American Tempest (6 page)

With his order to fire, Washington's men unwittingly fired the first shots of what would explode into the planet's first world war. Called at the time the “Great War for Empire,” it would spill the blood of millions across four continents and the seas in between, as seven nations vied for control of the world's wealth over seven years—and Boston's merchants vied for as large a share of that wealth as they could earn or steal.

“They are a set of brave, hardy dogs,” Peter Oliver said of the merchants he had known as boys in Harvard. “They will sacrifice everything for money.”
⁶

Indeed, many were ready to sacrifice their honor as human beings—and the blood of innocents—by disguising their struggle for wealth as a quest for liberty for the common man.

 

____________

^*
The College of William and Mary was founded in 1693 and Yale College in 1701—both as divinity schools.

I
nstead of retreating eastward to the safety of British-controlled Fort Cumberland after his attack on the French, young George Washington allowed bravado to govern his judgment and intellect, and he remained at his temporary encampment—scoffing at the 1,100 French troops at Fort Du Quesne. “If the whole detachment of French behave with no more resolution than this chosen party did,” he boasted, “I flatter myself we shall have no great trouble in driving them to . . . Montreal.”
¹

At dawn on July 3, the crack of a musket shot pierced the chatter of heavy rain over Washington's camp, followed by the cry of a wounded sentry. A chorus of Indian war whoops heralded the emergence of three columns of French troops, who raked the camp with musket fire. When the firing stopped, thirty Virginians lay dead and seventy wounded; Washington had little choice but to accept French demands that he surrender all his arms in exchange for safe passage home for himself and his troops.

For the moment, the West remained in French hands, and British authorities, sensing an expansion of North American hostilities with the French, urged royal governors in America to make joint preparations for war. Delegates from New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland
met in Albany, New York, where Benjamin Franklin, a Pennsylvania delegate, stunned the conference by proposing that the colonies unite politically. With strong support from Massachusetts merchant-banker Thomas Hutchinson, Jr., the delegates approved a plan that would unite all the colonies except Georgia and Nova Scotia under a crown-appointed president general and a grand council, or legislature, to be elected by colonial assemblies. However, the plan met with a curt rejection by the home government in Britain and all the royal governors in America, thus postponing all prospects of union for a generation.

The following spring, a British convoy sailed into Chesapeake Bay with a contingent of professional British troops under General Edward Braddock, who planned to combine his force with provincial militia to drive the French from the Ohio Valley. From the first, however, everything that could go wrong for Braddock did. Maryland failed to send wagons to carry supplies; Pennsylvania failed to send horses; and Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia all failed to raise their complements of troops to supplement British regulars. Even the Indians who had pledged to support the English failed to appear.

“I am almost in despair,” Braddock lamented, “from the . . . sloth and ignorance . . . of the people and the disunion of the several colonies.”
²

Nonetheless, Braddock ordered his troops to march westward across the Appalachians to Fort Du Quesne, “confident they would never be attacked,”
³
according to Washington, who joined Braddock as an aide. Suddenly, the crackle of shots and blood-curdling whoops engulfed the woods just east of the French fort. A mob of half-naked French and Indians materialized among the trees above the British right column, fired a staccato of shots, then disappeared into the forest. Dozens of British troops fell dead and wounded. Before stunned survivors could reform their lines to return fire, the French and Indians had vanished. The British fired at trees, only to hear war whoops build to a deafening crescendo at the rear. Before they could turn, another band of Indians had emerged, fired, and vanished. In and out they sprang, left, right, front, rear . . . appearing, disappearing, reappearing. They were everywhere, nowhere, never forming lines to fight by European rules of linear warfare.

Confusion and terror gripped the British ranks. Officers on horseback charged back and forth, their mounts shifting right, left, and whinnying in blood-curdling dissonance with Indian war cries. All-too-easy targets on the open ground, troops, officers, and horses toppled like toys. Washington felt musket balls slice through his hat and uniform as he tried in vain to rally troops; shots felled two of his horses but left him uninjured, and he remounted horses of dead riders. Braddock was less fortunate. A ball shattered his arm, smashed through his rib cage and lodged in his lungs. One by one, other officers fell onto the blood-soaked ground as they tried to rally troops. The slaughter lasted three hours; 977 of the 1,459 British troops lay dead or wounded. Twenty-six of the eighty-six officers were killed; thirty-seven others, including Braddock, suffered wounds. Braddock died five days later. French casualties amounted to seventeen dead or wounded; the Indians lost about one hundred warriors.

As they ran out of ammunition, British survivors dropped their weapons, ran to the river and thrashed their way to safety on the opposite bank. Instead of pursuing, the Indians remained on the battleground, hopping about the dead and wounded—like vultures—plundering wagons and bodies, methodically scalping, ignoring shrieks of the wounded as they sliced and ripped hides off living heads as well as dead. Washington used his knowledge of the western wilderness to lead the three hundred-odd survivors back to the safety of British-held Fort Cumberland. Although Americans hailed Washington for his heroism in leading survivors to safety, British military commanders puzzled over the depth of the military supplies in the hands of the French and Indians in so isolated an outpost as Fort Du Quesne. With British ships in control of the Atlantic, the only sources of arms in North America were New England's merchants. Although British authorities called such traffic treasonous, the merchants viewed all cash customers alike and bristled at government attempts to restrict their freedom to buy from and sell to whomever they pleased.

The humiliation of English troops in the West encouraged the French to expand the war against their ancient enemy and, by 1757, what had been a regional struggle called the French and Indian War expanded, with France, England, and five other nations at war across the face of the earth
for domination of territories in Europe, Africa, and Asia as well as the Americas. In North America, a twelve thousand–man French army swept southward along Lake Champlain in New York, capturing Lake George to the south and threatening to sweep across the entire northern half of New York. Again, the French forces surprised the British military by the endless reserves of military supplies and other essentials at their command in a wilderness far removed from the French homeland by a vast ocean controlled by the British navy. In the ensuing months, the British replotted their strategy in North America, relegating ill-trained amateur soldiers of the American militia to secondary roles and sending only professional, regular army troops into battle.

To try to cut the flow of supplies from the British colonies to French Canada, the British launched a massive attack from the south, recapturing Lake George and Lake Champlain and cutting the links between New York's productive farmlands and Montreal. Meanwhile, a British fleet of thirty-three ships with ten thousand regulars aboard sailed to attack Cape Breton Island and the huge fortress of Louisbourg, which guarded the entrance to the St. Lawrence River Valley and the flow of arms, ammunition, and other essentials to French forces and the French population in Quebec. With Louisbourg in British hands, the French would have to surrender all of New France.

When the huge British invasion force landed on June 8, 1757, the French had only 4,500 troops and twelve fighting ships to defend the massive fortress. At the end of two weeks, British attackers had overrun the fort's outer defenses and trapped the remaining French troops inside. On August 1, the French raised the flag of surrender.

In the West, meanwhile, English Brigadier General John Forbes was leading two thousand British regulars and two thousand Virginia militiamen toward Fort Du Quesne to avenge the massacre of General Braddock and his men and force the French out of the Ohio Territory. By the time they came within sight of Fort Du Quesne, however, its French occupants had set it ablaze and fled. The British would rebuild the fort and rename it Fort Pitt.

As the British combed through the detritus of Louisbourg's previous inhabitants, they made a shocking discovery: Most of the French army's
supplies—clothes, tents, and other accouterments, along with considerable amounts of arms and ammunition—were British, smuggled to Newfoundland by American merchant ships sailing from Boston, Rhode Island, and New York. A subsequent investigation found that as many as forty American ships had smuggled supplies to French forces at Louisbourg before it fell—and were still carrying goods to French military authorities in Newfoundland.

“An illegal trade is carried on between Rhode Island and the French settlements . . . for supplying His Majesty's enemies,” declared the captain of a British privateer charged with capturing cargo ships bound for French Canadian ports.
⁴

Infuriated by the findings, Major General Jeffrey Amherst wrote angry notes to the governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, singling out the last as “one of the principal colonies upon which they [the French] depend. . . . Several of the merchants of Newport,” he declared, “are deeply concerned in this iniquitous trade, which is not only infamous in itself by supporting the avowed enemies of the king, but occasions great difficulty in procuring necessary supplies for carrying on His Majesty's service.”
⁵

In Britain, the king's intimates raged at New England merchants' refusal to put British interests or patriotism ahead of their lust for money. Colonel William Byrd, a king's councilor with a penchant for lyricism, put it this way: “The Saints of New England have a great dexterity at palliating a perjury so well as to leave no taste of it in the mouth, nor can any people like them slip through a penal statute.”
⁶

With British warships guarding the entrance to the St. Lawrence River Valley, French defeat became inevitable, but British military commanders feared that if smugglers continued to supply French forces in Canada, they would stall British victory and force Britain to pay a heavy price in men and materials. At their urging, William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, who was responsible for British foreign and military affairs, sent a circular letter to the royal governors, warning of

Pitt's letter went on to demand that colonials “desist from the infamous and traitorous practices of supplying the enemy with provisions and military stores during a war undertaken at their request and for their immediate protection.”
⁷
Parliament backed Pitt's demands by passing an act allowing customs officers to obtain writs of assistance to search and seize without specifying in advance what they were searching for, what they might seize, or where they would search. With writs of assistance, customs officials would, for the first time, have powers to collect duties and other taxes—and, indeed, end most of the trade. In effect, the writs threatened to drive many if not most Massachusetts merchants out of business by forcing them to pay duties on goods they had long smuggled tax-free into port, then up the St. Lawrence River.