood its technical details, and they spent a remarkably large amount of time together. Stubborn as the general was, he invited suggestions from the young man, knowing that Washington possessed information about the country that he lacked. Braddock was the best teacher Washington ever had. From him the Virginian learned not only how to do things militarily but also how not to do them.

  By May 1755, when Washington joined him at Frederick, Maryland, Braddock had assembled over 2,000 men, about half colonial and half regulars. The force included an artillery train, a baggage train, about 2,500 horses, and specialists in engineering and artillery. They were supported by hired teamsters, and trailed by a horde of camp followers. When the column set out for the mountains, it stretched nearly six miles, and it was in trouble from the outset. Braddock’s brusque manners had alienated colonial authorities, and he had difficulty raising supplies and, especially, horses. American horses were not the purpose-bred draft animals he was used to in Europe and were too small and weak to haul the heavy artillery. The burden of clearing a road to Fort Duquesne, already a nearly impossible challenge, was doubled by the extra work—reducing hills, filling gullies—needed for the horses.

  Braddock campaigned as he would have in Europe. He was going to besiege and assault a fort designed and built by professional engineers. He would need big guns and plenty of ammunition, a lot of men and horses, and food and supplies for all of them—all to be hauled along. Washington tried to talk the commander into sizing up the enemy and matching his plans to the landscape. He attempted, he wrote years later, to impress the general and his officers “with the necessity of opposing the nature of his defense to the mode of attack which, more than probably, he would experience from the Canadian French and their Indians.” It was no use. “But so prepossessed were they in favor of regularity and discipline, and in such absolute contempt were these people held, that the admonition was suggested in vain.”18

  As the expedition entered the forested mountains, headway slowed to under two miles a day. By the middle of June men all along the column were dropping from dysentery, scouts and deserters were turning up dead and scalped, horses were giving out. Cursing the green hell he was trying to hack his way through, Braddock concluded that it would take another month to reach Duquesne. He called a council of war to decide what to do next. First, however, he asked Washington’s advice. The Virginian proposed detaching about 1,200 light troops, taking the minimum supplies and artillery, to speed ahead. The rest of the army would follow with the wagons and heavy baggage. Braddock presented th
e proposal to the council, which ratified the plan but increased the numbers of guns, wagons, and beef cattle making the trip.

  Washington then nearly collapsed from dysentery, aggravated by hemorrhoids. Braddock ordered him to bed, promising to summon him when it was time to engage the enemy. The old general marched out with the striking force. Washington, borne on a wagon, caught up with him on July 8, 1755, two miles from the Monongahela and twelve from Duquesne. Still shaky, the next morning he strapped some pillows to his saddle and rode up to join Braddock, who had sent the engineers across the river to make a road on the far bank. In early afternoon, he led the army across, Washington at his side. Their road was a narrow track flanked by dense underbrush and overhung by towering hardwood forest. Braddock’s arrangements would have been perfect if this had been the open country of Europe. In this jungle he should have sent out scouts.

  Instead, he strung small battalions of flank guards on either side. Closer in, the main bodies of troops marched in close-order columns of two, on either side of the central convoy of artillery, the artillery wagons, and the beef on the hoof. In the lead was a guide party, a few foot soldiers, and six horsemen. They were about twenty yards ahead of the advance party, consisting of a company and then a battalion in columns of three. They were followed by a work party, engineers and sappers who would rush ahead of the advance to clear any obstructions. Braddock and Washington rode behind this group, ahead of the main column. A strong battalion served as a rear guard.