His Excellency: George Washington (4 page)

As Washington sought to understand the translation of this diplomatic message, Tanacharison, who apparently spoke fluent French and therefore grasped Jumonville’s point before Washington did, decided to take matters into his own hands. He stepped up to where Jumonville lay, in French declared, “Thou art not yet dead, my father,” then sank his hatchet into Jumonville’s head, split his skull in half, pulled out his brain, and washed his hands in the mixture of blood and tissue. His warriors then fell upon the wounded French soldiers, scalped them all, and decapitated one and put his head on a stake. All this happened under the eyes of the shocked and hapless commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Washington.
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While he did not tell an outright lie to Dinwiddie, neither did Washington speak the whole truth about the episode. In his diary he attempted to convince himself that Jumonville’s claim to be on a diplomatic mission was “a pure Pretence; that they never intended to come to us but as Enemies.” In effect, he was rationalizing the massacre to himself. In a letter home to his brother, he glossed over the killings by focusing on his own personal response to the sense of danger: “I heard Bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the Sound.” This self-promoting statement made it into the Virginia newspapers, prompting a flurry of stories depicting Washington as America’s first war hero. The bravado remark even made the rounds in London, where no less than George II reportedly dismissed it as youthful bragging: “He would not say so, if he had been used to hear many.”
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Whether he was a hero, a braggart, or an accomplice in murder, the skirmish at Jumonville Glen had convinced Washington that his detachment, though outnumbered by the French forces in the area, could hold its own until reinforcements arrived. “We have just finish’d a small palisaded Fort,” he wrote Dinwiddie, “in which with my small Numbers I shall not fear the attack of 500 Men.” He named the crude circular stockade where he intended to make his stand Fort Necessity, a glancing recognition of his precarious situation. In early June, Dinwiddie endorsed the decision to defend the fort, while also sending word that the commander of the Virginia Regiment, Joshua Fry, had recently died after falling off his horse, making Washington the new man in charge, with the rank of colonel. (Yet again, another’s death led to his own advancement.) A militia detachment of about two hundred was also on the way to reinforce him.
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To his credit, Washington realized that his fate depended less on the British reinforcements than on the support of local Indians, who continued to control the balance of power in the region. On June 18, Tanacharison arranged a Council of Indians at which Washington responded to questions about English intentions toward the Ohio Country. He apprised the several chiefs that the sole purpose of the English military effort was “to maintain your Rights . . . to make that whole Country sure to you.” He claimed that the English had no other goal than to recover for the various Indian tribes “those Lands which the French had taken from them.” This was a bald-faced lie, rendered necessary by Washington’s recognition, as he put it, “that we can do nothing without them.” Apparently the chiefs found the argument unpersuasive, or perhaps they simply knew that the size of the advancing French force made any alliance with Washington’s embattled troops a bad gamble. At any rate, Tanacharison led all the Indians into the woods, leaving Fort Necessity to its fate. Captain James McKay arrived with his reinforcements shortly thereafter, whereupon Washington and McKay began to debate command authority, McKay claiming that his commission as a captain in the British army trumped Washington’s colonial rank as a colonel.
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They could not argue for long, because by early July they learned what Tanacharison had probably known earlier, namely that a force of about eleven hundred French and Indians led by Louis Coulon de Villiers, who happened to be Jumonville’s aggrieved brother, was about to descend upon them. On the morning of July 3 the first French soldiers appeared on the horizon about six hundred yards from the fort. Accounts disagree as to who fired the first shots. Because Washington had only cleared the trees and brush sixty yards around Fort Necessity, the entire French and Indian force closed to the edge of the perimeter, took refuge behind trees and stumps, and began to pour a murderous fire down upon the beleaguered defenders. The result was a slow-paced slaughter lasting for nine hours. A driving downpour filled up the trenches inside and outside Fort Necessity, rendering much of the gunpowder useless. By dark nearly a third of Washington’s force had been killed or wounded, and the survivors, sensing imminent catastrophe, broke into the rum supply to bolster their courage. Rumors spread within the garrison that four hundred Indian warriors were marching to join the French, anticipating a massacre laden with trophies and scalps. The defenders faced not just humiliating defeat, but total annihilation.
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Washington’s version of what happened next, reiterated and revised throughout his life, does not fit the bulk of the evidence. He claimed that the defenders of Fort Necessity were inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy—more than three hundred dead or wounded by the end of the day—so the French commander, Captain de Villiers, decided to call a truce and propose generous terms of surrender. In return for promising to remove themselves from the Ohio Country for one year, the defenders were permitted to evacuate the fort carrying their arms, their colors, and their honor. In Washington’s version, the battle at Fort Necessity was not a defeat so much as a stalemate, in which the Virginians and British conducted themselves with gallantry and composure despite the superior French force arrayed against them.
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The more unattractive truth was that Washington had placed his troops in a hopelessly vulnerable position at Fort Necessity. He had suffered one hundred casualties compared with only five deaths on the enemy side. The relentless musket fire and horrible weather conditions had caused the defenders to panic, and the panic only intensified when news of imminent Indian reinforcements created the prospect of a wholesale massacre of the garrison. (In the Articles of Capitulation the French promised to “restrain, as much as shall be in our power, the Indians that are with us.”) Most awkwardly, the Articles of Capitulation referred to “the Assassination of M. de Jumonville,” meaning that Washington’s signature on the surrender document endorsed the conclusion that the British in general and he in particular were responsible for murdering a diplomatic emissary of the French crown, which in turn meant that the British were responsible for the hostile action that launched the French and Indian War.
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Washington went to his grave claiming that he never realized that the word “assassination” was included in the Articles of Capitulation, and blamed the misunderstanding on a poor translation from the French original and the rain-soaked character of the document. He claimed that he would never have agreed to such terms if he had known their full meaning. Given the utterly desperate situation he faced, however, it is difficult to imagine what choice he had, which is probably one reason why he felt obliged to deny any sense of desperation.

He led the beleaguered remnant of his regiment out of Fort Necessity on July 4—a day he surely never thought he would celebrate—with his reputation up for grabs. Horatio Sharpe, the governor of Maryland, published a critical account of Washington’s conduct at Fort Necessity, describing the battle as a debacle and Washington himself as a dangerous mixture of inexperience and impetuosity. The French, for their part, found him a convenient symbol of Anglo-American treachery for his role in the Jumonville massacre. They had confiscated his journal at Fort Necessity and cited the misleading section on the Jumonville incident as evidence of his duplicity. The French commander in North America, General Duquesne, identified Washington as the epitome of dishonor: “He lies very much to justify the assassination of sieur de Jumonville, which has turned on him, and which he had the stupidity to confess in his capitulation. . . . There is nothing more unworthy and lower and even blacker, than the sentiments and the way of thinking of this Washington. It would have been a pleasure to read his outrageous journal under his very nose.” For French propaganda purposes Washington became the ideal villain, and he was featured as such in an epic poem published in France designed to demonstrate the evil character of the enemy.
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Back in Williamsburg, on the other hand, William Fairfax was using his influence to depict Fort Necessity as a noble, if futile, effort to block the French invasion of Virginia’s western lands. After all, if the French regarded Washington as a diabolical character, did that not constitute a recommendation of sorts? Responding to pressure from Fairfax and Dinwiddie, in September the House of Burgesses issued an order recognizing Washington and several of his officers at Fort Necessity “for their late gallant and brave Behavior in the Defense of their Country.” Whatever happened at Jumonville Glen, however ill-advised the futile stand at Fort Necessity, the young man was unquestionably brave, and with the outbreak of war on the frontier, Virginia needed a hero who also happened to look the part.
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Though vindicated, Washington himself felt frustrated: “What did I get by this?” he asked his brother. “Why, after putting myself to a considerable expense in equipment and providing Necessarys for the Campaigne—I went out, was soundly beaten, lost them all—came in, and had my Commission taken from me.” The latter lament referred to the decision by the burgesses not to vote new taxes for a major expedition against the French, which meant that the Virginia Regiment was disbanded into several independent companies, leaving Washington to serve at a lower rank. This struck him as a gross insult. He was touchy about his rank; lacking aristocratic credentials like Fairfax, or London connections like Dinwiddie, his military position was his primary indication of social standing in the Virginia hierarchy. Rather than accept the demotion, he preferred to resign. He did so in November 1754, all the while convinced that he had found his proper calling as a soldier. “My inclinations,” he acknowledged, “are strongly bent to arms.” Events were about to demonstrate that he was in the ideal location to exercise those inclinations.
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MASSACRE AT THE MONONGAHELA

T
HE CATALYST
for these events arrived in Virginia in February 1755 with two regiments of British regulars, a sweeping mandate to assume supreme authority over British military policy for all of North America, and specific orders to launch the campaign against the French menace by capturing Fort Duquesne. His name was General Edward Braddock, a thirty-five-year veteran who knew all there was to know about drilling troops in garrison, something about waging war in the arenas of Europe, and nothing whatsoever about the kind of savage conditions and equally savage battlefields he would encounter in the American interior.

His superiors, hunched over maps in London, had described his mission as a triumphal procession through the Ohio Country, the capture of Fort Duquesne, and then a campaign to roll up the string of French forts on the Great Lakes and the eventual seizure of all of French Canada. No one even remotely familiar with the mountains, rivers, and Indian tribes within this terrain would have drawn up such orders. Braddock’s mission, in effect, was inherently impossible. He made it even more so by proceeding to issue imperious commands to the respective governors and legislatures of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania for additional funds, thereby alienating all the colonial governments. He sealed his fate completely at a meeting with a delegation of Indian chiefs by telling them that their historic claims to land in the Ohio Valley were worthless and that British troops had no need for aid from savages, prompting most of the tribes in the region to go over to the French. As Braddock saw it, he commanded the largest and best equipped military force ever assembled on the North American continent, making victory inevitable. In fact, the campaign was doomed from the start.
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In the spring of 1755, Washington had no inkling of these larger intractables. He was living at Mount Vernon, which he was leasing from Lawrence’s widow, trying to decide what to do with his life. His letterbook for this phase is a somewhat contaminated document, because he went back to revise his language on two later occasions, 1786–87 and 1797–98, in order to improve his spelling and syntax and conceal his youthful ambivalence. By restoring his original language alongside the revisions, the modern editors of his papers allow us to recover his confusion at this moment, along with his solicitous and awkwardly deferential attitude toward British authority as embodied in Braddock.

In March he wrote Robert Orme, Braddock’s chief of staff, in somewhat stilted fashion: “I must be ingenuous enough 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.” More than the educational experience of serving under a veteran British officer, Washington wanted the patronage that Braddock’s stature could provide. “I have now a good oppertunity,” he wrote his brother, “and shall not neglect it, of forming an acquaintance which may be serviceable hereafter, if I shall find it worth while to push my Fortune in the Military line.” His sensitivity about rank—once a colonel, he would now be only a captain—was resolved when Orme assured him that Braddock “will be very glad of your Company in his Family”—meaning as aide-de-camp on his staff—“by which all inconveniences of that kind [rank] will be obviated.” He joined Braddock’s swelling entourage of horses, wagons, and men at Frederick, Maryland, in early May 1755.
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Braddock recognized that he faced a massive logistical problem. In order to mount a proper siege of Fort Duquesne according to orthodox European-style standards for success, he required overwhelming superiority in both manpower and artillery. His main force of more than two thousand men needed to be fed along the route, his heavy cannon needed to be pulled by horses, and all the food for them needed to be carried on wagons, which required more horses—about 2,500 in all—plus the wagon masters and ubiquitous camp women following in the rear. This cumbersome cavalcade, stretching out over six miles, had to carve its own road through more than one hundred miles of wilderness terrain that Washington knew to be almost impassable and that even Braddock acknowledged “would occasion great Trouble and retard me considerably.” All of Braddock’s extensive military experience worked against him: he knew in considerable detail how to conduct a conventional campaign in Europe, but in the Ohio Country everything he knew proved either irrelevant or wrong.
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