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  All trudged along in good order until a ragged popping of musketry erupted in front of the column. It grew into a continuous roar that spread from the van down the length of the army, invisible musket fire from the woods on both sides. Braddock, with Washington close behind, rode forward to see what was afoot. They ran into the guides and the vanguard, fleeing back until they collided with the advance party and scrambled its ranks. Then the advance turned and ran, overtaken by panic.

  A party of about 600 Indians and 300 French and Canadians had set out from Duquesne to find the British. They and Braddock’s advance had stumbled into each other on the dark, narrow track. The advance had panicked, while the French and Indians coolly dispersed to flank the British column.

  The officers drew their swords and ordered the fleeing redcoats to stop and re-form, “with as much success,” Washington recalled, “as if we had attempted to have stopped the wild bears of the mountains.” Ranks forming up in the column were driven into confusion, men literally falling over one another, when the fugitives from the advance ran into them. Balls tore into the tangled mass and took out officers on horseback.

  Washington’s horse dropped under him, and he caught another. The British regulars were so panic-stricken that they could not hear commands. After the initial stampede, they did what they had been trained to do—stand their ground and keep fighting—but they were haphazard about it. Most casualties, Washington thought, “received their shot from our own cowardly English soldiers who gathered themselves into a body, contrary to orders, ten or twelve deep, would then level, fire, and shoot down the men before them.”19

  The Virginians plunged into the woods on either side, to engage the enemy on his own terms, from behind trees and in open order. A British officer interpreted these maneuvers as desertion and ordered the colonials to re-form ranks and rejoin the center of the column. Seeing that his fellow Virginians had the solution to the army’s problem, Washington offered to lead the provincial troops into the forest to take the fight to the enemy. Braddock, however, had other ideas.

  The heaviest fire came from a rise on the column’s right, and the general decided to charge the slope with bayonets. The officers restored some order, but the men refused to advance. One by one, including Braddock, the officers went down. Washington’s second horse collapsed with a gunshot wound, and a ball carried away his hat. By this time his coat was thoroughly perforated. When he caught another mount, he was the senior officer on the scene still standing. The wounded Braddock summoned him and gave permission to charge the woods with the Virginians.

  Washington sent the general to the rear on a cart, then remounted to consider the situation. The narrow road and the woods around it were choked in thick, stinking gunsmoke. He could see that he was losing more Virginians to British fire than to the enemy. The redcoats shot blindly into the woods, assuming that anyone there was the foe, although most of the colonials were just inside the treeline. There was nothing to do but order a retreat. The troops formed their depleted ranks and backed up, fighting, to the rear guard. That unit covered the army as it recrossed the river, and Washington posted the remaining men on a rise on the other side. The Battle of the Monongahela—which most Americans would call “Braddock’s Defeat”—was over.

  It was one of the worst catastrophes ever to befall British arms. Of the 1,200 men engaged, over 900 were dead or wounded. They littered the forest floor along with dead and dying horses and cattle and abandoned equipment. On the other side, twenty-three French and Canadians were dead, sixteen wounded; Indian figures likely were at the same low level. Already the blowflies, vultures, and scalping knives were hard at work.20

  Washington was worn down by dysentery, exhaustion, and despair, but Braddock had work for him as night fell on July 9. He ordered him to ride forty miles eastward to where the second division was bringing up the heavy baggage, to get relief for what was left of the striking force. For the first few miles he rode through the battle’s human refuse. “The shocking scenes which presented themselves in this night march are not to be described,” he remembered. He rode past the dead and the dying, hearing “groans, lamentations, and cries.” It was a journey of “gloom and horror” made more frightful by the darkness imposed by the thick forest cover.21

  Washington reached the camp early in the morning of July 10, 1755, but news of the catastrophe had beaten him to the place. Officers and men were consumed by terror. Many privates were already deserting as fast as their legs could carry them, leaving behind a trail of dropped muskets and accoutrements. Washington ordered some relief wagons sent back, then collapsed with weakness.

  Braddock—swaying on horseback because the men refused to carry him—appeared with the shattered striking force late in the day. He had only one thing in mind: to get out of this forested hell on earth. Anything that could not be carted off was destroyed. Ammunition, wagons, food, equipment, and other baggage were put to the torch, cannons smashed. The army then marched eastward as fast as it could haul itself.

  The old general died just past the ruins of Fort Necessity, on the third day after the battle. Washington buried him in the road, then trooped the army over the grave to hide it from the Indians. “Thus,” the Virginian mourned, “died a man whose good and bad qualities were intimately blended…. His attachments were warm, his enmities were strong, and, having no disguise about him, both appeared in full force.”22

  Never again would Washington find an older patron to offer the guidance and protection he had received from his half brother, from William Fairfax, and from the flawed but caring Braddock. He was twenty-three years old.23

  THE CONSCIENCE OF A SOLDIER HAS SO LITTLE SHARE

  Washington studied the military arts for the rest of his life. His starting point was Braddock’s Defeat. It amazed him that such a large, strong, and well-trained army could have been so thoroughly shot to pieces. He had high praise for the British and colonial officers because of their steadfast bravery. The Virginian privates “behaved like men and died like soldiers.” The fault for the catastrophe, he thought, rested on the regular British infantry, who performed like a mob of cowards.

  The Virginia colonel was too hard on them. Their behavior grew out of the way they had been trained, combined with their being in a situation for which they had not been trained. Regulars had been drilled to stand in close order just yards from an enemy arrayed the same way. It took a stern kind of bravery to stand still while the enemy fired volleys into their ranks. Sergeants stalked back and forth keeping the lines straight, closing up vacancies left by dead or wounded. When so ordered, the soldiers would load and fire and step off into a bayonet charge toward a mass of enemy firing or charging back. All that took place amid blinding smoke and dying friends and deafening blasts of gunfire.

  Regular soldiers spent a lifetime, under brutal discipline, learning to follow their orders as tight formations, not as individuals. When the officers went down at the Monongahela, the enlisted men did not know how to think for themselves, and had been trained not to. American soldiers had never had the kind of training and discipline that it took to make a regular. They saw themselves as individuals more than as cogs in a military machine, and believed they could figure out what to do without excessive supervision. The contrast between the two styles would vex Washington in his next war.

  The young officer also drew conclusions about the importance of discipline to an army. He had imposed none at Jumonville’s Glen or Fort Necessity, and the result was catastrophe. At the Monongahela, redcoat discipline had evaporated, causing another disaster. Orders from commanders, Washington decided, would not be obeyed unless they were enforced. An army had to be controlled ruthlessly, to produce unquestioning obedience in any situation.

  There was something else: Braddock had proved disastrously that commanders did not have a monopoly on good ideas. He had been unusually receptive to suggestions from subordinates, but most often he dismissed their ideas and stood firm with his own original notions, because
in European regular warfare, seniors gave orders and juniors obeyed them. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the young man absorbed a lesson in leadership—the commander should be willing to listen before making a final decision.

  Washington returned to Virginia to find himself a famous man—not just locally but across the colonies and even in England. He was already well-known in France as the villain who had committed murder under a flag of truce. But the cool way he had ridden back and forth through the Battle of the Monongahela, untouched while his horses died and his coat was shredded, impressed friend and foe alike. He seemed as charmed a man as he was brilliant a leader, salvaging something from the catastrophe. He became known around the world as the “hero” of Braddock’s Defeat.

  Washington’s transformation from British hero to American patriot began on August 14, 1755, when Dinwiddie commissioned him “Colonel of the Virginia Regiment and Commander in Chief of all forces now raised in the defense of His Majesty’s Colony.” He received authority to exercise his own judgment to “act defensively or offensively.” This implemented an act of the Virginia Assembly, which voted £40,000 to raise and maintain a regiment of 1,000 men, along with 200 frontiersmen organized into four companies of “rangers,” as irregular Indian fighters were called.24

  Virginia faced catastrophe on a western frontier extending nearly 350 miles, as the Indians raided farms and settlements in the Shenandoah Valley. The remaining British regulars had marched off to Philadelphia as leaders in London and in the colonies considered what to do next. Over the next year the main theater of the war in America shifted northward toward Canada, while the killing of Jumonville grew into a world war, called the French and Indian War in America and the Seven Years’ War everywhere else. The major powers of Europe entered the fray, their armies and navies fighting on that continent, and in India, the world’s oceans, and the Caribbean islands.

  Washington believed his province had been abandoned by London. But he would accept his new position only if the conditions were “honorable.” He complained that he had “suffered much in my private fortune besides impairing one of the best of constitutions,” meaning his health. The Assembly granted him £300 for his past expenditures, a salary of 30 shillings per day, £100 a year for expenses, and a 2 percent commission on all official purchases he made.25

  Satisfied, Washington ordered new uniforms for himself, then designed those of the Virginia Regiment—blue with scarlet facings and silver trim—and placed orders for them also. He raised the thousand men and appointed the officers. He declared that officers would receive commissions by merit and not through influence, although he had to give in on that point in a few cases. Finally, he raised the ranger companies and ordered the construction of about two dozen small timber forts along the frontier.

  It was a fine school for a budding commander in chief (Washington was the first American to carry that title). He sent out patrols against Indian raids, demonstrating that white Virginians could be every bit as savage as their native opponents. He ordered the lash and the occasional hanging for desertion and other infractions. He smoothed out conflicts between officers when the sexual customs of his own planter class ran up against the proprieties of the middle class. A typical case involved an officer who had poached another’s servant girl and made her his mistress.

  Washington instituted a training and disciplinary regimen for the Virginia Regiment that made it the finest body of light troops in America, pursuing open-order tactics, fast movements, and marksmanship. Its ways suited American conditions better than those of the line (heavy) troops that Braddock had led across the Monongahela. The Virginia rangers, who saw more action than the regiment, were as effective as those led by Robert Rogers farther northeast.

  Washington quickly became discouraged, however, owing to lack of support and respect from British authorities. He concluded that he and his province had little stake in the war he had helped to start. It was just one of “the usual contests of empire and ambition.” Virginians were pawns in somebody else’s squabble, in which “the conscience of a soldier has so little share that he may properly insist upon his claims of rank, and extend his pretensions even to punctilio.”26

  Washington threatened to resign but was urged to visit higher commanders to clarify his position, and that of his troops, as members of the British army. He got nowhere on that score during his first trip in 1756, but the journey introduced him to the America that lay beyond Virginia. He visited the first cities he had ever seen, including Philadelphia, Boston, and Newport. He was overwhelmed by the goods available in those places, and spent beyond his means for his increasingly fine personal uniforms.

  The commander in chief returned to Virginia after several weeks to find the war on the frontier raging, and decided not to resign. He took rangers and some militiamen out to meet Indians marauding through the Shenandoah. He could claim success in the bush, but most of his men were holed up in forts where they were of little use against the mobile enemy. Too often they were unpaid, ill-clad, and ready to quit. However, Washington’s chief frustration was the refusal of London to grant him and his officers commissions in the royal army.

  “If it should be said,” he complained to Dinwiddie, “that the troops of Virginia are irregulars, and cannot expect more notice than other provincials, I must beg leave to differ.” All they needed to make them regulars were commissions in the royal army. He and his men, he believed, were better at the American kind of war than any English snob in a red suit. It was therefore especially insulting that his officers and privates were paid less than British regulars who could not perform as well. “We cannot conceive,” he railed, “that because we are Americans, we shou’d therefore be deprived of the benefits common to British subjects.”27

  Still Washington soldiered on, stemming the Indian tide from the west. He wanted to campaign against Fort Duquesne, the fount of the Indian war, but he could not do it with Virginia’s resources alone. Finally, in April 1758 he learned that help was on the way. General John Forbes, a thirty-year veteran of British service, arrived in Pennsylvania with a regular force twice the size of the one Braddock had commanded, accompanied by his second in command, General Henry Bouquet. Their target was Fort Duquesne.

  Washington offered his services and his troops, as well as Cherokee and Catawba allies he had enlisted in the Carolinas. Indians, Washington told Forbes, were “the only troops fit to cope with Indians on such ground.” Forbes and Bouquet liked that idea and just about everything else Washington proposed to them. They appeared to regard the Virginians as the real professionals in this bloody business, and replaced their men’s red coats with Virginia ranger uniforms. They also adopted Washington’s bush-fighting tactics and put the Virginia Regiment in the vanguard of the expedition westward. They bought Washington’s argument that “from long intimacy, and scouting in these woods, my men are as well acquainted with all the passes and difficulties as any troops that will be employed.”28

  The Virginian did not have his way in everything. He proposed that the approach to Duquesne should follow Braddock’s road northwest out of Virginia. It was already cut and needed only minor clearing. What he was really after was to protect Virginia’s interest in being the gateway to the West, realizing his and the Ohio Company’s ambitions for land and profit over the mountains. He was not about to let Pennsylvania reap that harvest at Virginia’s expense.

  Forbes and Bouquet were competent and experienced, and they enjoyed the services of excellent engineers and quartermasters. Washington could and did learn a lot from them about campaign logistics. Their army was based at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, so it would be easier to cut a new road west than to move the whole affair south, then back north. Bouquet invited Washington to Carlisle to make his case, assuming that he would accept the final decision, whichever way it went. In the end, the British generals decided on a route west from Carlisle.

  Washington had no choice but to go along. Privately he exploded in a blizzard of insubordinate
letters to officials in Williamsburg and officers of the Ohio Company. The campaign, he claimed, was doomed. As the expedition crawled westward through the fall, his language became inexcusable. He accused Forbes and Bouquet of incompetence. The march was too slow, and the army would be caught by snows in the mountains. It would never reach the French fort. If there was another massacre, it would not be Washington’s fault. It was a disgraceful performance, as he understood years later, when it appeared that insubordinate officers were plotting against him. And he was wrong on every count.

  The lead elements of the column reached the vicinity of Fort Duquesne early in November, with no snow falling. Braddock’s ghost hovered over the expedition, as Forbes called a council of war to decide what to do next. Washington counseled against an immediate attack, owing to lack of intelligence. Forbes agreed to postpone action. Washington smugly wrote to Williamsburg that the campaign was stalled, just as he had predicted.

  On November 12, 1758, the Virginians stumbled into a patrol out of the fort and became disorganized, companies firing on each other. Washington knocked muskets aside with his sword in a hail of lead that brought down dozens of his men. The French patrol hightailed it for home after the Virginians captured three of them. The prisoners described the fort as deteriorating, undermanned, and ripe for the picking. Forbes ordered an advance, with the Virginians in the lead. They found the place abandoned and partly destroyed. Leaving behind a small guard, the Forbes-Bouquet expedition returned to its various homes. Washington led his Virginians down Braddock’s road, then rode on to Mount Vernon.

  With the French gone from the Forks and their fortunes falling toward the loss of Canada to the British in 1760, the Indians lost support for their raids on the frontier. They had backed the wrong horse in a war whose scale they could not have imagined. The Virginia borderlands became more peaceful, settlers returned, and others ventured across the mountains to carve out homesteads.