His Excellency: George Washington (5 page)

After stepping off at a brisk pace in mid-May, Braddock’s column ground to a near halt once it hit the Alleghenies in June. Washington began to sense disaster at this time, writing his brother that “this prospect was soon clouded & all my hopes brought very low indeed when I found . . . they were halting to Level every Mole Hill, & to erect Bridges over every brook; by which means we were 4 Days gttg 12 Miles.” Stragglers were also being killed and scalped routinely, a sign that the Indian intelligence network was fully aware of their location and destination. Washington apprised Braddock that the ponderous pace of the baggage train virtually assured that they would be marooned in Indian country once the snows in the mountains began to make any advance at all impossible. He recommended that a “flying column” of twelve hundred lightly equipped troops be disengaged from the main body and proceed at full speed toward Fort Duquesne. Braddock accepted this advice, probably one of the reasons why Washington never engaged in the widespread Braddock bashing that haunted subsequent accounts of the eventual debacle. Just as the flying column went forward, Washington came down with dysentery and had to remain with the wagons in the rear. He extracted a promise from Braddock that, once they approached striking distance of their objective, he would be brought forward to participate in the attack. On July 8, as the advance party prepared to cross the Monongahela, though he was still feverish and afflicted with a painful case of hemorrhoids that required him to place cushions on his saddle, Washington rode forward to join Braddock.
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The disaster occurred the following day. Subsequent accounts of the battle, blaming Braddock for a tactical blunder in maneuvering his troops carelessly across several streams, have been discredited. Braddock’s mistake was not tactical but strategic—not understanding that European rules of war could not be imposed on America without translation. The engagement began as an accident of war rather than a planned ambush. A large reconnaissance detachment from Duquesne of nearly nine hundred men, two-thirds of them Indians, stumbled upon Braddock’s vanguard at the edge of a clearing in the forest, immediately spread out in a semicircle around the clearing, then started firing.

The Virginia troops rushed into the woods to engage the enemy at close quarters. The British regulars, obedient to their training, formed themselves into concentrated rows in the open field. Within the first ten minutes their ranks were decimated and panic set in. Despite heroic efforts by their officers to rally them, the regulars broke. The Virginia troops ended up being caught in the crossfire between the Indians and the British. Entire companies were wiped out by “friendly fire” from British muskets. As Washington described it later, “they behavd like Men, and died like Soldiers,” while the regulars “broke & run as sheep before Hounds.” Braddock himself, as fearless as he was obstinate, rode into the center of the killing zone and was quickly cut down with wounds in his shoulder and chest.
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With Braddock down and the other aides-de-camp casualties, it fell to Washington to rally the remnants. Riding back and forth amidst the chaos, two horses were shot out beneath him and four musket balls pierced his coat, but he miraculously escaped without a scratch, while, as he put it, “death was levelling my companions on every side of me.” Irony as well as destiny made its appearance on the battlefield that day. One of the few British officers to survive unhurt was Captain Thomas Gage, whom Washington would encounter as commander of the British army outside Boston twenty years later. In the rear, supervising the horses for the baggage train, was Daniel Boone, who also survived to become an American legend.
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It was a complete debacle. Out of a total force of thirteen hundred men, the British and Americans suffered over nine hundred casualties while the French and Indians reported twenty-three killed and sixteen wounded. For the rest of his life, Washington remembered the scenes of the dead and the screams of the wounded as they were being scalped. Braddock died three days into the retreat, and Washington buried him in the middle of the road, then ran wagons over the grave in order to prevent his body from being desecrated and his scalp claimed as a trophy. After reaching safety, Washington wrote his mother and brother to assure them he was alive: “As I have heard . . . a circumstantial acct of my death and dying Speech, I take this first opportunity of contradicting the first and assuring you that I have not, as Yet, composed the latter.”
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This piece of understated bravado masked Washington’s dominant reaction to the defeat, which initially was disbelief that a force so large and well equipped could be so thoroughly routed. Dinwiddie concurred, confessing that “it appears to me as a dream, wn I consider the Forces & the train of artillery he had with him.” But the more Washington thought about it, the more he realized that the very size of Braddock’s force, plus his cumbersome artillery train, which eventually proved useless, actually contributed to the fiasco. Braddock himself was not personally to blame, but rather the entire way of waging war he carried in his head, which simply did not work in that foreign country “over the Mountains,” where the forest-fighting tactics of the Indians reigned supreme. The relationship between officers and troops had to change in the frontier environment because “in this kind of Fighting, where being dispersd, each and every of them . . . has greater liberty to misbehave than if they were regularly, and compactly drawn up under the Eyes of their superior Officers.” For now, given the obvious fact that most of the Indian tribes were allied with the French, any conventional campaign on the Braddock model into the Ohio Country would meet the same fate. The massacre at the Monongahela was a costly and painful way to learn this hard lesson, but Washington learned it deep down, which was becoming his preferred way to absorb all the essential lessons.
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As for his reputation, for the second time he emerged from a disastrous defeat with enhanced status. No one blamed him for the tragedy—Braddock was the obvious and easy target—and he came to be called “the hero of the Monongahela” for rallying the survivors in an orderly retreat. His specialty seemed to be exhibiting courage in lost causes, or, as one newspaper account put it, he had earned “a high Reputation for Military Skill, Integrity, and Valor; tho’ Success has not always attended his Undertakings.” There was even talk—it was the first occasion—that his remarkable capacity to endure marked him as a man of destiny. “I may point out to the Public,” wrote Reverend Samuel Davies, “that heroic youth Col. Washington, who I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto preserved in so signal a Manner for some important Service to his Country.” This proved prescient later on, but for now it underlined the young man’s chief characteristic, which was a knack for sheer survival.
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THE REGIMENT

I
N AUGUST 1755,
though he was only twenty-three, Washington’s ascending reputation made him the obvious choice to command the newly created Virginia Regiment. In the next three and a half years he recruited, trained, and led what became an elite unit of, at times, over a thousand men which combined the spit-and-polish discipline of British regulars with the tactical agility and proficiency of Indian warriors. During this time the main theater of the French and Indian War, now officially declared, moved north to the Great Lakes, New England, and Canada, making the Virginia frontier a mere sideshow and Washington himself what one biographer has called “the forgotten man on a forgotten front.”
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But if he languished in obscurity from some larger strategic and historical perspective, the experience as commander in chief of Virginia’s army provided his most direct and intensive schooling in military leadership prior to his command of the Continental army twenty years later. Moreover, in part because the historical record begins to thicken during this phase, and in part because the young man was growing up, the mere glimpses we had before become fuller pictures, though still fuzzy at the edges. Finally, the Virginia Regiment itself was very much his own creation, the first institution over which he exercised executive authority, and in that sense was a projection of his own developing convictions as both an officer and an aspiring gentleman.

From start to finish, he complained, as he would throughout the War for Independence, he had been given responsibilities without the resources to meet them. “I have been posted . . . upon our cold and Barren Frontiers,” he lamented, “to perform I think I may say impossibilitys, that is, to protect from the Cruel Incursions of a Crafty Savage Enemy a line of Inhabitants of more than 350 Miles extent with a force inadequate to the taske.” What he meant was that the dominant Indian tribes of the Ohio Country, chiefly the Shawnee and Delaware, had interpreted Braddock’s defeat as a mandate to maraud and plunder all the English settlements west of the Blue Ridge. The initiative, the numbers, and the tactical advantage were on the enemy’s side: “No troops in the universe can guard against the cunning and wiles of Indians,” he explained. “No one can tell where they will fall, ’till the mischief is done, and then ’tis vain to pursue. The inhabitants see, and are convinced of this; which Makes each family afraid of standing in the gap of danger.” There were no set-piece battles, just savage skirmishes that often ended in massacres. As he saw it, he was responsible for providing security over a region that was inherently indefensible, the epitome of mission impossible.
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His effort to change this fatal chemistry began with a plea to Dinwiddie for more Indian allies. “Indians,” he claimed, “are the only match for Indians.” This was less a statement of racial or ethnic enlightenment than a practical assessment that ten Indians were worth more than one hundred Virginia soldiers in a forest fight. He strongly supported the attempt to recruit Catawba and then Cherokee warriors from the Carolinas and gave orders to his troops “to be cautious what they speak before them: as all of them understand english, and ought not to be affronted.” Despite his best efforts, the Indian populations of the region remained resolutely pro-French and the decisive factor in making his mission a wholly defensive holding action, which eventually took the shape of multiple forts or stockades strung out on the west side of the Blue Ridge and garrisoned by detachments of his Virginia “blues.”
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They were called that because of their distinctive uniforms, which Washington designed himself: “Every officer of the Virginia Regiment is, as soon as possible, to provide himself with uniform Dress, which is to be of fine Broad Cloath: The Coat Blue, faced and cuffed with Scarlet, and Trimmed with Silver: The Waistcoat Scarlet, with a plain Silver Lace, if to be had—the Breeches to be Blue, and every one to provide himself with a silver-laced Hat, of a Fashionable size.” The officers’ uniforms were but the outward manifestation of Washington’s larger goal, which was to make the Virginia Regiment a truly special unit, “the first in Arms, of any Troops on the Continent, in the present War.” They were to look sharper and drill with greater precision than any group of British regulars, and they were to master the mobile tactics of “bushfighting” with Indian-like proficiency. Within a year Washington believed he had created just such an elite force, which, because it was constantly engaged in combat operations patrolling the Virginia frontier, had a battle-tested edge no other colonial or British troops could match.
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His pride in them was both professional and personal. “If it shou’d be said,” he wrote Dinwiddie, “that the Troops of Virginia are Irregulars, and cannot expect more notice than other Provincials, I must beg leave to differ, and observe in turn, that we want nothing but Commissions from His Majesty to make us as regular a Corps as any upon the Continent.” He had come to regard himself as superior to anyone, British or American, in conducting this kind of guerrilla war, and it rankled him that neither he nor his troops were paid at the same rate as British regulars. “We cannot conceive,” he complained to Dinwiddie in what turned out to be prophetic language, “that because we are Americans, we shou’d therefore be deprived of the Benefits Common to British Subjects.” His protest on this score was more personal than ideological; that is, it derived less from any political convictions about colonial rights than from his own disappointment that neither he nor his regiment were sufficiently appreciated. In the spring of 1756 he traveled all the way to Boston, his first trip to the northern colonies, to plead his case for equal pay and higher rank as a British officer to William Shirley, then acting commander for North America, who listened attentively but did nothing. He was a serious young man who took himself and his Virginia Regiment seriously, and expected others to do the same.
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He also managed to combine a broad-gauged grasp of his mission, in all its inherent frustrations, with a meticulous attention to detail. He drafted literally thousands of orders that all began “You are hereby ordered to . . .” and then proceeded, in language more incisive and grammatically cogent than his earlier writing, to focus tightly on a specific assignment: If you come upon a massacred settlement, harvest the corn crop before moving on; when constructing stockades, clear the surrounding trees and brush beyond musket range (a lesson he had learned from Fort Necessity); when a ranger in the regiment is killed in action, continue his salary for twenty-eight days to pay for his coffin; if ambushed in a clearing, rush toward the tree line from which the shots came while the enemy is reloading. Officers were held to a higher standard of deportment, to include controlling their wives: “There are continual complaints to me of the misbehavior of your wife,” he apprised one captain. “If she is not immediately sent from the camp . . . I shall take care to drive her out myself, and suspend you.” The old adage applied: if God were in the details, Colonel Washington would have been there to greet Him upon arrival.
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