George Washington Read online

  By the time Lord Howe’s monument was finished, the sense of transatlantic unity and promise had only strengthened as Anglo-American armies completed the methodical conquest of Canada in 1760 and then proceeded to snap up Bourbon possessions in the Caribbean, taking the rich French sugar island of Martinique in early 1762 and, after Spain belatedly entered the conflict, capturing the fabulously wealthy port of Havana that same summer. All these conquests prompted fresh celebrations in British North America; they seemed prescient of a new era of prosperity for the colonies within an expanded British Empire and under a benevolent young king, George III, who had ascended to the throne upon his grandfather’s death in 1760.

  Given these stirring times and the reports from all battle fronts that filled pages of newspapers like the Virginia Gazette, it is perhaps unsurprising to find hints that Washington had not completely forgotten his own dreams of military glory. His enduring interests were reflected in an invoice he sent to the London merchant Robert Cary on September 20, 1759 ordering busts to embellish Mount Vernon. These could not have been any more martial: two great captains of antiquity, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and four commanders who had made their names in Washington’s own century—Charles XII of Sweden; Frederick the Great of Prussia; John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough; and Marlborough’s fellow victor at Blenheim, Prince Eugene of Savoy. In addition, and continuing his distinctly warlike approach to interior decorating, Washington requested “2 furious wild beasts of any kind,” posed “as if approaching each other and eager to engage.” Washington’s military tastes were clearly untypical: while Cary was able to supply a pair of suitably belligerent lions, which remain in place at Mount Vernon, there were no busts available in the sizes required by Washington of any of the six military heroes. Poets, and philosophers, both ancient and modern, could be supplied instead, but Colonel Washington wasn’t interested in them; apparently, only soldiers reflected the warrior image he sought to project.16

  Washington’s duties in Virginia’s House of Burgesses also brought reminders of a conflict in which he had recently fought. In November 1759, he served on a committee that considered the petitions of men of his old regiment who had now fallen on hard times. Christopher West had enlisted in the Virginia Regiment in September 1754 and was captured by the Indians in February 1756. After two years of captivity in Canada, he had been sent from Quebec to England to be exchanged for a French prisoner. At long last, “after many hardships,” West managed to rejoin his regiment and now sought compensation for his “lost time.” On Washington’s recommendations, the House agreed to allow West £32 to cover his pay during his captivity, with any further arrears to be settled by the regiment’s paymaster. Another petitioner must have struck an even stronger chord with Washington: in November 1758, Daniel McNeil had been wounded in a skirmish with the enemy at Fort Ligonier—probably the Loyalhanna “friendly fire” incident in which Washington had come so close to losing his life. McNeil’s injuries left him incapable of supporting his wife and three small children. After Washington and his fellow burgess Francis Lightfoot Lee examined his claim, it was resolved to grant him an immediate payment of £10, plus £5 per year for future subsistence.17

  Although he had retired from active service, Washington’s experience continued to make him a valued pundit on Virginia’s military affairs. In 1760, a fresh Indian war had erupted, this time with the powerful Cherokees, whose growing alienation had been clear ever since they’d forsaken the Forbes expedition. That spring, Cherokee gunmen blockaded a fort built within their territory on the Little Tennessee River; yet another outpost named after the unlucky Lord Loudoun, it was garrisoned by men of the South Carolina Independent Companies and provincial troops from the same colony. When Lieutenant Governor William Bull of South Carolina appealed for help, Virginia’s Assembly voted to complete its regiment to 1,000 men under Colonel William Byrd and mount a relief expedition. Washington was notified too late to attend the crucial vote, and the absence of his expertise was mourned by Major Robert Stewart. In his opinion, Washington’s advice would probably have prevented “an expedition that a thousand circumstances concur in rendering impracticable.” Stewart believed it was madness to send raw, new-raised troops into the mountainous country of the “warlike and formidable” Cherokees, who in “their numbers and mode of warfare have so vast a superiority.”18

  Stewart’s doubts were shared by his former commander. Besides the Virginian contingent, a force of regulars under Washington’s old comrade of the Forbes campaign, Colonel Archibald Montgomery, had marched to the relief of Fort Loudoun. Writing to a London correspondent, Washington believed that, while the French were now “so well drubbed” that there seemed little doubt that the conquest of Canada would be completed that summer, the Cherokees were a different matter. Healthy and in high spirits when they left Charleston, Montgomery’s men had already “penetrated into the heart of their country,” but their commander needed to be wary, as he had “a crafty subtle enemy to deal with that may give him most trouble when he least expects it.”19

  Both Stewart and Washington were correct in their analysis. On August 9, 1760, with no prospect of help in sight, the starving garrison of Fort Loudoun was obliged to surrender. Montgomery’s force had fended off a Cherokee ambush near the settlement of Etchoe on June 27 but, with scores of wounded to care for, lacked the transport to push onward with enough supplies to complete its mission; Byrd’s command moved so sluggishly that it was still inside Virginian territory when the fort fell.

  Amherst subdued the heartland of Canada as easily as Washington had predicted, but it took another expedition to bring the defiant Cherokees to heel. This was commanded by none other than James Grant, the same officer who had been overwhelmed and captured outside Fort Duquesne in September 1758. Exchanged in time to join Montgomery’s expedition, Grant now knew the Cherokees and their daunting mountains and had no intention of underestimating either. Like Forbes before him, Grant was sympathetic to the Indians, informing Amherst: “If both sides were heard . . . the Indians have been the worst used.” Most of the Cherokees regretted recent killings and would gladly make peace if possible, Grant added.20 But Amherst was unconvinced by such claims: the Cherokees must be severely punished before there could be any talk of peace. Grant was obliged to obey. His 1761 punitive campaign, which ravaged the Cherokees’ towns, was a model of its kind, using packhorses to penetrate the tribe’s mountainous homeland and deploying seasoned veterans who were no longer unnerved by war whoops. Grant’s advance was screened by a small but highly effective corps of scouts: these were an unusual mixture of northern and southern Indians—Mohawks and Mahicans, Catawbas and Chickasaws—leavened with white rangers and volunteers from the regulars.21

  Grant’s motley scouts were led by Captain Quintin Kennedy of the 17th Foot, who had been wounded at Braddock’s defeat as an ensign in the 44th and had since made a name for himself as one of the British Army’s leading practitioners of American bush fighting. Kennedy’s corps included yet another survivor of Braddock’s campaign, the Iroquois warrior Silver Heels, who had alerted Washington to the presence of Ensign Jumonville’s party in 1754. Having helped him to ignite a global war, Silver Heels had seen far more of the ensuing conflict than Washington. Striking up a friendship with the ambitious and energetic Kennedy, Silver Heels had followed him to war on the New York frontier and then against the Cherokees in the Carolinas. There his experiences highlighted the cultural differences between the tribal allies. On May 6, 1761, when Grant’s expedition reached Fort Ninety Six, eight Chickasaws came into camp and performed the war dance. A British officer, Captain Christopher French of the 22nd Foot, reported how “one of them observed that Silver Heels a Seneca Mohawk Indian who came with us from New York was a looker on, [and they] desired he would dance, which after some difficulty [on] account of his not being understood by them, he did.” After the Cherokees were subdued by Grant’s deliberate scorched-earth strategy, Silver Heels joined Kennedy on the exp
edition sent from the mainland against Martinique. Kennedy commanded the four companies of rangers that spearheaded the successful assault on the island in January 1762. Having escaped numerous hazards since 1755, like many other British veterans Kennedy swiftly succumbed to the West Indian climate; but Silver Heels survived and accompanied the slaves and other plunder that the captain had sent back to New York.22

  Just as colonial Americans seemed increasingly “British” in identity as the war entered its final, victorious phase, for their part, some Old Country soldiers reciprocated by relating ever more closely with the people they had been sent to protect. They consciously adopted the “American” label to distinguish themselves from officers serving in Germany, who were believed to receive greater recognition; this gave an interesting twist to George Washington’s persistent gripe that colonial officers received second-class treatment compared with Britons.

  Writing from London in October 1760, where he had been sent with Major General Amherst’s dispatches announcing the final conquest of Canada, Major Isaac Barré revealed an affiliation with the Americans that was destined to grow far stronger in coming years. Barré, who had served as Wolfe’s adjutant general at Quebec and was shot in the face during the firefight on the Plains of Abraham, bitterly informed Amherst that “any seam or scar” received in Germany was “called a mark of honor, when the same in a poor American is either unnoticed or supposed to be got by inoculation.”23 Two years later, when the British were besieging Havana, another Quebec veteran, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Fletcher of the 35th Foot, told his sister that, while officers who had “stayed at home in peace and quietness” had monopolized the promotion list, those on active service had been shamefully shoved aside: “You will no doubt call us a parcel of growling Americans,” Fletcher wrote, adding that they had good cause to be so.24

  This intriguing “Americanization” was also apparent in the tactics adopted by the British Army. By the Caribbean campaigns of 1762, the veteran redcoats were employing unconventional techniques that would have shocked Braddock. Enemy strongpoints on mountainous Martinique had fallen to fluid and headlong assaults by light infantry, grenadiers, and rangers, plus a handful of Indian warriors like Silver Heels. The general who assumed command of the victorious Martinique army for the attack on Havana observed: “They have conquered in a few days, the strongest country you ever saw, in the American way, running or with the Indian whoop.” As that “growling American,” Colonel Fletcher of the 35th, put it in another letter home, these highly aggressive tactics had worked wonders in intimidating the opposition: “Our North American manner of attacking the enemy equally surprised as well as frightened them to such a degree that none of them . . . could be prevailed upon, either to attack or defend.”25

  When the Seven Years’ War was brought to a close at the Peace of Paris in 1763, Britons on both sides of the Atlantic contemplated a new era of greatness. Just twelve years later, they were locked in a bitter and bloody civil war. Ironically, the seeds of that conflict sprouted from the sheer scale and decisiveness of Britain’s victory. Unlike previous Anglo-French struggles, which had typically ended with a restoration of the prewar situation, the Seven Years’ War caused seismic shifts in the balance of power. Ministers in distant London now faced the challenge of administering vast new American territories: on the mainland alone they had acquired Canada and all other French claims east of the Mississippi. Before the definitive treaty was signed, France had already transferred Louisiana west of the Mississippi to Spain, thereby relinquishing its remaining American territory. Meanwhile, in partial exchange for Havana, Spain ceded Florida to Britain.

  The maintenance and administration of this greatly expanded North American empire would require money and manpower. Before these new costs were even considered, there was the question of paying the reckoning for the war that had just been won. At its beginning, Britain’s national debt stood at nearly £75 million; by 1763, it had rocketed to almost £123 million, with interest at £4.5 million a year—and this at a time when the annual national budget was just £8 million. With taxation far higher in Britain than in America, it seemed only fair to British policy makers that the colonists in whose interests the war had been fought should help to shoulder the burden. This assumption misread the mood and mindset of Americans who had long since grown accustomed to ruling themselves through their own elected assemblies, bodies like Virginia’s House of Burgesses. Americans were not represented in Parliament, so why should they pay the taxes it sought to impose upon them? Indeed, to do so would deprive them of their prized English liberties; over the coming decade, sporadic British efforts to tax the colonies would be interpreted by many Americans as a sinister ministerial plot aimed at achieving nothing less.26

  There were other baleful legacies to Britain’s overwhelming victory in 1763. The humiliations heaped upon a humbled France ensured that revenge against her old enemy would henceforth become the primary objective of her foreign policy. More immediately, the eradication of French power on the North American continent played a part in fomenting another dangerous Indian war, far more widespread than the conflict with the Cherokees.

  As the tribes of the interior were no longer needed as allies against the old enemy, Major General Amherst sought to cut costs by ending the customary policy of providing them with ammunition and other gifts. Deeply offended by what they regarded as a gross show of contempt and convinced by a flow of white settlers across the Appalachians that the promises made at the Treaty of Easton back in 1758 were meaningless, a formidable Indian confederacy, embracing the Ohio and western tribes, struck back with a devastating coordinated assault. Small posts recently taken from the French, like Venango and Presque Isle, were engulfed, leaving larger strongpoints—Forts Niagara and Pitt and the stockaded settlement at Detroit—marooned under Indian blockade. Raids lapped against the frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania, prompting an exodus of settlers that recalled the grim years 1755 to 1758.27

  This Indian war of independence, traditionally named after the Ottawa leader Pontiac, erupted when Amherst was least able to quell it. Most of the veteran regulars responsible for conquering New France had been sent to the Caribbean, where they died in the thousands from tropical disease. Those survivors of the siege of Havana who trickled back to New York were but a pitiful remnant of the once-formidable “American Army.” The desperate Amherst managed to gather some 400 Highlanders—all that now remained of Montgomery’s regiment and two battalions of the 42nd, or Royal Highland Regiment—and to place them under the command of Washington’s old commander, Colonel Henri Bouquet, with orders to relieve Fort Pitt.

  Obliged to retrace the road he’d followed during Forbes’s campaign, by early afternoon on August 5, Bouquet had marched his convoy of packhorses as far as Bushy Run, about twenty-five miles from his objective. Here, he was attacked by a strong force of Indians: local Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingos joined by Wyandots, Miamis, and Ottawas from the west.

  Alerted by the Indians’ tracks and fires, Bouquet had arrayed his command in a hollow square. This defensive formation kept the enemy at bay, but with casualties mounting and little water to be had, by evening his situation looked bleak. The next day, the Indians renewed their assault, fighting with a determination that impressed their enemies. Bouquet proved equal to the crisis. By deliberately weakening part of his perimeter, he lured the Indians forward into a devastating trap, meeting them with close-range volleys followed by a counterattack that allowed his regulars to ply their bayonets. According to Private Robert Kirkwood of Montgomery’s Highlanders, at this the Indians “set to their heels and were never after able to rally again.”28

  Bouquet’s close-run victory enabled him to push on to Fort Pitt and was widely celebrated as proof that the Indians, who had beaten Braddock and Grant nearby, “and expected to have served Colonel Bouquet in the same manner,” were no longer invincible. The outcome owed much to the resilience of Bouquet’s veterans and to his own presence of mind: since 1758,
he had clearly continued to devote thought to the tactical demands of the wilderness. Writing to congratulate him on his success, one of his officers, Captain Harry Gordon, observed, “You have many times talked of the disposition you put in practice, as preferring it, and I made no doubt the consequence would show the justice of your thoughts.”29

  Bushy Run did not end the Indian war. The conflict dragged for another year before the momentum of the tribes’ offensive slackened in the face of growing disunity and a systematic advance against the villages along the Muskingum River, west of Fort Pitt, commanded by the indefatigable Bouquet. Yet “Pontiac’s War” wrecked Amherst’s reputation as the conqueror of Canada; he was replaced as commander in chief in North America by Washington’s friend and yet another veteran of Braddock’s defeat, Major General Thomas Gage.

  The unexpected Indian war had prompted much comment and alarm in London. In October 1763, in a belated attempt to defuse tensions between whites and Indians, a proclamation was issued. Renewing the pledge made at the Treaty of Easton five years earlier, this banned white settlement west of the Appalachians, reserving that territory for the Indians “for the present.” Intended to appease and reassure the tribes, the proclamation had the opposite effect on the colonists, not least George Washington.

  From his first teenaged forays beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, Washington had been drawn by the trans-Appalachian west and its rich potential for exploitation. By 1763, for all his own extensive acreage at Mount Vernon and the Custis plantations, Washington’s hunger for western land was stronger than ever, and he remained receptive to any initiative that might add more. This interest was stimulated by economic problems: at the very time Washington was working to maximize the productivity of his farms, he was facing an increasingly frustrating relationship with the English merchants who acted as agents in selling his tobacco and who bought and imported the luxury items that were virtually unobtainable in the American colonies.