The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  On December 7, Washington’s party set off, but “excessive rain, Snows, & bad traveling, through many Mires & Swamps” kept it from reaching the commander’s fort until the twelfth. While waiting there for the Frenchman to ponder the ultimatum, the ever-observant Washington gauged the fort’s strength and drew Dinwiddie a detailed plan. As the snowstorm worsened and his horses weakened, the young major sent the animals homeward, while the French stalled, got his escort drunk, and promised them guns—“plot[ting] every Scheme that the Devil & Man cou’d invent, to set our Indians at Variance with us” and “get the Half King won to their Interest.”

  Finally prying his Indians loose, the young envoy caught up with his horses 130 miles down the road on Christmas Eve. But by the day after Christmas, the poor beasts were so feeble, the cold so biting, and the frozen, snow-clogged roads so much worse, that Washington wrapped himself and an interpreter in Indian fur coats, stuffed his supplies and papers in a backpack, and set off with his gun to speed his report to Dinwiddie, leaving the others to follow slowly with the horses.26 He knew what the letter he was bearing said, for the French commander had told him, “As to the summons you send me to retire, I do not think myself obliged to obey it.”27

  The trek grew harder. On December 27, a band of French-allied Indians ambushed him and his interpreter, with one firing at them from “not 15 Steps, but fortunately missed.” As their attackers melted into the woods, the two envoys pressed on all night until dark the next day, so the Indians couldn’t find them again. But then they met another hindrance: a river they expected to be frozen hard enough to walk across was churning with ice floes. Already exhausted, they spent the whole next day building a raft with their one worn-out hatchet. Halfway across, they got stuck in the ice, and Washington, struggling to pole the raft free, got “Jirk’d . . . into 10 Feet [of] Water, but I fortunately saved my Self by catching hold of one of the Raft Logs.” They couldn’t budge the raft but managed to wade to an island and spent the night in cold “so extream severe” that it gave the interpreter frostbite and froze the river solid enough to walk across in the morning. On New Year’s Day 1754, they reached the interpreter’s house, after passing an Indian war party fearful of being blamed for killing settlers they’d found already scalped and half-eaten by pigs.

  The next day, Washington bought a horse, reached Belvoir on January 11 for a day’s rest, and presented Dinwiddie with the French commander’s letter in Williamsburg on the sixteenth. It’s easy to see how his published report, with its exotic account of savage Indians, daring wilderness adventure, and haughty French defiance, made the twenty-two-year-old an instant celebrity. In London, the Gentleman’s Magazine praised him as “a youth of great sobriety, diligence, and fidelity,” and Dinwiddie jumped him to lieutenant colonel.28

  NO APPLAUSE greeted his next wilderness exploit, however. Instead, as London’s great gossip Horace Walpole quipped, “a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire,” and it took until 1763 for the Seven Years’ War that Washington ignited to blaze not just through the New World but through Europe and even India and Africa before it burned itself out.29

  The flash point was a spot at the Forks of the Ohio that after his last mission Washington had recommended as perfect for a fort, which a small British force had started to build. Hearing that the French were probing the strategic site, Dinwiddie ordered his new lieutenant colonel to “restrain all such offenders” or “kill and destroy them.” On April 2, 1754, Washington and his militiamen marched into the forest, but with fifty miles still to go, their scouts reported that a thousand French soldiers had occupied the half-finished stockade, renaming it Fort Duquesne. Washington camped at what seemed a defensible spot called Great Meadows (near present-day Uniontown, Pennsylvania) and called for reinforcements.30

  Meanwhile, he heard from the Half King, encamped nearby, that French troops were skulking around his position. Washington leapt into action—disastrously. The Indians led him and forty men to “a very obscure place surrounded with Rocks,” where on May 28 they attacked, capturing twenty-one French soldiers and killing ten, including wounded men whom Washington saw the Indians “knock . . . on the head and bereave them of their scalps.” Among the dead: a thirty-five-year-old nobleman, the Sieur de Jumonville, who, like Washington on his earlier wilderness assignment, was an envoy bearing an ultimatum to the British to clear out of the Ohio Valley, as the captured French officers indignantly insisted.31

  At first, Washington didn’t want to believe he’d made so gross an error as to attack a diplomatic mission. The French officers, he blustered in his dispatch to Dinwiddie, were “bold Enterprising” men “of gt subtilty and cunning,” and “the absurdity of this pretext is too glaring as your Honour will see.” Later that day, as worry that he had blundered ate at him, Washington wrote Dinwiddie again, warning with defensive sarcasm that the captured French officers surely “will endeavour to amuse your Honour with many smooth Story’s,” such as that “they calld to us not to Fire,” and doubtless “they will have the assurance of asking the Priviledges due to an Embassy, when in strict Justice they ought to be hang’d for Spyes of the worst sort.”32 To his brother Jack, by contrast, Washington boasted of a victory, in which “I heard Bulletts whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.” When the London Magazine printed the letter, the battle-hardened George II scoffed, “He would not say so, if he had been used to hear many.”33

  The French, Washington knew, wouldn’t let the incident pass unavenged, so he strengthened his camp, now mordantly dubbed Fort Necessity, though his Indian allies deemed the exposed position hopeless and abandoned him in mid-June, urging him to retreat too. Rightly so. At 9 AM on July 3, with “Shouts, and dismal Indian yells,” almost 800 French and 400 Indians swooped in, commanded by Jumonville’s enraged elder brother, and “from every little rising, tree, stump, Stone, and bush kept up a constant galding fire upon us; which was returned by us in the best manner we could till late in the Afternn. when their fell the most tremendous rain,” soaking his soldiers’ powder and making further resistance impossible. As dusk fell, with a third of his 300 men dead or wounded, Washington signed the surrender that the elder Jumonville offered, proud to be able to march away with drums beating and flags flying. What he hadn’t realized is that he had signed a document, in a language he didn’t understand, that admitted his “assassination” of young Jumonville, a propaganda coup for the French. Now they could claim that the war crime of a trigger-happy backwoods officer had forced conflict upon an innocent France.34

  THOUGH THE FRENCH banged that drum hard, Washington’s reputation in England and America soon bounced back; people deemed his stand at Fort Necessity a gallant defiance of overwhelming odds.35 Yet he himself was simmering with discontent. Why, he wrote Dinwiddie from the forest depths even before he killed Jumonville—why should London treat colonial officers such as himself as inferior? Why should British officers with royal commissions “have almost double our pay,” while “we must undergo double their hardship”? Instead of “serv[ing] upon such ignoble terms” and “slaving dangerously for the shadow of pay, through woods, rocks, mountains—I would rather prefer the great toil of a daily laborer, and dig for a maintenance.”36 His next letter reports Jumonville’s death only after pages of complaints about his “trifling pay,” though the money bothered him less than the disrespect. The “motives that lead me here were pure and Noble,” he protested; “I had no view of acquisition but that of Honour, by serving faithfully my King and Country.”37 To his meritocratic mind, it was a question of his worth.

  So imagine his outrage when, in October 1754, London decided to split the Virginia regiment into ten parts, each headed by a captain—meaning Lieutenant Colonel Washington would be demoted. Equally galling, officers with royal commissions would now outrank colonial officers of the same nominal rank. Washington fumed that he could never have “any real satisfaction, or enjoyment in a Corps, where I once did, or thought I ha
d a right to, command,” especially when “every Captain, bearing the King’s Commission . . . would rank before me,” including “many who have acted as my inferior Officers.”38 As he recalled bitterly more than thirty years later, writing of himself in the third person, “This was too degrading for G. W. to submit to; accordingly, he resigned his Military employment.”39

  He knew he’d be back, though; and in March 1755, when General Edward Braddock, impressed with his repute as a crack frontier fighter, invited him to become his aide-de-camp for an assault on Fort Duquesne, he signed on as an unpaid volunteer, to finesse the status issue.40 But Braddock, with a British officer’s characteristic arrogant condescension, couldn’t hear advice from any mere colonial. Shortly after the general’s arrival in America, Benjamin Franklin gingerly tried to warn him against “ambuscades of Indians.” So “dextrous” are they, Franklin hinted, that Braddock might find his long line of troops “attacked by surprize” and “cut like a thread in several pieces.” Braddock, Franklin reported, “smiled at my ignorance and replied, ‘These savages may indeed be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia; but upon the King’s regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they should make any impression.’”41

  WASHINGTON’S COUNSEL had no more effect. As the army lumbered into the woods in early June, he urged Braddock to travel lightly and prepare for Indian attack tactics—a lesson he had learned bitterly at Fort Necessity. But “so prepossessed were they in favr. of regularity and discipline and in such absolute contempt were these people held, that the admonition was suggested in vain,” Washington wrote. Woolen-clad redcoats fainted and died from the heat as they cut a road for their heavy wagons. When Braddock finally took his young aide-de-camp’s advice and sent a lighter detachment on ahead, he ordered Washington, now desperately ill with the dysentery sweeping through the army, to travel lying in a wagon back with the baggage, promising he could come forward when the fighting seemed about to start. Accordingly, on July 9, “tho’ much reduced and very weak,” Washington “mounted his horse on cushions,” to ease his dysentery-inflamed hemorrhoids, and took his place at Braddock’s side.42

  At 10 AM, a few miles short of the fort, the French and Indians attacked, firing hidden behind trees and rocks. The “Hallooing and whooping of the enemy, whom they could not see,” Washington recalled, so panicked the British regulars, marching in serried ranks, that they “broke & run as Sheep before the Hounds,” exposing “all those who were inclin’d to do their duty, to almost certain Death.” By contrast, the “Virginians behavd like Men, and died like Soldier’s.” Washington offered to lead the survivors in fighting the enemy in their own guerrilla style, but Braddock’s assent came too late. Nevertheless, with steely courage, Washington galloped all over the battlefield, trying to turn chaos into orderly retreat, his tall figure so conspicuous that he “had 4 Bullets through my Coat, and two Horses shot under and yet escaped unhurt,” a miracle that he ascribed to Providence.43 Fifteen years later, an Indian chief told him he had reached the same conclusion: that the Great Spirit must have a brilliant future in store for the young officer whom his braves couldn’t kill even though he had repeatedly ordered them to shoot him down.44

  No such spirit watched over Braddock. A bullet pierced his lung. Washington laid him in a cart and, as his only unwounded aide-de-camp, relayed his orders. Braddock wanted him to bring the rear detachment forward to cover the retreat; so, after twelve adrenaline-fueled hours on horseback, Washington set off on an all-night, forty-mile ordeal, as he groped his way through the darkness of the thick woods, while the cries of the wounded and dying—“enough to pierce a heart of adamant”—rang in his ears and still echoed in his mind thirty years later. By the time the two units joined and made it to safety, 1,000 of the original 3,000-man force lay dead or wounded, two-thirds of whom, he estimated, “receiv’d their shott from our own cowardly dogs of Soldier’s.” There, Braddock—bewilderedly muttering “Who would have thought it?”—breathed his last, and Washington buried him with full honors, before driving wagons back and forth to obscure his grave so that the Indians couldn’t dig up his body for a “savage triumph” over a man his aide-de-camp judged “brave even to a fault and in regular service would have done honor to his profession.” Braddock left him a red silk sash and brace of pistols, which Washington cherished.45

  “If wisdom is not to be acquired from experience,” Washington liked to ask, “where is it to be found?”46 Certainly his hard-earned experience of the summer of 1755 taught him priceless lessons. The first had to do with military tactics. “The folly and consequence of opposing compact bodies to the sparse manner of Indian fighting, in woods, which had in a manner been predicted, was now so clearly verified that henceforward another mode obtained in all future operations,” he noted.47 Second, the folly was Braddock’s and the other British officers’, not his—and, accompanied as it was by such an arrogant contempt for the experience of others, it seemed to be irremediable. “The whole transaction,” as Benjamin Franklin summed up the Braddock debacle with his usual wryness, “gave us Americans the first suspicion that our exalted ideas of the prowess of British regulars had not been well founded.”48

  AFTER YEARS OF such defeats, British arms, under Secretary of State William Pitt’s brilliant new commanders, finally—and gloriously—won the French and Indian War (the American part of the Seven Years’ War), ending French power in North America. Washington’s part in the conflict proved frustratingly inglorious, though. However thrilled he was when Dinwiddie named him colonel and commander in chief of the Virginia regiment in August 1755, his was the impossible task of “protect[ing] 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.”49 He couldn’t prevent the constant murders of the Shenandoah Valley settlers and their wives and babies. The hopelessness tore his heart out. “But what can I do?” he wrote Dinwiddie. “I see their situation, know their danger, and participate [in] their Sufferings; without having it in my power to give them further relief, than uncertain promises. . . . The supplicating tears of the women; and moving petitions from the men, melt me into such deadly sorrow, that I solemnly declare, if I know my own mind—I could offer myself a willing Sacrifice to the butchering Enemy, provided that would contribute to the peoples ease.”50 But it wouldn’t.

  Those three hard years patrolling the frontier turned Washington from a cocky prodigy into a mature commander. For all the heartache—indeed, because of it—he came away with three convictions that stayed at the core of his worldview. Three weeks after Jumonville’s death in 1754, with a French war clearly looming, representatives of seven of the thirteen colonies met at Albany, New York, to discuss “a plan for a union of all the Colonies under one government, so far as might be necessary for defence and other important general purposes,” as Benjamin Franklin, the plan’s author, described it. Neither the colonial assemblies nor the London authorities approved the scheme for a Crown-appointed executive and a grand council chosen by the colonial assemblies; but the idea of an American union was very much in the air from then on, and Washington’s experience trying to hold off the Indian allies of a European power with nothing but a Virginia regiment made him a true believer. “Nothing I more sincerely wish,” he wrote the governor of Pennsylvania in 1756, twenty years before the Articles of Confederation, “than a union to the Colonys in this time of Eminent danger.”51

  Similarly, more than thirty years before the Constitutional Convention, he was already calling for energy in the executive. You can’t “govern, and keep up a proper spirit of Discipline, with[ou]t Laws” and “a person invested with full power to exert his Authority” to carry them out, he wrote Dinwiddie from the frontier in October 1755. It is amazing, he observed, in terms that The Federalist echoed a generation later, “that we alone shou’d be so tenacious of Liberty as not to invest a power, where Interest, and Politicks so unanswerably demand it.” The very people whose lives and p
roperty he was trying to defend—whose self-interest was identical to the public interest—wouldn’t recognize his authority to requisition supplies from them, he complained: “no orders are obey’d but what a Party of Soldier’s or my own drawn Sword Enforces; without this a single horse for the most urgent occasions cannot be had.” This was a hard way to supply an army, he grumbled, but he’d keep on doing it, “unless they execute what they threaten i, e, ‘to blow out my brains.’”52 Someone has to be able to wield the force on which governmental authority ultimately rests, he understood, and he was willing to go far to do so. He wrote a fellow officer in July 1757 that out of 400 recently enlisted soldiers, 114 had already deserted. “I have a Gallows near 40 feet high erected (which has terrified the rest exceedingly:) and I am determined,” he wrote, “to hang two or three on it, as an example to others.”53

  BUT SUCH A MEASURE, he well knew, was only the last resort in a grave crisis. As he told the Continental Army on New Year’s Day 1776, shortly after he became its commander, his “first wish [was] to have the business of the Army conducted without punishment,” and therefore, as far as it was in his power, he would “reward such as particularly distinguish themselves.”54 Behind that declaration lies an important eighteenth-century theory of human behavior that Washington took as a bedrock assumption all his life—and that intellectual historians have called the “love of fame” or “emulation” theory.55 According to such writers as La Rochefoucauld, Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, people don’t behave virtuously or heroically because they have an inborn love of virtue or of their fellow men. But they are born with a craving for distinction, for the good opinion, admiration, and applause of others. This craving, which Washington’s contemporaries called “pride” or “emulation,” isn’t in itself moral or public-spirited (and indeed may be the opposite), but its effects tend to be the same as those that virtue or conscience or magnanimity would produce: in order to win the approval, praise, and honor you want, you have to behave in praiseworthy, socially approved, publicly beneficial ways.