It was a complete debacle. Out of a total force of thirteen hundred men, the British and Americans suffered over nine hundred casualties while the French and Indians reported twenty-three killed and sixteen wounded. For the rest of his life, Washington remembered the scenes of the dead and the screams of the wounded as they were being scalped. Braddock died three days into the retreat, and Washington buried him in the middle of the road, then ran wagons over the grave in order to prevent his body from being desecrated and his scalp claimed as a trophy. After reaching safety, Washington wrote his mother and brother to assure them he was alive: “As I have heard . . . a circumstantial acct of my death and dying Speech, I take this first opportunity of contradicting the first and assuring you that I have not, as Yet, composed the latter.”37
This piece of understated bravado masked Washington’s dominant reaction to the defeat, which initially was disbelief that a force so large and well equipped could be so thoroughly routed. Dinwiddie concurred, confessing that “it appears to me as a dream, wn I consider the Forces & the train of artillery he had with him.” But the more Washington thought about it, the more he realized that the very size of Braddock’s force, plus his cumbersome artillery train, which eventually proved useless, actually contributed to the fiasco. Braddock himself was not personally to blame, but rather the entire way of waging war he carried in his head, which simply did not work in that foreign country “over the Mountains,” where the forest-fighting tactics of the Indians reigned supreme. The relationship between officers and troops had to change in the frontier environment because “in this kind of Fighting, where being dispersd, each and every of them . . . has greater liberty to misbehave than if they were regularly, and compactly drawn up under the Eyes of their superior Officers.” For now, given the obvious fact that most of the Indian tribes were allied with the French, any conventional campaign on the Braddock model into the Ohio Country would meet the same fate. The massacre at the Monongahela was a costly and painful way to learn this hard lesson, but Washington learned it deep down, which was becoming his preferred way to absorb all the essential lessons.38
As for his reputation, for the second time he emerged from a disastrous defeat with enhanced status. No one blamed him for the tragedy—Braddock was the obvious and easy target—and he came to be called “the hero of the Monongahela” for rallying the survivors in an orderly retreat. His specialty seemed to be exhibiting courage in lost causes, or, as one newspaper account put it, he had earned “a high Reputation for Military Skill, Integrity, and Valor; tho’ Success has not always attended his Undertakings.” There was even talk—it was the first occasion—that his remarkable capacity to endure marked him as a man of destiny. “I may point out to the Public,” wrote Reverend Samuel Davies, “that heroic youth Col. Washington, who I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto preserved in so signal a Manner for some important Service to his Country.” This proved prescient later on, but for now it underlined the young man’s chief characteristic, which was a knack for sheer survival.39
THE REGIMENT
IN AUGUST 1755, though he was only twenty-three, Washington’s ascending reputation made him the obvious choice to command the newly created Virginia Regiment. In the next three and a half years he recruited, trained, and led what became an elite unit of, at times, over a thousand men which combined the spit-and-polish discipline of British regulars with the tactical agility and proficiency of Indian warriors. During this time the main theater of the French and Indian War, now officially declared, moved north to the Great Lakes, New England, and Canada, making the Virginia frontier a mere sideshow and Washington himself what one biographer has called “the forgotten man on a forgotten front.”40
But if he languished in obscurity from some larger strategic and historical perspective, the experience as commander in chief of Virginia’s army provided his most direct and intensive schooling in military leadership prior to his command of the Continental army twenty years later. Moreover, in part because the historical record begins to thicken during this phase, and in part because the young man was growing up, the mere glimpses we had before become fuller pictures, though still fuzzy at the edges. Finally, the Virginia Regiment itself was very much his own creation, the first institution over which he exercised executive authority, and in that sense was a projection of his own developing convictions as both an officer and an aspiring gentleman.
From start to finish, he complained, as he would throughout the War for Independence, he had been given responsibilities without the resources to meet them. “I have been posted . . . upon our cold and Barren Frontiers,” he lamented, “to perform I think I may say impossibilitys, that is, to protect 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.” What he meant was that the dominant Indian tribes of the Ohio Country, chiefly the Shawnee and Delaware, had interpreted Braddock’s defeat as a mandate to maraud and plunder all the English settlements west of the Blue Ridge. The initiative, the numbers, and the tactical advantage were on the enemy’s side: “No troops in the universe can guard against the cunning and wiles of Indians,” he explained. “No one can tell where they will fall, ’till the mischief is done, and then ’tis vain to pursue. The inhabitants see, and are convinced of this; which Makes each family afraid of standing in the gap of danger.” There were no set-piece battles, just savage skirmishes that often ended in massacres. As he saw it, he was responsible for providing security over a region that was inherently indefensible, the epitome of mission impossible.41
His effort to change this fatal chemistry began with a plea to Dinwiddie for more Indian allies. “Indians,” he claimed, “are the only match for Indians.” This was less a statement of racial or ethnic enlightenment than a practical assessment that ten Indians were worth more than one hundred Virginia soldiers in a forest fight. He strongly supported the attempt to recruit Catawba and then Cherokee warriors from the Carolinas and gave orders to his troops “to be cautious what they speak before them: as all of them understand english, and ought not to be affronted.” Despite his best efforts, the Indian populations of the region remained resolutely pro-French and the decisive factor in making his mission a wholly defensive holding action, which eventually took the shape of multiple forts or stockades strung out on the west side of the Blue Ridge and garrisoned by detachments of his Virginia “blues.”42
They were called that because of their distinctive uniforms, which Washington designed himself: “Every officer of the Virginia Regiment is, as soon as possible, to provide himself with uniform Dress, which is to be of fine Broad Cloath: The Coat Blue, faced and cuffed with Scarlet, and Trimmed with Silver: The Waistcoat Scarlet, with a plain Silver Lace, if to be had—the Breeches to be Blue, and every one to provide himself with a silver-laced Hat, of a Fashionable size.” The officers’ uniforms were but the outward manifestation of Washington’s larger goal, which was to make the Virginia Regiment a truly special unit, “the first in Arms, of any Troops on the Continent, in the present War.” They were to look sharper and drill with greater precision than any group of British regulars, and they were to master the mobile tactics of “bushfighting” with Indian-like proficiency. Within a year Washington believed he had created just such an elite force, which, because it was constantly engaged in combat operations patrolling the Virginia frontier, had a battle-tested edge no other colonial or British troops could match.43
His pride in them was both professional and personal. “If it shou’d be said,” he wrote Dinwiddie, “that the Troops of Virginia are Irregulars, and cannot expect more notice than other Provincials, I must beg leave to differ, and observe in turn, that we want nothing but Commissions from His Majesty to make us as regular a Corps as any upon the Continent.” He had come to regard himself as superior to anyone, British or American, in conducting this kind of guerrilla war, and it rankled him that neither he nor his troops were paid at the same rate as British regulars. “We cann
ot conceive,” he complained to Dinwiddie in what turned out to be prophetic language, “that because we are Americans, we shou’d therefore be deprived of the Benefits Common to British Subjects.” His protest on this score was more personal than ideological; that is, it derived less from any political convictions about colonial rights than from his own disappointment that neither he nor his regiment were sufficiently appreciated. In the spring of 1756 he traveled all the way to Boston, his first trip to the northern colonies, to plead his case for equal pay and higher rank as a British officer to William Shirley, then acting commander for North America, who listened attentively but did nothing. He was a serious young man who took himself and his Virginia Regiment seriously, and expected others to do the same.44
He also managed to combine a broad-gauged grasp of his mission, in all its inherent frustrations, with a meticulous attention to detail. He drafted literally thousands of orders that all began “You are hereby ordered to . . .” and then proceeded, in language more incisive and grammatically cogent than his earlier writing, to focus tightly on a specific assignment: If you come upon a massacred settlement, harvest the corn crop before moving on; when constructing stockades, clear the surrounding trees and brush beyond musket range (a lesson he had learned from Fort Necessity); when a ranger in the regiment is killed in action, continue his salary for twenty-eight days to pay for his coffin; if ambushed in a clearing, rush toward the tree line from which the shots came while the enemy is reloading. Officers were held to a higher standard of deportment, to include controlling their wives: “There are continual complaints to me of the misbehavior of your wife,” he apprised one captain. “If she is not immediately sent from the camp . . . I shall take care to drive her out myself, and suspend you.” The old adage applied: if God were in the details, Colonel Washington would have been there to greet Him upon arrival.45
The raw material from which Washington recruited his regiment was raw indeed. He kept several rosters of the enlisted men, that reveal that most of his recruits were recently arrived immigrants, primarily from England, Ireland, or Scotland, or second-generation carpenters, bricklayers, and tanners from the Pennsylvania or Virginia backcountry. Washington duly recorded their names, age at enlistment, height, trade, place of origin, then a brief physical description: “Dark Complexion & Hair, lame in his right thigh by a wound”; “Fair Complexion, sandy Hair, well made”; “Red face, pitted with the small pox, Red Hair.” Though he maintained a proper social distance from the enlisted men, he knew most of them personally. And though most of them were older than he was, he cultivated the image of a caring but strict father toward his children.46
Discipline was harsh. Those found guilty of drunkenness or lewd behavior sometimes received up to a thousand lashes. Deserters, even those who returned voluntarily, faced death by hanging. A surge in desertions in the summer of 1757 produced a string of public executions. “I have a Gallows near 40 feet high erected,” Washington boasted to a British officer, “and I am determined . . . to hang two or three on it, as an example to others.” He suffered no sleepless nights after endorsing the executions, even when a condemned man made a special plea based on previous bravery in combat. There were clear lines in his mind, and if you crossed them, there was no forgiveness.47
He routinely contrasted the discipline of his own regiment with the undependable militia, whom he described as “those hooping, hallowing, Gentleman-Soldiers!” The ranks of most militia units were actually filled with yeomen farmers a notch above his own troops in the pecking order of Chesapeake society. But their short terms of enlistment and inveterate independence made them virtually worthless, as he saw it, in a war that put a premium on staying power. They were the wind. His Virginia Regiment was the wall. He described one scene in which a thirty-man militia unit refused to assist in the construction of a fort unless paid forty pounds of tobacco for each day of labor, this despite the fact that the fort was designed to protect their own families from annihilation. On another occasion, when reports of a large Canadian and Indian patrol arrived at his headquarters at Winchester, most of the militia assigned to his command declared their enlistments up and simply walked out. Washington resented that his Virginia Regiment was frequently mistaken for a mere militia unit. He did not believe you could trust in the principle of voluntarism, or the spontaneous expression of public virtue, to meet a wartime crisis. This was one youthful conviction that he never saw fit to abandon; indeed, it foreshadowed his low estimate of militia throughout the Revolutionary War.48
His abiding respect for civilian authority, most especially his insistence on strict obedience to the principle of civilian control over the military, eventually became one of his greatest legacies. But when he commanded the Virginia Regiment he violated the principle on several occasions, beginning with the whispering campaign he instigated against Dinwiddie when his requests for higher pay, more troops, and greater discretion in choosing the location of forts were routinely rejected. He opened a separate channel of communication with John Robinson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, blaming Dinwiddie for decisions that left the entire Shenandoah Valley, “the best land in Virginia,” vulnerable to Indian domination.49
Washington understood the open secret of Virginia politics, which was that the governor’s sovereign authority was more theoretical than real, because the legislature had managed to use its constitutional control over money bills as a weapon to limit gubernatorial power. So there were really two power sources to appease, and Washington’s covert communications with Robinson represented his realistic response to the bifurcated character of Virginia politics. For over a year he demonstrated considerable dexterity in negotiating a two-track approach without Dinwiddie’s knowledge.50
By 1757, however, the relationship with Dinwiddie had deteriorated badly, and the official correspondence became loaded with mutual accusations of deceit. Washington charged Dinwiddie with encouraging hostile gossip among the burgesses about his conduct of the war, which was precisely what he was doing to Dinwiddie. In fact, Dinwiddie had resolutely supported Washington in the backrooms of Williamsburg, despite gossipy criticisms from some burgesses that he was submitting inflated estimates of Indian strength in order to promote greater tax levies. Through it all, Washington maintained a posture of absolute probity: “But this know,” he wrote Dinwiddie, “that no man that ever was employed in a public capacity has endeavored to discharge the trust reposed in him with greater honesty, and more zeal for the country’s interest, than I have done.” There was truth in this claim, but not the whole truth, which would have included the behind-the-scenes machinations. Two features of the emerging Washington personality come into focus here: first, a thin-skinned aversion to criticism, especially when the criticism questioned his personal motives, which he insisted were beyond reproach; second, a capacity to play politics effectively while claiming total disinterest in the game.51
There was yet another political game he found himself playing, which operated by a wholly different set of rules and at a higher level in the imperial hierarchy. This was the aristocratic game of deference and patronage that he had played successfully with the Fairfax family and had hoped to play with Braddock. The eventual successor to Braddock as the commander of His Majesty’s forces in North America was John Campbell, the Earl of Loudoun, who turned out to be another ill-fated and short-lived emissary from London, brimming over with that wicked combination of confidence in his abilities and ignorance of his theater of operations. Upon his arrival in 1756, Washington wrote him in the properly deferential style: “We the officers of the Virginia Regiment beg leave to congratulate your Lordship on your safe arrival in America: And to express the deep Sense We have of his Majesty’s Wisdom and paternal Care for his Colonies in Sending your Lordship to their Protection at this critical Juncture.” He concluded his letter with a special plea based on the loyalty to Britain’s goals embodied in the Virginia Regiment, “as it in a more especial Manner entitles Us to Your Lordship’s Patronage.
”52
Lord Loudoun represented the privileged and presumptive aristocratic culture that beckoned to Washington as the epitome of influence. In the Virginia Regiment, on the other hand, officers and rangers were promoted on the basis of their performance, and Washington often resisted efforts by Fairfax to have unqualified friends given commissions. But Britain, and to a great extent Virginia as well, still operated within a social matrix where power flowed within bloodlines and where coats-of-arms trumped merit. Loudoun would have been hard-pressed to distinguish the Alleghenies from the Alps, but by a combination of royal whim and family fortune he controlled British policy and therefore the fate of the Virginia Regiment and its commander. Washington’s attempt to solicit his attention and support for a regular commission was almost comical in its fumbling effort to affect the proper deferential style:
Although I have not the Honour to be known to Your Lordship: Yet your Lordship’s Name was familiar to my Ear, on account of the Important Services performed to His Majesty in other parts of the World—don’t think My Lord I am going to flatter. I have exalted Sentiments of your Lordship’s Character, and revere your Rank; yet, mean not this (could I believe it acceptable). My nature is honest, and Free from Guile.53
Loudoun not only ignored the request, but even decided temporarily to disband the Virginia Regiment in order to send several companies to fight in South Carolina. Still determined to make an impression, Washington named one of his forts after Loudoun, which then proved a lingering embarrassment when Loudoun’s failure to mount a successful campaign against Cape Breton caused London to recall and replace him. It seems safe to conclude that Washington understood the rules of the aristocratic game, felt obliged to play by its rules to further his career, but often came off as the provincial American incapable of mastering the deferential vocabulary.
His Excellency_George Washington Page 4
