Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (4 page)

The French commander at the Forks, Captain Claude-Pierre Pécaudy, sieur de Contrecoeur, had no orders to attack Washington’s Virginians; he could defend himself, but he was not to initiate hostilities. Uncertain of Washington’s intentions, he sent Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, with thirty-five French soldiers and instructions to seek out Washington, discover his purposes, and order him out of territory claimed by the French, if Washington had advanced that far. Jumonville’s mission was diplomatic, and he had no expectation that his meeting with the British might end in fighting.
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Washington, of course, knew none of this, and when on May 27 a small force of his own, made up of militia and Iroquois led by Tanaghrisson, collided with the French soldiers, he gave the French no opportunity to explain themselves. The collision indeed was more of an ambush, in which Tanaghrisson and the Iroquois slaughtered French soldiers attempting to surrender. Washington had given the order to fire into the French after his men had surrounded the French encampment. The French, wholly surprised, put up little resistance and in fact attempted to throw themselves on the Virginians’ mercy after the Indians began killing men who were wounded. Washington’s description of the affair has the French firing first, the English responding with volleys that killed ten of the enemy and wounded one, and the remaining twenty-one French attempting to surrender. Testimony of witnesses suggests great confusion in the skirmish, with Jumonville being either shot by an Indian or murdered by Tanaghrisson while he tried to read his “summons” explaining his mission and to call a ceasefire. Washington later reported that the Indians, without orders, had
scalped and killed the wounded French soldiers. Whatever the truth, Washington appears not as a leader in control of his forces, but as one who allowed control to slip away—if he ever really had it. His famous remark in a letter to his brother John, to the effect that “I heard bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound,” was empty bravado from an officer who recognized something had gone wrong in this encounter with the French.
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The clash with the French had one unanticipated effect: It softened the antagonism Washington and Governor Dinwiddie had begun to feel for each other. Frenchmen had died in the confrontation of May 28, an encounter that confused observers then and long afterwards. The entire affair surely was unnecessary, but killing Frenchmen pleased Englishmen in these years, whatever the circumstances surrounding their deaths. Dinwiddie was delighted.

Neither Washington nor Dinwiddie ever acknowledged their feeling about each other, but just a few days before the firefight with the French, Washington complained bitterly to Dinwiddie that neither he nor his officers were paid enough. What he meant was that they were not paid as much as the soldiers in British regiments were, and they resented the disparity. In this complaint he was speaking for himself as well as for his officers and troops; indeed, his own feelings drove his anger as much as anything his troops said. To his credit, he did not scant the interests of common soldiers, though the demands of his officers moved him even more. He knew that common soldiers on enlisting asked immediately who their paymaster was. It was a question with an edge, because the answer was ordinarily the colonel of the regiment. In March, Washington had accepted that responsibility when the appointee Joshua Fry, the officer to whom he was to report, died, and the command with the rank of lieutenant colonel—with the responsibility of paymaster—was given to him by Dinwiddie.
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Washington answered his soldiers’ discontent with assurances that things would improve once the legislature acted to provide the financial underpinnings of military action. Dinwiddie had worried not that ordinary soldiers might leave the service, but that the officers in the Virginia Regiment and their immediate commander, George Washington, would. The disagreements between the two men had begun before the firefight with the French. Washington had first opened up the question of pay earlier in May. Dinwiddie reacted with bluntness, saying
that Washington’s complaints were “ill timed” and not “founded in such real Cause as I am sorry to find You think they are.… The first objection to pay,” he wrote, “should have been made before engaging in the Service.” To this Washington replied, “I could not object to the Pay before I knew it,” and then reviewed for Dinwiddie’s benefit the history of their earlier discussions of pay and why what was offered to a Virginian officer was less than what a member of the British Army in America received.
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The intricacies of this exchange included references to compensation for certain “necessaries” an officer received or did not receive—the leading example being his “regimentals” (uniforms). Irrelevance soon made its way into the argument, with back-and-forth over pay allowed officers in the 1746 expedition to Canada. Washington also remarked unfavorably on the quality of the rations provided to officers in camp.

At some point in the fray Washington threatened to resign. It was a thought that grew far more from his conception and feeling about military service than from a simple desire to have more pay. He wrote Dinwiddie at this time that the complaints from the officers were “not frivolous,” but “are founded on strict Reason: for my own part, it is a matter almost indifferent whether I serve for full pay, or as a generous volunteer; indeed, did my circumstances correspond with my Inclinations, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter: for the motives that lead me here were pure and Noble; I had no view of acquisition but that of Honour, by serving faithfully my King and Country.”
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There is in this declaration the beginnings of an idea of disinterested service that would grow and lead to action in the Revolution. For now it would carry him into a full-scale attempt to win a commission in the British army. He was surrounded by men who held such commissions, and he would soon serve with them. At this moment, just before he fought an important battle in the Ohio, he felt undervalued, even though he commanded a force of considerable size against an old enemy. The resentments evoked by his situation were not to leave him for years, though they subsided somewhat after the Jumonville affair.

In the two weeks that followed the battle with the French, Washington received supplies and reinforcements from Virginia until his command
numbered around four hundred men. Among the supplies were weapons: light artillery, nine guns capable of firing small shells. He also began the construction of a fort at Great Meadows, Pennsylvania, a low palisade of logs enclosing an area that conceivably could hold seventy men. He called it Fort Necessity, but what the fort was for is not entirely clear: It could house supplies, including ammunition, but it was dominated by high ground and was unsuitable for serious defense.
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Washington soon revealed that he did not have defense in mind. He had little knowledge of French numbers at Fort Duquesne, at the Forks, but he was determined to drive them out, and in mid-June he began his advance toward them. The French meanwhile had received heavy reinforcements and could soon count a thousand soldiers, more than twice Washington’s number. Washington had about fifty miles of rough terrain to cover to get at them and soon found that making his way through heavy woods and hills that seemed like tall mountains would yield little besides many dead horses, broken wagons, and exhausted troops. Near the end of June, he learned that his enemy possessed a much greater force than his own and was on the way to attack. Turning around was humiliating, but he nonetheless retreated to Fort Necessity.

Fort Necessity was not a fort, though it was called one by the English forces. It resembled nothing so much as a circle made by a palisade of recently cut wood, no more than seven feet in height. It was located in a large meadow, surrounded by high ground. The circle—or palisade—was about 53 feet in diameter; its perimeter measured 168 feet. An entrance of about 3.5 feet was cut on the southwest side of the fort. Washington raised Fort Necessity quickly, and claimed that, with it, “I shall not fear the attack of 500 Men.”
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Inside, he had a small, rickety storehouse built—the roof of which leaked, as he was to discover when rain began to fall—and there he stored the small stock of powder and lead he had carried forward. Since the fort could not accommodate all of his troops, he ordered outworks dug—trenches, not redoubts. The soil was soft, almost a marsh, and a few days after the trenches were completed, they filled up with water.

By the time his soldiers reached Great Meadows, in near flight, many were in bad shape. At least one hundred suffered from sicknesses of various sorts, probably induced by bad diet and the unsanitary
conditions often found in American camps. Fort Necessity hardly afforded the care that might have readied them for battle.

The Indians were nominally under the leadership of Tanaghrisson, customarily referred to as the Half King in the letters of Washington, who chose this moment to detach himself from the English at Great Meadows. He had expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of the palisade that passed as the fort; he had, after all, seen the powerful structures the French had built and were building at Fort Duquesne. The English fort would not stop anyone of force, he said.
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A few days before Washington bottled himself up at Great Meadows, they had listened to him proclaiming the desire of the English to protect Indian interests. Washington had declared in the conference with the Indians that it was the purpose of the governor of Virginia to defend Indian lands that presumably were being threatened by the French. It does not take much thought to imagine how the Indians regarded such assurance. The history that they all knew held scenes of Virginians advancing into the West, pushing the Indians aside when they did not kill them, while converting woods, groves, and meadows into farms and hamlets. If no such remembrances entered into Indian consciousness, the knowledge of French infantry advancing up the river removed any possibility that Indian warriors would throw their lives away defending a circular fence against overwhelming power.

On July 2, Washington received warning that the French were only a few miles away. When he discovered the next day that they were almost upon him, he reacted as if he were encountering the French army in Europe. His first impulse was to march his troops out in a formation designed to array armies against one another in the open. Bravery, honor, and tradition were served in battles fought in such circumstances. There were surely brave and honorable men on both sides in the battle that followed, but the French took the hills that dominated the fort and proceeded to pick off the men crouching behind the palisade and in the outworks. The French looked downward from concealment behind trees and bushes, while the Virginians, exposed in their positions, looked upward and saw few of their enemy. After taking casualties, the Virginians, some of whom had broken into the supply of rum, were willing to surrender. The French offered terms—among them that after surrendering the enemy soldiers would give their word not to return to the Ohio Country for a year, free the French
prisoners they had taken earlier, and supply two hostages, both officers, to secure their agreement to the surrender. Once such terms were agreed to, the French would allow the defeated to march off with their arms, colors, and personal property. The terms required Washington’s signature, which he gave in the dim light of candles, unaware that he was signing a document in French that carried the admission that he was responsible for the “assassination” in June of Jumonville, a confession of guilt that he did not feel and had no intention of agreeing to. But his name on this hastily composed document was there and would be used against him for years afterwards by the French enemy.
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It was a costly defeat. Not only had Washington made a damaging concession to the French version of the struggle for the Ohio Country; he had suffered one hundred killed and wounded. The day following, he led his tattered three hundred back to Wills Creek, where many of them began deserting. They were a broken force; he, though not broken in body or spirit, was badly bruised.

He may not even have thought much about his part in the surrender of Fort Necessity, but others had, and their judgments soon affected his own. One in particular, Governor Robert Dinwiddie, seems surprising, for in the weeks immediately following the defeat, the governor concealed his disappointment in Washington. He did not upbraid him for action that appeared rash or at best poorly planned. Nor did many others, at least not in public. The House of Burgesses, which like all legislative bodies was filled with military experts, said little but, later in September, passed a resolution of thanks to Washington and his officers “for their late gallant and brave Behavior in the Defense of their Country in the battle at Fort Necessity.” William Fairfax, by now almost a surrogate father of Washington, wrote a thoughtful and kind letter of reassurance, comparing the battle at Fort Necessity to “Marlboro’s Campaigns” as examples of “many wise Retreats performed that were not called Flights.” Comparison to Marlborough would have pleased any British commander, but whatever good effect Colonel Fairfax hoped to achieve slipped in September when he referred to the encounter at Fort Necessity as a “rout.” Still, the blunt phrasing did not offend, for Fairfax indicated that he had not lost confidence in Washington’s leadership.
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Washington had hardly begun to think through the meaning of his
failure at the Forks of the Ohio when Governor Dinwiddie ordered him to return to the western edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains with the Virginia Regiment, a unit that now existed more on paper than in reality, so fragmented were its companies. In the West once more, according to the governor’s instructions, he should resume operations against the French. Taken by surprise, Washington objected and managed to postpone anything resembling compliance.