America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (11 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
Hannah’s Escape
Anne Hutchinson’s followers who joined the Quakers, Mary Dyer, and who also defiantly returned to Boston, was arrested, stripped in public, and severely lashed. When Dyer returned to Boston a second time with two Quaker men, all three were convicted of blasphemy and the two men were hanged. Told to leave Boston, Mary Dyer refused.
On June 1, 1660, she too was executed.
Anne Hutchinson, Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Dustin—each woman’s story carried its own moral for the people of New England.
The Puritan fathers believed that the banishment of Anne Hutchinson—along with the execution of Quakers and the banning of Catholics in Massachusetts—would end dissent and bring God’s blessings on the colony. After King Philip’s War, it was thought that the death and dismemberment of Metacom and the symbolic triumph of Mary Rowlandson would end the cataclysmic wars with the Indians. And again in 1697, the victory of Hannah Dustin over the Abenaki and the end of King William’s War was expected to bring peace with the French.
All were short-lived visions.
a Atermath z
Any hope for the British to win peace with the French and their Indian allies was shattered when the next phase of fighting, known in America as Queen Anne’s War, began in 1702.39 With different tribes allying themselves with both sides once more, the conflict spread as far south as St. Augustine, which the English attacked and burned in 1702.
In 1704, an English force moved out of South Carolina and attacked Spain’s Florida missions in what became known as the Apalachee | 79 \
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Massacre. This phase of the war nearly wiped out the remnants of the tribes who had once battled Spanish conquistadors and eventually accepted the Spanish missions and Catholicism, and for whom the Appalachian Mountains were later named. Hundreds were killed, and many more were taken captive and sold as slaves. About eight hundred Apalachees fled west into French Louisiana, where they were greeted by yet another catastrophic epidemic.40
In the winter of 1704, a combined French and Indian force attacked the settlement at Deerfield, an English outpost in remote western Massachusetts. After a heavy snowfall built up a ramp that allowed the raiders to easily mount the village’s palisade, the ensuing massacre left fifty-seven of Deerfield’s settlers dead. Again, this episode produced captives and captivity accounts. Among the most famous of these stories was the tale of Deerfield’s minister, John Williams, famed as the “redeemed captive.” But as with the tale of Anne and Susan Hutchinson, the fate of another Deerfield captive went untold for a very long time. Eunice Williams, the daughter of the “redeemed captive,” chose to marry her Indian captor and remain in Canada.
Queen Anne’s War lasted until 1713, ending in the Treaty of Utrecht, which extended England’s American possessions at the expense of France. But the French and English contest for America was far from over.
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1714 George I becomes first Hanoverian king of England.
1715
In South Carolina, Yamasee Indians, encouraged by the Spanish, massacre English settlers.
1717
First Freemasons lodge opens in London.
1718
New Orleans founded by French.
1727 George II becomes king of England.
1729 In Louisiana, Natchez Indians massacre three hundred French soldiers and settlers.
1732 Georgia, last of the thirteen British colonies, is established as a defensive buffer against the Spanish in Florida; Roman Catholics are prohibited under its charter.
George Washington is born in Virginia.
1739 War of Jenkins’ Ear fought between Britain and Spain, as part of the wider War of Austrian Succession, fought among European powers.
1741 Major Scots-Irish migration to America to escape persecution in Ulster, Ireland.
1743–1748 King George’s War fought between British and French in North America, as part of the wider War of the Austrian Succession.
1753 French forces construct three forts in the Ohio River Valley.
1754 On April 16, the French expel the Virginians from the fort they are building at the forks of the Monongahela and Ohio rivers.
On May 27, George Washington ambushes a French party; on July 3–4, the French force Washington to surrender.
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1755 Defeat of British general Braddock by French and Indians in western Pennsylvania.
1756–1763 The Seven Years’ War is formally declared in Europe.
1759 British capture Quebec; British general Wolfe and French leader Montcalm are both killed in battle.
1760 George III becomes king of Great Britain.
Montreal surrenders to British forces.
1762 Boston lawyer James Otis issues his first political tract,
A Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives
, arguing that American colonists have the rights of Englishmen.
1763 Treaty of Paris is signed, ending the Seven Years’ War (and the French and Indian War). Britain becomes the dominant power in the Americas; France retains New Orleans; Florida is ceded to Britain by Spain.
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Associate yourself with Men of good Quality if you Esteem your own Reputation; for ’tis better to be alone than in bad Company.
—R ules of Civility and Decent Behavior,
R ule 56 (1640)
Formal attacks & platoon firing would never answer against the savages and Canadiens. It ought to be laid down as a maxim to attack them first, to fight them in their own way, and go against them light & naked, as they come against us.
—Captain Adam Stephens,
Virginia Ranger (1754)
I fortunately escaped without a wound, tho’ the right Wing where I stood was exposed to & received all the Enemy’s fire and was the part where the man was killed. . . . I can with trust assure you, I heard Bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.
—George Washington
(May 31, 1754)
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a
Ohio River Valley—May 1754
Deep in pennsylvania’s western wilderness, with a small force of bad-tempered, ill-trained, rain-soaked Virginia militiamen and a group of Indians he barely trusted, twenty-two-year-old George Washington had a decision to make.
Hundreds of miles from his superiors in Williamsburg, the young lieutenant colonel had been ordered not to engage any French forces should he encounter them—there was peace between the French and British. But now here he was, faced with a small detachment of French soldiers bivouacked in the Pennsylvania woods. Washington believed that many more French troops might soon follow. He could withdraw, report, and await orders. Or he could make a stand, stop this scouting party, and await reinforcements from Virginia.
Ambitious but untested in combat, headstrong, perhaps even fool-hardy—the young Virginia planter’s son chose to strike first, before the French could attack. He was urged on by his Indian ally, a Mingo tribal chief named Tanaghrisson, known to the English as the Half King.
In the early morning of May 28, 1754, with some of his men still lost and wandering in the thick Ohio River Valley wilds about sixty miles south of present-day Pittsburgh, Washington moved his forty backwoodsmen and their Indian allies through the dense woods.
There would be no close-order march or precise firing lines accompanied by drums and pipes, in European military textbook fashion.
Instead Washington’s men moved Indian-style, stealthily surrounding | 87 \
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the French from a rock cliff overlooking the small clearing where they were camped.
All through the night before, a steady, pouring rain had soaked the men. Now they readied their powder and dried their “Brown Besses,” the notoriously inaccurate flintlock muskets they carried. In the clearing below them, the thirty or so Frenchmen began to wake, creeping from beneath blankets or out of rough lean-tos made from tree branches to start fires and cook breakfast. A Frenchman spotted one of the Virginians and cried out in alarm. In an instant, two shots rang out. The Virginia militiamen had, without a direct order from Washington, begun to fire on the French camp. In the pandemonium and thick fog of acrid gunsmoke hanging over the scene, the French soldiers gamely tried to return fire. Washington’s Indian allies cut off any escape. The firefight lasted a mere ten or fifteen minutes. When it was over, one of Washington’s men was dead and another three had been wounded. The French had suffered fourteen dead and wounded.
Another twenty Frenchmen had been captured unharmed. Among the French wounded was a thirty-five-year-old ensign named Joseph de Jumonville.
What happened then has been the subject of conjecture and debate for more than 250 years. But these next few moments changed history—of that there is no doubt. Far from the halls of power in London and Paris, a world war had begun.
After the confusion of battle, as clouds of musket smoke—the thick bluish gray haze that inspired the phrase “fog of war”—slowly lifted, and as the wounded lay around him moaning, Washington struggled to understand the French officer. Translators on either side provided little help. Jumonville gestured frantically, waving some papers at the Virginian. Only after considerable misunderstanding did his purpose | 88 \
Washington’s Confession
become clear. This small detachment and the injured Jumonville were not scouts, the vanguard of a French invasion force, as Washington suspected. Carrying a message to the English colonial authorities in Virginia, Jumonville was on a diplomatic mission. The letter the young officer waved at Washington was from the French governor in Canada and warned the English that the Ohio River Valley was French territory. It went on to threaten that no English expeditions should enter the area and that France would accept no English settlements in the area.
As Washington’s interpreter struggled to make out the gist of the Frenchman’s diplomatic letter—a thinly veiled threat aimed directly at the English crown—there was a flurry of motion. The chief who had guided and advised Washington, the Half King, moved beside Jumonville. Without warning, the Half King swung his hatchet, bury-ing it in the wounded Frenchman’s head, saying in French, “Thou art not dead yet, my father.” Reaching into Jumonville’s shattered skull, the Half King pulled out some brain matter and smeared it on his hands. As if on signal, the rest of the Half King’s warriors fell on the wounded French captives. The Indians methodically scalped and stripped the Frenchmen as they were killed. One French soldier’s decapitated head was then impaled on a stick.1
George Washington’s later descriptions and reports of this seemingly minor battle and its horrific aftermath were brief and lacked these grim details. The twenty-two-year-old planter’s son with precious little military experience first simply reported, “The French sent a detachment to reconnoiter our Camp and obtain intelligence of our strength & position; notice of which being given by the Scouts [Indians], GW
[Washington] marched at the head of the party, attacked, killed 9 or 10, & captured 20 odd.” In a more expansive follow-up letter written | 89 \
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the next day to his superior, Governor Robert Dinwiddie, Washington mentioned Jumonville’s death almost in passing. After spending considerable time complaining about the “trifling pay” received by colonial officers and the dissent this was causing within the ranks, Washington noted only that Jumonville was “amongst those that were killd.” It was not an outright lie by the man later immortalized as the relentless truth-teller of cherry tree fame. Perhaps, at this moment, Washington thought, the less said the better. 2
Two days later, Washington wrote a much more buoyant description of this “most signal victory” to his brother Jack, in which he added, almost as a postscript: “I fortunately escaped without a wound, tho’ the right Wing where I stood was exposed to & received all the Enemy’s fire and was the part where the man was killed & the rest wounded. I can with truth assure you, I heard bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.”3 (When King George II later read of this account, he supposedly retorted, “He would not say so had he been used to hear many.”) Washington’s terse description of a questionable decision on his part—clearly at odds with his orders not to engage in hostilities— made no mention of the Half King’s grisly attack on Jumonville, a wounded prisoner. Reports detailing the death of Jumonville and how the Mingo warriors then scalped the wounded French captives only emerged afterward. Apparently the Half King was eager to avenge the death of his own father at French hands. Nor did Washington’s account agree with the one delivered by the only French survivor of the battle, whose version of the events placed the blame for killing the wounded French soldiers squarely on Washington and his Virginians.
The lone Frenchman who had escaped the ambush and watched the massacre of the French company from hiding, had made his way back | 90 \
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to the French command. Eager for vengeance, a company of French troops was dispatched to track down Washington’s Virginians. They were led by Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers, the brother of the dead Jumonville. When the French pursuers reached the scene of the battle in the clearing, they found the unburied bodies of their comrades and one severed head gazing at them from a pole.
The incident to which Washington had given his “spin” in such convenient brevity set off a chain of events that started a war about which the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire later wrote, “Such was the complication of political interests that a cannon shot fired in America could give the signal that set Europe ablaze.” That war, the Seven Years’ War—known in American history as the French and Indian War—cost the lives of some 853,000 soldiers and perhaps hundreds of thousands more civilians worldwide. 4
In America, this deadly conflict’s repercussions would ultimately carry the thirteen colonies on the road to revolution. This brief battle, involving a young colonial officer in an utterly remote backwater of England’s great empire, altered the course of American history. It led to the demise of France as a competing force in North America. The policies that flowed from England’s ultimate victory would also alter the course of American history, as fledgling Americans saw themselves in a new light and increasingly balked at decisions handed down in London. And it would provide many young colonial officers and soldiers with their first battlefield tests, perhaps even hinting that Bri-tannia might rule, but was not invincible.
