George Washington Read online

  In keeping with Forbes’s plan to safeguard his supply line and avoid lengthy wagon trains, Bouquet anchored the army’s advance upon carefully fortified depots, established forty to fifty miles apart; the first of these was at Raystown, about 100 miles from Fort Duquesne, where the army’s advance units, including half of the 1st Virginia Regiment under the experienced Lieutenant Colonel Stephen, concentrated in early summer. Unlike Braddock’s command, which had enjoyed no such safety net, if by some mischance Forbes’s army met with a check in the wilderness it would have fall-back positions within reach, so preventing a local defeat from escalating into a headlong rout. Somewhat ironically, as Forbes himself acknowledged, this “protected advance” strategy was taken directly from a recent military manual, published in 1754 by a French officer, Lancelot, Comte Turpin de Crissé.15

  Like Forbes, with whom he worked well, Bouquet was an unusually enlightened soldier, schooled in the traditions of European warfare but also keen to adapt to American conditions. When Colonels Washington and Byrd each proposed the radical step of dressing their men “after the Indian fashion” for the coming campaign, both the general and his second in command greeted their initiative with enthusiasm. As so few genuine Indians now remained with the army, white men equipped like “savages” could prove useful as scouts, Forbes told Bouquet, “for as you justly observe, the shadow may often be taken for the reality, and I must confess in this country, we must comply and learn the art of war, from enemy Indians or anything [sic] else who have seen the country and war carried on in it.”16

  Washington’s readiness to field an entire regiment dressed like tribal warriors, swapping their regulation coats, breeches, and spatter-dashes for “Indian leggings,” shirts, blankets, and even “breech-clouts” (loincloths), is intriguing, particularly given his previous insistence upon high standards of regimental dress and his personal penchant for fine clothing. That the same man who in 1754 had naïvely assumed that blood-red uniforms would impress Indians could now adopt such informal “Indian dress” for officers and men alike also reveals the impact of frontier warfare upon Washington’s evolution as a soldier; by 1758, hard reality had supplanted romantic fancy. As Washington explained to Bouquet that July, “proceeding as light as any Indian in the woods” was “an unbecoming dress I confess for an officer, but convenience rather than show I think should be consulted.”

  When 200 of Washington’s men arrived at Raystown under the veteran Major Lewis, all decked out Indian-fashion, Bouquet was delighted. He thanked Washington for “this extraordinary dispatch,” whose “dress should be our pattern on this expedition.”

  As Bouquet prepared to march his troops across the forbidding, forested Allegheny Mountains, he was not simply concerned with appearances. During the first weeks of August, on the fields outside Raystown camp, he drilled his regulars and provincials in tactics intended to repel any attack upon his line of march in the woods. One unusually observant eyewitness, the Reverend Thomas Barton, noted that Bouquet arrayed his troops in four parallel columns, each of two men abreast and separated by about fifty yards. After marching for some distance in this formation, the troops shook out into one long, two-deep line, capable of keeping up “an incessant fire.” This fusillade was followed by “a sham pursuit with shrieks and halloos in the Indian way” before the line rallied and reformed. As Bouquet informed Forbes, such “a very long front” would stymie the standard French and Indian tactics, which invariably sought to outflank and surround the enemy.17

  Washington was initially ordered to concentrate his men at Fort Cumberland and then start building a road northward to connect with Raystown. Because of the supply and transport problems that dogged the campaign, it was only in late June that Washington could begin his advance to Wills Creek, which he reached on July 3 with the remaining five companies of his own regiment. Colonel Byrd arrived four days later with eight companies of the 2nd Virginia Regiment and about fifty Indians he had brought from the Carolinas. Washington now contemplated surroundings that were familiar, if scarcely auspicious: it was from Wills Creek that he had embarked upon his fruitless diplomatic mission in 1753; from there that he had set off on two ill-fated attempts to seize the Forks of the Ohio in 1754 and 1755; and the rickety stockades of Fort Cumberland had often provoked controversy during the frustrating years of command since then.

  As Washington awaited further orders, Forbes dropped what proved to be a bombshell for the Virginians. Acting on the advice of his engineers and of his cousin James Glen, the former lieutenant governor of South Carolina, the general announced that he had now changed his mind about the army’s route to Fort Duquesne. Instead of doglegging down from Raystown to Fort Cumberland and then following the old Braddock Road, it would push directly westward across the Alleghenies to the Forks of the Ohio. Explaining his reasoning to William Pitt, Forbes emphasized that this would shorten his route, and “labor of cutting the road, [by] about 40 miles.” Indeed, using Braddock’s Road would save little work, as in the three years since it was first cut it had become swamped by the returning forest.18

  Washington, Byrd and their fellow Virginians were aghast at this unexpected, last-minute change of plan. More than disinterested military factors lay behind their response. Ever the proud Virginian, Washington was outraged that his own colony now looked set to lose the monopoly of what would likely become the key postwar artery to the unexploited west, giving access to those rich and tempting lands that his expert surveyor’s eye had assessed when he first penetrated the Ohio Country in 1753. The fact that the profits would be reaped by the Old Dominion’s archrival Pennsylvania only salted the wound.

  In coming weeks, Washington worked assiduously to convince Bouquet, and through him Forbes, that Braddock’s Road remained the best route forward. The resulting rift between Washington and his commanders dealt a damaging blow to his reputation as a trustworthy officer worthy of the king’s commission, and he had no one but himself to blame.

  Although Washington lost no opportunity to champion the old road and disparage the new, for many weeks Bouquet refused to question his motives for doing so. Washington’s track record as a brave, selfless officer gave no reason to suspect that he was acting for anything other than the good of His Majesty’s service. Although he had been granted leave to travel to Winchester, where he was standing to represent Frederick County in the Assembly elections, Washington did not take it. This decision was influenced by rumors that “a body of light troops” would soon be pushed forward; keen as ever for a chance to pursue his quest for military glory, Washington lobbied Bouquet to employ both himself and his regiment.19

  Indeed, on July 24 —the very same day that Washington topped the Winchester poll, bagging 309 of the 397 votes cast—Bouquet assured him that Forbes had mentioned several times how much he depended upon him and his Virginians and would lose no opportunity to exploit his experience and “knowledge of the country.” Two days later, Bouquet informed Forbes of his confidence that Colonel Washington was “animated by a sincere zeal to contribute to the success of this expedition, and ready to march from whatever direction you may determine with the same eagerness.” On the day after that, Bouquet wrote to Washington again, not doubting that the Virginian was “above all the influences of prejudices and ready to go heartily where reason and judgment shall direct.” In an effort to clarify matters, “so that we all center in one and the same opinion,” Bouquet proposed that he and Washington should meet midway between Fort Cumberland and Raystown on July 29. During their discussion, however, the true reasons for Washington’s implacable hostility toward the new road soon became all too clear to the Swiss veteran. As he wearily told Forbes, “Most of these gentlemen do not know the difference between a party and an army, and find everything easy which agrees with their ideas, jumping over all difficulties.”20

  Any lingering doubt in the matter was removed by a letter that Washington soon after wrote to an old friend from the Braddock campaign, Forbes’s aide-de-camp, Major Fran
cis Halkett of the 44th Foot. This was an unsubtle attempt to use Halkett—a worthy, if not especially bright staff officer—to sway Forbes against the Raystown route. “If Colonel Bouquet succeeds in this point with the General,” Washington warned Halkett, “all is lost! All is lost by Heavens!” There would be no victors’ laurels to be gathered; instead, the delays involved in straying off the “beaten path” and negotiating a succession of daunting mountains would scupper the entire campaign.21

  This gambit was all the more reprehensible because on that very same day, August 2, Washington sent Bouquet a minutely detailed recapitulation of his case in favor of Braddock’s Road, which concluded with a solemn declaration that all was proposed for the best reasons, without “any private interest, or sinister views.” But by now, even the tolerant Forbes had reached the limits of his patience. On August 9, apparently after stumbling across Washington’s melodramatic note to the hapless Halkett, he wrote to Bouquet: “By a very unguarded letter of Colonel Washington, that accidentally fell into my hands, I am now at the bottom, of their [the Virginians’] scheme against this new road, a scheme that I think was a shame for any officer to be concerned in.” Two days later, Forbes informed the commander in chief, Major General Abercromby, that Washington was the “leader and adviser” of the Virginians’ “foolish suggestions.” This was hardly the kind of notice at British Army headquarters that Washington wanted.22

  Not surprisingly, Washington’s intrigues undermined Forbes’s faith in him as an officer and cost him much of the credit he had accumulated as the expedition’s expert on frontier warfare. In early September, when Forbes believed the time was right to march the remaining Virginians from Fort Cumberland to join the main army at Raystown camp, he mentioned to Bouquet that he “would consult Colonel Washington, although perhaps not follow his advice, as his behavior about the roads, was no ways like a soldier.”23

  In fact, Washington’s “behavior” was even worse than his disappointed commanders believed. A few days earlier, he had sent a letter to his staunch friend John Robinson, the speaker of Virginia’s House of Burgesses, which painted the campaign in the most pessimistic light. All hopes of winning glory were gone, he predicted, and only a miracle could produce “a happy issue.” In Washington’s opinion, the campaign’s “miscarriage” resulted from the conduct of its leaders, who were “dupes,” or perhaps “something worse,” to “Pennsylvanian artifice.” Rather than let such slights to Virginia pass unchallenged, he added, a “full representation of the matter” should go before the king. Washington even volunteered to present this in person: “I think without vanity I could set the conduct of this expedition in its true colors, having taken some pains, perhaps more than any other, to dive into the bottom of it.” For good measure, Washington added a line lifted from a letter he had recently received from his former military secretary John Kirkpatrick bemoaning “the luckless fate of poor Virginia to fall a victim to the views of her crafty neighbors.”24

  The wrangling over the rival roads is significant, and not simply for what it reveals of the young Washington’s stubbornness. For all his apparent desire to enter the imperial establishment by gaining a regular army commission and the approval of British commanders, at heart Washington remained a Virginian. His overriding loyalty to the colony of his birth epitomizes the reluctance of British North America’s inhabitants to abandon local allegiances for the greater good. Little wonder that London-based commentators in the 1750s still used the “mother-child” metaphor to characterize the relationship between Britain and her colonies: all too often, from Whitehall’s perspective, the colonists behaved like unruly offspring—selfish, jealous, and addicted to bickering among themselves. It seemed incredible that they could ever share a broader identity as Americans and work together.

  During the late summer of 1758, Brigadier General Forbes had enough on his plate without having to adjudicate colonial rivalries. His own woes were exacerbated by troubling news from the north: although Major General Jeffery Amherst’s army had clawed itself ashore on Cape Breton and commenced besieging the fortress of Louisbourg, the great force of redcoats and provincials led up the Hudson Valley by the commander in chief, James Abercromby, had been decisively defeated. On July 8, his frontal assault upon the French lines at Ticonderoga was bloodily repulsed; that disaster compounded another, two days earlier, when Abercromby’s second in command, Brigadier General George Augustus Howe, was killed in a skirmish after landing at the head of Lake George. During his short time in America, the dashing Lord Howe, who was the eldest of three brothers destined to make a mark upon the continent’s history, had achieved unprecedented popularity among the colonial population. Courteous and debonair, yet fearless, tough, and practical, Howe had personified the qualities of gentleman warrior that Washington himself held so dear. His untimely death, which robbed the Anglo-American cause of its most promising leader, was widely seen as a catastrophe, with Washington among the many who sincerely lamented “the loss of that brave and active nobleman.”25

  Despite these bleak tidings from the New York frontier and for all the frustrating setbacks that jinxed his own campaign—chronic supply problems, the “desertion” of his Indian allies, and, not least, his deplorable health—Forbes remained optimistic. The implacable Scot had planted other plans, and his army’s methodical advance allowed them time to mature. In contrast to Braddock, who had given little weight to Indian diplomacy, Forbes appreciated that tribal support was crucial to the campaign’s outcome. This was not simply cynical politicking. Sympathetic to the Ohio Indians’ perspective, Forbes analyzed the underlying reasons for their disaffection. In a dispatch to Pitt, he identified problems destined to sour relations between whites and Indians long after the colonists had won their independence from Britain and the frontier had shifted far to the west. Forbes blamed the current pro-French disposition of the Shawnees and Delawares upon the abuses of “the saddest of mortals called Indian traders,” and the “madness” of thrusting settlements into the Indians’ hunting grounds.26

  Forbes’s hopes of luring these hostile nations to a peace conference now rested largely upon unlikely allies. The Quaker Israel Pemberton, who led the Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures, had already given credence to that long-winded title by establishing contact with the Ohio tribes. Pemberton’s initiative was bolstered by the courage and persuasiveness of a Moravian missionary, Christian Frederick Post. He embarked upon a hazardous journey among the Delawares, bearing invitations from Forbes and Governor William Denny of Pennsylvania for them to return to their former lands along Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River. Braving appalling dangers, the tenacious Post proved remarkably successful. While the French could only look on in vexation, he coaxed their key Indian allies into giving him a hearing, heeding his words of reconciliation, and agreeing to attend a great conference scheduled to be held at Easton, Pennsylvania, in October. With an increasingly realistic prospect of unpicking New France’s Indian alliance network on the Ohio, Forbes was no longer so anxious to forge ahead. As he put it in a cryptic observation to Bouquet on August 9, “As we are now so late, we are yet too soon. This is a parable that I shall soon explain.”27

  Although most of the Cherokees had long since quit Forbes’s army, clashing ominously with the frontier folk of northwest Virginia as they rambled home, his force retained the services of a small, but significant, contingent of warriors from other southern tribes. In late August about fifty Indians—Catawbas, Tuscaroras, and Nottoways—arrived at Raystown. As the Reverend Barton reported, these warriors craved vengeance: for the death of their English “brothers” under Braddock, whose bones they had seen scattered at the Monongahela, and for the Catawba chief Captain Bullen, freshly slain in an ambush near Fort Cumberland. As Washington informed Bouquet, the loss of Captain Bullen and another warrior killed alongside him, Captain French, was a heavy blow, as they “were very remarkable for their bravery, and attachment to our interest.�
�� Both were buried with military honors.28

  As the summer dragged on and Washington’s command at Fort Cumberland awaited orders to advance, other soldiers of the 1st Virginia Regiment encountered the enemy at closer quarters. One of them, Michael Scully, had a narrow escape after he was bushwhacked by Indians as he rounded up horses outside Raystown camp. As Adam Stephen reported to Washington, Scully—an Irishman and a former butcher—was confronted by two warriors who aimed their guns at him; luckily, the weather was wet and their powder damp, and both missed fire. One of the Indians ran forward wielding his tomahawk, but Scully shot him down when he was just four paces away. Scully felled another Indian with the butt of his musket but was instantly seized by a third, who wounded him twice in the head with a sword and slashed him across the face with his scalping knife. That Indian tried to take the Irishman’s scalp, but “Scully being very strong” threw him down on top of the second Indian, “gave him a stroke with his gun” for good measure, then, imagining more of the enemy were coming up, ran into camp covered in wounds. For a forty-five-year-old described in the muster roll of Major Lewis’s company as having “very large though clumsy limbs,” it was an impressive performance. Equally noteworthy is Stephen’s assumption that his colonel would know who Scully was; it testifies to Washington’s keen interest in his men, and the importance of such paternalism for his regiment’s fighting spirit.29