It was a modest affair and was soon invested by 700 French and Canadians and 100 of their Indian allies. The French rained down musket-fire on the garrison, which Dinwiddie had bulked up to 400, and at sunset of the first day of the siege, Washington’s force panicked and broke into the rum issue. The French mercifully offered the Americans, retirement from Fort Necessity provided they returned French prisoners, promised not to return to the Ohio Valley within a year, left two hostages behind as an earnest, and admitted the “assassination” of Jumonville. Washington accepted all this, having taken 30 dead and 70 wounded, compared with three French dead and a handful of wounded. He retired, with most of his men carrying the wounded and the corpses of their fallen comrades. Most of his force deserted and scattered at the first opportunity. He rightly counted himself lucky, but had effectively accepted responsibility for starting one of the most important wars of modern times, and with an uncivilized act at that. Washington has presented posterity a rather bowdlerized version of this fiasco and his subsequent renown has somewhat obscured the facts, though it must be said that he was personally brave and collected, and swiftly seized the prospect of honorable deliverance when it appeared.
Even the placatory British prime minister, Newcastle, was outraged and worried when he learned of this debacle. He relied on what he portentously described as his continental “system” of alliances with the Spanish, Austrian Empire, Danes, Hanover, and some other German states to contain France, while he launched a counter-blow in America. With George II’s favored son, the Duke of Cumberland, Newcastle concerted a plan for sending two Irish regiments out to America under the command of Major General Edward Braddock, a spit-and-polish professional with no experience or knowledge at all of American warfare, to uproot the French fort system that Duquesne had built. Cumberland blew any security with public announcements about the new armed mission, which came to the attention of the French ambassador in London as to any informed person in the British capital. The French rushed to send reinforcements to Canada, though they suffered from the ice-shortened season for dispatching forces up the St. Lawrence.
3. THE OUTBREAK OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR
The English position in those colonies was not much strengthened by the arrival of Braddock and his Irishmen in February 1755. The colonists resented Braddock’s high-handed manner and the British army’s rules, which were that any British officer, even a lieutenant, could order about like pirates any colonial officer, even Washington and his few peers, and that the colonial militias were subject to British military discipline. This was heavy going for these rough and ready frontiersmen, who were unaccustomed to taking orders, other than at the approach of and during outright exchanges of live fire. Nor were they much enamored of submitting themselves to a regimen that was unsparing in meting out floggings and even drum-head executions.
From May to July 1754 in Albany, New York, there was what was called the Albany Congress, to pursue unity of the colonies. The leading figure at the Congress was the ambitious Philadelphia inventor, scientist, printer, postmaster, and diplomat Benjamin Franklin. Behind his jaunty humor there lurked a sophisticated political operator who would prove himself more than able to master the sternest and most tortuous challenges that could be posed in the chancelleries of Europe. He was already the principal public figure among the colonists, and Washington was a rising young officer and landowner, the one an amiable intellectual and sly maneuverer, the other a physically imposing and capable officer, though personally stiff and somewhat limited by being a plantation inheritor and, beyond elemental education, an autodidact. But both were investors in and advocates of trans-Allegheny development, and both had a vision of a rapidly expanding America that would brook no interference from the French, and whose attachment to the British was essentially much less a reflexive submission to the Crown than a tactical association with the presumed facilitator of their local ambitions.
Franklin had already done a stint as Pennsylvania’s representative in London. However flickering might be their imperial enthusiasm, the colonists had no ability at this point to replace the British with any locally generated or spontaneous cohesion. The Albany Congress broke up in disharmony, and the Quaker majority in the Pennsylvania Assembly, dominated by and servile to the Penn family, roundly deserted Franklin and repudiated any notion of colonial union for the unholy purpose of armed combat, especially for the purpose of enriching the less pious of their number in extra-territorial speculation.
Braddock started off with a fantastically ambitious plan for blotting the French out of the continent, which Cumberland and his entourage had devised in complete ignorance of North American conditions or of the likely correlation of forces, and in defiance of Newcastle’s chimerical hopes of avoiding war with France. Admiral Edward Boscawen was to blockade the Gulf of St. Lawrence, strangling New France of reinforcements. Braddock and his Irish regiments were to take Fort Duquesne, which was now a formidable fortress. Braddock named the governor of Massachusetts, William Shirley, a major general and told him to reactivate disbanded regiments and march to Niagara at the western end of Lake Ontario and seize the large French fort there, following which Braddock, who would clear the French out of the several hundred miles of French forts and garrisons between what are today Pittsburgh and Buffalo, would join forces for the final mopping-up of New France. It was an insane plan, made even more absurd by Braddock’s impossible personality and incandescent contempt for the colonials.
Braddock rejected suggestions from a couple of the colonial governors that instead of attacking the southern French forts, including Duquesne, he attack with all his forces at Niagara, the northern terminus of the French supply route into the Ohio, Illinois, and Mississippi country. This would have been the correct strategy for concentrating all available force on the point of maximum vulnerability. Cumberland and the other London creators of the Braddock attack plan had no idea that the supposedly navigable rivers often had rapids and that the trails that were supposed to be avenues for British supply wagons were narrow and often soft underfoot and could only be used at a snail’s pace, and a not very motivated snail at that. Nor were they aware that almost no Indians could now be induced to assist the British as guides or scouts and that only they knew their way to the designated targets. Washington prudently declined the command of a Virginia regiment and instead accepted to be an unpaid aide to Braddock, presumably, after his harrowing combat command debut at Fort Necessity, to avoid blame for another shambles, and to increase his chances for a British commission that would give him some status in the parent-country forces, which would clearly be needed in ever larger numbers if the French were to be successfully resisted.
Braddock also made the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin. His severe demands for horses and supplies frightened the Pennsylvania legislature out of its Quaker aversion to the somewhat louche and worldly Franklin, who was sent as a placatory envoy to Braddock. Franklin, now America’s most accomplished diplomat, as Washington was its foremost soldier, though nothing in the past of either indicated the heights they would achieve in the balance of their careers, exploited Braddock’s unsuccessful foraging in Maryland and Virginia. Franklin sent boxes of fine food and good wine to the junior officers of Braddock’s units, and Pennsylvania was thereafter excused from the general’s rages against the colonials.
Braddock, with Washington at his side suffering from dysentery and acute hemorrhoids, plunged through the wilderness toward Fort Duquesne, his force’s movements faithfully reported by Indians to the French commander, Contrecoeur, the victor of the Fort Necessity encounter and brother-in-law of the “assassinated” Jumonville. On July 10, Braddock’s so-called “flying column” of about 1,500 men, including several hundred civilian workers and a number of the officers’ whores, which had managed about five miles a day, was attacked by about 800 French, Canadians, and (in the majority) Indians. The attackers infiltrated the dense forests on each side of the road and without warning, disconcerting the English with the nerve-rattling screaming of the Indians, poured down precise, rapid sniper-fire. The well-trained British formed into rectangles in the road, consolidating themselves as better targets for the enemies they could not see, and were steadily mowed down. Braddock remained mounted, and acted with great bravery, as did Washington, who had two horses shot from under him. After several hours, Braddock