Washington

by Ron Chernow

  With the cold weather having grown “scarcely supportable,” Washington and Gist soldiered on alone to Murthering Town, where they picked up a “party of French Indians” who pledged to guide them on foot along the fastest route to the Forks of the Ohio.31 The group trudged on for miles, with Washington so exhausted that he allowed one Indian guide to carry his backpack. Washington trusted this Indian, but Gist intuited something amiss as the woods suddenly grew unfamiliar. At one point, when they came to a meadow, the Indian hustled out into the clearing without warning, spun around, and fired at them point-blank from fifteen paces. Washington, unscathed, saw Gist race to disarm the Indian. “Are you shot?” the young man hollered, and Gist shouted back, “No.” Gist jumped on the Indian, pinned him to the ground, and was about to execute him with his musket when Washington pleaded for his life. They kept the Indian bound and released him after dark. As he scuttled off into the woods, Washington and Gist, fearing he might return with others, dashed in the opposite direction. “As you will not have him killed,” Gist upbraided Washington, “we must get him away and then we must travel all night”—which is exactly what they did.32

  When these weary travelers arrived at an icy river, they expected to find it frozen solid. Instead, a large section of icy water swirled in the middle of the river. With “one poor hatchet,” Washington remembered, he and Gist devoted an entire day to hacking out a rude raft to float them across.33 Midway across the river, it became wedged in an ice floe, stuck so fast that Washington “expected every moment our raft would sink and we perish.”34 He tried to free the craft by pushing a pole against the river bottom: “I put out my setting pole to try to stop the raft that the ice might pass by, when the rapidity of the stream threw it with so much violence against the pole that it jerked me into ten feet [of ] water.”35 Bobbing breathlessly in the current, Washington latched onto one log of the raft and heaved himself onto its surface. Unable to get ashore, he and Gist lay stranded on an island in the river. Although Washington had been submerged in the icy water, it was Gist who suffered frostbite in his toes and fingers. The pair withstood the elements on the island all night. By the next morning, the river having congealed into a sheet of ice, they were able to scramble across to safety. Clearly, to have survived these mishaps, Washington must have been a physical prodigy, made of seemingly indestructible stuff. In his first political assignment, he had overcome a punishing array of obstacles, both physical and psychological, without losing sight of his primary objectives.

  After stopping briefly at Belvoir to regale the Fairfax family with tales of his wilderness saga, Washington beat a path to Williamsburg and on January 16, 1754, handed to Governor Dinwiddie the sealed letter from the French commandant, who refused to capitulate before British threats. Washington also supplied the governor with a map of Fort Le Boeuf and careful estimates of French military power. Impressed by the thoroughness with which Washington had tackled this complex task, Dinwiddie asked him to take the nearly seven thousand words of his frontier journal and convert them overnight into a coherent report for the council.

  In presenting this narrative to the governor, Washington struck a note of servility: “I hope it will be sufficient to satisfy Your Honour with my proceedings, for that was my aim in undertaking the journey and chief study throughout the prosecution of it.”36 Washington had no time to buff his prose and prefaced his journal with a disclaimer: “There intervened but one day between my arrival in Williamsburg and the time for the Council’s meeting for me to prepare and transcribe, from the rough minutes I had taken in my travels, this journal.” Such a timetable “admitted of no leisure to consult of a new and proper form to offer it in or to correct or amend the diction of the old.”37 It was an early example of Washington being nagged by his sense of an inadequate education.

  Published in colonial newspapers as far afield as Massachusetts, this report had repercussions beyond anything Washington could have envisioned. In late January, Dinwiddie alerted the Board of Trade in London to the prospect of a major French encroachment in the spring: the French would marshal fifteen hundred French soldiers and countless Indian warriors and commence a program to build more forts in the Ohio Country. To substantiate his case, Dinwiddie sent along Washington’s report, which was published in London in pamphlet form as The Journal of Major George Washington, giving the obscure young man instant renown in the British Empire. The slim volume helped kindle a spark that eventually led to the conflagration of the French and Indian War. Washington had expected money as well as fame for his trouble and was not assuaged when the assembly voted him a measly fifty-pound reward. As he grumbled to his brother Augustine, “I was employed to go a journey in the winter . . . and what did I get by it? My expenses borne!”38 It was Washington’s first bitter lesson in politics.

  Washington parlayed the governor’s approval of his work into a central role in the colony’s upcoming military campaign in the Ohio Country. Within a week of arriving in Williamsburg, he was authorized, as adjutant of the Northern Neck District, to raise and train one hundred militia. Joined by another hundred troops, they were to march to the Forks of the Ohio and construct a fort. On January 28 Washington contacted another Virginia official, Richard Corbin, and lobbied him for a promotion. Once again his style was both assertive and self-effacing: he tugged the forelock and pushed himself forward at once, as if he knew he was being boorish but couldn’t contain himself. He started out by conceding that the “command of the whole forces” of Virginia would be “a charge too great for my youth and inexperience.” Then he continued: “But if I could entertain hopes that you thought me worthy of the post of lieutenant colonel and would favour me so far as to mention it at the appointment of officers, I could not but entertain a true sense of the kindness.” This dogged young man cited “my own application and diligent study of my duty,” rather than his ability, as the best reason for his promotion.39 As it turned out, Washington did not overstate his worth, and Dinwiddie presented him with a commission as a lieutenant colonel. Almost twenty-two, Washington was emerging as a wunderkind to be reckoned with in the world of Virginia politics.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Bloodbath

  FROM HIS HEADQUARTERS IN ALEXANDRIA, Lieutenant Colonel George Washington attempted to inject discipline into a group of raw recruits he had enlisted for the impending march. Scarcely the spit-and-polish outfit of his dreams, they were marginal figures who inhabited the fringes of colonial society, and his attitude toward these rank amateurs mingled sympathy with vague distaste. As he bemoaned to Dinwiddie, most of these soldiers were “loose, idle persons that are quite destitute of house and home and I may truly say many of them of clothes.”1 Throughout his career, Washington complained of his charges being too rambunctious; they never seemed mannerly enough for his tastes. These scruffy, underfunded troops lacked shoes, stockings, shirts, and coats, as well as cutlasses, halberds, pikes, and drums. Their tattered clothing was especially upsetting for Washington, who lobbied Dinwiddie for red uniforms, advancing the novel sartorial theory that among the Indians red “is compared to blood and is looked upon as the distinguishing marks of warriors and great men.”2 He went so far as to opine that the Indians ridiculed the French soldiers’ shabby appearance, “and I really believe [that] is the chief motive why they hate and despise them as they do.”3

  To head the expedition, Dinwiddie named Joshua Fry, a former mathematics professor at the College of William and Mary; the English-born and Oxford-educated Fry was given command of the Virginia Regiment with the rank of colonel. Since Fry was already in his midfifties, Washington was stuck below a lumbering old man, as he likely perceived him. Most of all, however, he sulked about the inequitable treatment of colonial officers. Under the British imperial system, a captain from England with a royal commission could boss around Lieutenant Colonel Washington, even though the latter held a nominally higher rank—the sort of slight that rankled for many years with the proud young Virginian.

  By mid-March, as
intelligence reports filtered back from the Ohio Country of a French raiding party speeding toward the Forks of the Ohio, an apprehensive Dinwiddie ordered Washington “to march what soldiers you have enlisted immediately to the Ohio.”4 He furnished Washington with broadly elastic orders. In general, he was to maintain a defensive posture but could initiate hostilities if the French meddled with any military works or English settlements. Not mincing words, Dinwiddie granted him the power to apply deadly force, telling him that “you are to restrain all such offenders and in case of resistance to make prisoners of or kill and destroy them.”5 This open-ended mandate was crucial to the dramatic events shortly to unfold.

  On April 2, 1754, Washington set out for the wilderness with 160 green recruits. For the first time, he must have felt like a true commander. Their supply-laden wagons progressed slowly, for the men had to carve out a frontier road. Three weeks later, at the junction of Wills Creek and the Potomac, a courier swept into Washington’s camp with calamitous news: French troops had descended on the Forks en masse, forcing the surrender of British forces building a fort there; the French had renamed this pivotal outpost Fort Duquesne. It mattered little that the British had been aided by the Half King and his warriors, for the disparity in forces had been staggering: the French had assembled one thousand troops, 360 boats and canoes, and eighteen artillery pieces to subdue thirty-four helpless British soldiers. Not surprisingly, as the news percolated through camp, Washington had to cope with sinking morale and threatened desertions. He reassured the Half King that while his own detachment was too small to repel the French, it merely embodied the vanguard of “a great number of our warriors that are immediately to follow with our great guns, our ammunition, and our provision.”6 Washington evoked a phantom force, since Colonel Fry was bringing up the rear with little more than a hundred soldiers.

  Far from being intimidated, the courageous Washington burned with what he called a “glowing zeal.”7 Once again he played the impromptu diplomat in the wilderness and dashed off spirited letters to Lieutenant Governor James Hamilton of Pennsylvania and Governor Horatio Sharpe of Maryland, rallying them to send reinforcements. He was achingly aware of his youthful presumption in doing so, saying apologetically to Sharpe, “I ought first to have begged pardon of your excellency for this liberty of writing, as I am not happy enough to be ranked among those of your acquaintance.” He tried to stir the governors to action in ringing language, saying that the present contest “should rouse from the lethargy we have fallen into the heroic spirit of every free-born Englishman to assert the rights and privileges of our king.”8 An unknown young surveyor two years earlier, Washington was now penning admonitory letters to governors of neighboring colonies. Evidently he succeeded, because both Maryland and Pennsylvania dispatched more troops.

  Strangely enough, at this moment of looming confrontation with the French, Washington wrangled bitterly with Dinwiddie over the mundane matter of pay. Washington and his men smarted over the inferior compensation colonial officers received compared with regular officers. In mid-May Washington expressed dismay to Dinwiddie over a decision by the House of Burgesses to fix their pay at a steep discount to royal British salaries, stating that he would rather serve without pay than suffer this indignity: “But let me serve voluntarily. Then I will, with the greatest pleasure in life, devote my services to the expedition without any other reward than the satisfaction of my country. But to be 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 . . . than serve upon such ignoble terms.”9 From this letter, one can see how wholly Washington had imbibed the aristocratic ethos of the Fairfax family, since his own income scarcely entitled him to such grand, self-sacrificing gestures. Dinwiddie responded with irritation, expressing surprise that the young man for whom he had such “great expectations and hopes” should concur “with complaints in general so ill-founded.”10 He wrote in the impatient tone of an older man who had formerly found a young protégé quite sensible and was now shocked to find him far more headstrong than he had reckoned. The pay issue carried tremendous symbolic weight for the striving, hypersensitive Washington, who chafed at anything pertaining to inferior salary and status.

  On the evening of May 24, Washington received disconcerting news that a French detachment had crossed the Youghiogeny River eighteen miles away. He decided to establish a defensive position at a place called the Great Meadows (near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, today), a remote, grassy area that was to figure prominently in the Washington saga. With little premonition of the disaster ahead, Washington told Dinwiddie of his plans and struck a note of juvenile bravado: “We have with nature’s assistance made a good entrenchment and by clearing the bushes out of these meadows prepared a charming field for an encounter.”11 At the same time, Washington alluded to a disturbing episode: his sentries had heard rustling noises at night in the camp and didn’t know whether it was French interlopers or six of their own deserters. The men had fired at this unseen menace, prompting Washington to keep his men by their guns until daybreak. This episode coincided with reports from Christopher Gist that fifty boisterous French soldiers had invaded his nearby wilderness cabin, vowing to kill his cow and smash “everything in the house.”12 Gist also told of suspicious tracks that presumably belonged to this shadowy band. The Half King confirmed that the French had set up camp about seven miles away.

  At this jittery moment, Washington switched into a more aggressive mode and decided to hunt down the French contingent. Afterward he would evoke a nightmarish march in which he and forty men trudged through sheets of rain, “in a night as dark as pitch,” along a path so narrow they had to travel single file. On this moonless night, they kept stumbling against each other in the black void, and seven soldiers went astray in the woods. This harrowing atmosphere is important in understanding Washington’s hair-trigger response to the upcoming situation.

  On the morning of May 28, Washington and the Half King decided to pounce on the French intruders. Washington was convinced of their hostile intentions by the stealthy way they had moved about. As he afterward explained, the French “came secretly and sought after the most hidden retreats . . . and remained hid for whole days together and that no more than five miles from us. From thence they sent spies to reconnoiter our camp.”13 Washington’s sense of the situation, however faulty, likely predisposed him to launch a preemptive attack.

  Early that morning the Half King led him to a “low obscure place” where thirty-five Frenchmen lay encamped in a secluded glen, surrounded by rocks. For Washington, this “skulking place” underscored the clandestine nature of the French mission. He marched bravely at the head of his column, placing himself in the most vulnerable position as they approached the sheltered hollow. With Washington’s men in front of them and the Indians slipping behind them to block their escape, the French were encircled. According to Washington’s version of events, the French soldiers, when they spied the British, instantly scurried for their arms and unleashed a brisk fire. Washington gave orders to fire in return, and his men ripped off two quick volleys. Trapped on low ground, the ambushed French soon threw down their arms and surrendered. The casualty count showed a lopsided contest in which ten French were killed and another twenty-one were captured, compared with only one dead and two or three wounded on Washington’s side. Clearly, Washington and his men overpowered the French before they had a chance to respond, making it seem unlikely that the latter had fired first. The whole bloody affair was wrapped up in fifteen minutes.

  What converted this local skirmish into a worldwide incident was the identity of one victim: Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville, thirty-five, who bore an important diplomatic message to the British, demanding their evacuation from the Ohio Country. According to one account, as Jumonville read this ultimatum, the Half King stepped forward, split open his head with a hatchet, then dipped his hands into the skull, rinsed them with the victi
m’s brains, and scalped him. What is beyond dispute is that Washington abruptly found himself presiding over atrocities, as his Indian allies swooped down on the remaining Frenchmen “to knock the poor, unhappy wounded on the head and bereave them of their scalps,” as he wrote.14 This was a curiously ironic way to describe a bloodbath, as if Washington wished to distance himself from the horror or pretend it was merely routine. The Indians’ behavior placed him in an excruciating predicament, for he didn’t wish to repudiate them after their victory or threaten their alliance. We don’t know how many Frenchmen were murdered by Indian hatchets rather than British muskets.

  In their radically different version of events, the French claimed that they awoke that morning to find themselves hemmed in by Indians and Englishmen, with the latter firing first. Through an interpreter, Monsieur de Jumonville beseeched the English to cease firing, and when they did, he read aloud his ultimatum. The French claimed that, while reading this message, Jumonville was shot through the head by a musket and that the remaining French would have been annihilated had not the Indians rushed between them and the English, averting further bloodshed.

  Washington may have exaggerated the British role in killing the Frenchmen to establish his own military credentials. Whatever the exact sequence of events, he overstated his certainty that the French were spying on him and stalking his movements; his letter to Dinwiddie had admitted to doubts about the nocturnal spying incident. Afterward, when the French prisoners insisted that they had come only to deliver a warning, Washington scoffed at the claim. “They informed me that they had been sent with a summons to order me to depart. A plausible pretense to discover our camp and to obtain the knowledge of our forces and our situation!”15 A genuine diplomat, he maintained, would have traveled straight to him and presented his message in a forthright manner. Washington was convinced that French espionage was merely the prelude to a murderous assault on his men. Still, the French party was so small that, whatever its true intent, it hardly seemed to constitute a dire threat to the British.