by Ron Chernow
The French version likewise lacks plausibility in several particulars. It is hard to believe that Washington would have allowed a diplomatic messenger to be shot in cold blood, as the French insisted. After all, the previous fall he himself had been in an analogous situation, delivering a stiffly worded warning to the French. He was too cautious to jeopardize his career by murdering an ambassador. On the other hand, the French had already seized the Forks of the Ohio, and Washington may have felt the French and British empires were now at war in all but name. It also strains credulity that the Indians heroically thrust themselves between the French and the British. The Half King had recommended harsh measures against the French detachment, and in letters to Dinwiddie, Washington disclosed that the Indian chief circulated French scalps among friendly tribes as war trophies. The French version seems like a patent attempt to curry political favor with the Indians by exonerating them of blame for the savagery.
On May 29 Washington sat down in his camp at the Great Meadows to explain the apparent massacre to Governor Dinwiddie. Instead of turning straight to this fateful confrontation, he bizarrely devoted the first eight paragraphs to fresh complaints about colonial pay, which, he said, “debarred” him from “the pleasure of good living.”16 He informed Dinwiddie that he had told Colonel Fairfax that he intended to resign over the issue, but Fairfax had dissuaded him. Once again Washington feigned indifference to money and volunteered to serve without pay rather than accept meager compensation. When he finally got around to the Jumonville episode, he insisted that the French had flitted about likes spies and assassins. They had “sought one of the most secret retirements, fitter for a deserter than an ambassador to encamp in—stayed there two or 3 days [and] sent spies to reconnoiter our camp, as we are told, though they deny it.”17 For the next few weeks, Washington passed along to Dinwiddie every scrap of intelligence gleaned from French deserters that might strengthen his case.
To his younger brother Jack, Washington sent an account that showcased his leadership style in battle. Instead of hanging back in the rear, Washington had led by example and exposed himself unflinchingly to enormous risk. “I fortunately escaped without a wound, though the right wing where I stood was exposed to and received all the enemy’s fire and was the part where the man was killed and the rest wounded.” He also engaged in some youthful boasting. “I can with truth assure you, I heard bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.”18 Instead of being traumatized by battle, he wanted to illustrate his coolness under fire. When King George II encountered Washington’s blithe comments about the “charming” sound of bullets in a London periodical, he detected a false note of swagger. “He would not say so if he had been used to hear many,” the king said acerbically.19
Aware that the large French army at the Forks would soon get wind of the massacre and retaliate swiftly in overwhelming numbers, Washington vowed not to “give up one inch of what we have gained.”20 He hastily ordered his men at the Great Meadows to dig trenches, drive in pointed stakes, and build a crude, circular, palisade-style stockade that he dubbed Fort Necessity. While the troops busily braced for an attack, Colonel Joshua Fry tumbled from his horse and died on May 31. Thus, at age twenty-two, George Washington took full command of the Virginia Regiment, in yet another case of his being promoted to higher things by events beyond his control.
Surely Washington must have wondered whether Governor Dinwiddie would applaud his encounter with the French or condemn it as violating his instructions. On June 1 Dinwiddie sent him a letter that removed any lingering doubt: he construed the clash as a famous victory. Warmly congratulating Washington for “the very agreeable account” of the episode, he labeled it a success on which “I heartily congratulate you, as it may give a testimony to the Ind[ian]s that the French are not invincible w[he]n fairly engaged with the English.”21 In the next letter, Dinwiddie heaped further praise on Washington’s “prudent measures” and said he was sending four thousand black and four thousand white strings of wampum, fortified by three barrels of rum, for Indian diplomacy. At heart, however, Dinwiddie knew that Washington had acted rashly and exceeded instructions, for when he wrote to the Board of Trade in London, he converted Washington and his men into minor partners of their Indian allies. As he wrote, “This little skirmish was by the Half King and their Indians. We were as auxiliaries to them, as my orders to the Commander of our Forces [were] to be on the defensive.”22 While the folks at home embraced him as an improbable hero, Washington was denigrated in England as a reckless young warrior and in France as an outright assassin. He would have been crestfallen to know that, for some high-ranking folks in London, his behavior only confirmed that provincial officers couldn’t be trusted. “Washington and many such may have courage and resolution,” Lord Albemarle wrote to the Duke of Newcastle, “but they have no knowledge or experience in our [military] profession; consequently there can be no dependence on them!”23 Destiny had now conferred upon Washington a pivotal place in colonial, and even global, affairs, for the Jumonville incident was recognized as the opening shot that precipitated the French and Indian War, known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War. In the words of Sir Horace Walpole in London, “The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.”24
AS HE STEELED HIMSELF at Fort Necessity for the enraged French onslaught, Washington squabbled with Dinwiddie over the unequal treatment of provincial officers. Despite his good fortune, he brooded on the penalties he suffered as a colonial. He had no quarrel, he told Dinwiddie, with the appointment of Colonel James Innes, a veteran Scottish officer leading a North Carolina regiment, as the new commander in chief to replace Joshua Fry. And he enjoyed cordial relations with Major George Muse, who brought two hundred men to Fort Necessity and deferred to Washington as leader of the Virginia Regiment. What nettled Washington was the imminent arrival of South Carolina Independents under James Mackay, a senior officer who held his captaincy by royal commission. Mackay’s company was composed mostly of colonial soldiers, but it was part of the regular British Army. This renewed the thorny issue of whether a regular captain could lord it over Washington, who held a superior provincial rank. Washington assured Dinwiddie that he would “endeavor to make all my officers show Captain Mackay all the respect due to his rank and merit, but [I] should have been particularly obliged if your Honor had declared whether he was under my command or independent of it.”25
When Captain Mackay arrived with one hundred men on June 14, he quickly asserted his prerogatives over Colonel Washington and staked out a separate camp-site. When Washington sent over the parole and countersign to be used, Mackay made it crystal clear that he wasn’t bound by orders from a lowly colonial colonel. He also wouldn’t allow his South Carolinians to join the Virginians in an important road-building operation, since Washington could pay only inferior colonial wages. This high-handed behavior dealt a stinging rebuke to Washington, who was fighting to protect a British Empire that insisted on consigning him to inferior status. Increasingly, he found himself fighting one war against the French and an equally acrimonious one behind the lines with his British brethren.
As it happened, Washington had much graver problems than his minor interpersonal drama with Captain Mackay. On June 18 he huddled with the Half King and other chieftains for three days to plot strategy against the French. In the end, the Indians concluded that Washington and his flimsy fortress couldn’t shield them against the huge French force gathering at Fort Duquesne. This ended their short-lived alliance and threw young Washington back on his own resources. In his diary, he inveighed against the faithless Indians as “treacherous devils who had been sent by the French as spies” and could turn against his men at any time. The Half King, for his part, painted a portrait of Washington as a “good-natured” but naively inept young commander who “took upon him to command the Indians as his slaves” and refused to “take advice from Indians.”26 He derided Fort Necessity as “that little thing upon the
meadow.”27
On June 28 Washington ordered his exhausted men, who had been dispersed building roads, to retreat within the flimsy confines of Fort Necessity. At a war council that day, the outlook seemed pretty bleak. Intelligence reports, only slightly exaggerated, warned that the French would attack with eight hundred French soldiers and four hundred Indians, or several times Washington’s own strength. And their army was commanded by a Frenchman with a fiercely personal mission. Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers was the older brother of the fallen Jumonville and was bent upon avenging his death. To worsen matters, Washington’s depleted men had lacked meat or bread for six days and munched on withered corn as they dragged ponderous cannon across hilly terrain. Yet despite his vulnerable position, Washington remained sanguine that, with only three hundred men, he could defeat the superior French force. According to the Half King’s mocking account, Washington thought the French soldiers would pop up conveniently in the open field and allow themselves to get shot. 28
In choosing Fort Necessity, Washington opted for a spot poorly situated to withstand an incursion. He always refused to concede its demerits and years later still defended the Great Meadows as a place “abounding in forage” and convenient for a stockade.29 An uncouth backwoods structure, covered with bark and animal skins, the fort was primarily defended by nine small cannon that spun on pivots. Because it could contain only sixty or seventy men, Washington had three-foot trenches dug around its perimeter to protect additional men and threw up earthen breastworks to bolster their position. Despite such precautions, Fort Necessity stood on low-lying grassland that was soft and boggy and would form stagnant ponds in the rain. It was also surrounded by woods and high ground that could protect marksmen within easy musket range of the fort. Significantly, the fort was open to the sky, affording no shelter from the elements.
On the morning of July 3, 1754, Washington and his men had hunkered down at the fort when frantic scouts reported that “a heavy, numerous body” of French soldiers had drawn within four miles of their camp.30 They had stopped by the glen where Jumonville was killed and discovered the unburied bodies of dead compatriots, further inflaming their rage. Later that morning, while Washington’s men scooped out trenches, this invisible force took on a sudden, terrifying shape, descending on Fort Necessity in three columns. Bullets rained down from everywhere. French and Indian soldiers “advanced with shouts and dismal Indian yells to our entrenchments,” Washington recalled, but were greeted by a “warm, spirited and constant” fire that scattered them to the woods.31 What Washington didn’t recall was that the British regulars under Mackay had stood steadfast under French fire, while the ranks of his own Virginia Regiment had broken and dived for cover.
Washington received a costly lesson in frontier fighting as swarms of French and Indians kept up a scalding fire “from every little rising, tree, stump, stone, and bush.”32 Their well-protected marksmen took clear shots from woods as little as sixty yards away. Then late in the afternoon, a torrential rain began to fall—“the most tremendous rain that can be conceived,” in Washington’s words—and it soaked both his men and their weapons, turning the fort’s floor into a treacherous mud bowl.33 Worst of all, the water pooled in the ditches, trapping soldiers in their own defenses. Exposed to the sky, the men couldn’t keep their cartridges and fire-locks dry, rendering their muskets useless. By the end of the day, the rain-drenched stockade was a horrific swamp of mangled bodies, lying in blood and rain. The appalling casualty toll—a hundred men dead or wounded—represented a full third of Washington’s soldiers. The pitiless French also butchered every cow, horse, and even dog in sight. So one-sided was the outcome that the French suffered only three dead and seventeen wounded. To put a better gloss on the bloodshed, Washington and Mackay magnified the scale of French casualties, pegging the figure as high as three hundred, as if the two sides had fought to an even draw.
The debacle was compounded by the surrender. It was nearly nightfall when the French commander signaled a willingness to talk. By that point, Washington’s men had pounced on the fort’s rum supply, and half of them had gotten drunk—perhaps leaving Washington with a lifelong detestation of alcohol, especially among soldiers. Lacking dry gunpowder and food, Washington and Mackay had no choice but to submit; their troops were down to their last bags of flour and a little bacon, with their fresh food spoiling in the summer heat.34 The person picked to convey the terms of surrender was Jacob Van Braam, their French interpreter. The translation of those terms caused a brouhaha that engulfed Washington in yet another international controversy. As he shuffled between the two sides, Van Braam relayed an article of capitulation that said the French assault had been in retaliation for the assassination of Jumonville—a provocative word indeed. When Washington and Mackay signed the agreement around midnight, they imagined that the term used was the more neutral death or loss of Jumonville.35 Their inadvertent confession supplied the French with a major propaganda victory.
How could this profound misunderstanding have arisen? The night of the negotiation was dark and rainy, and when Van Braam brought back the terms of surrender, Washington and the other officers strained to read the blurry words in a dim light. “We could scarcely keep the candlelight to read them,” recalled one officer. “They were wrote in a bad hand, on wet and blotted paper, so that no person could read them but Van Braam, who had heard them from the mouth of the French officer.” 36 Not expert in English, Van Braam might have used death or loss interchangeably with assassination, yet it’s hard to imagine that he botched the translation deliberately. What is clear is that Washington was adamant that he never consented to the loaded word assassination. “That we were willfully, or ignorantly, deceived by our interpreter in regard to the word assassination, I do aver and will to my dying moment,” Washington insisted.37
In other respects, the French treated Washington and his men more honorably. They wanted to characterize their military confrontation as an act of reprisal instead of war and to show due mercy to the vanquished after they had “confessed.” Instead of being taken prisoner, the British soldiers would be allowed to retreat with the full honors of war, “our drums beating and our colors flying,” as Washington phrased it.38 Nevertheless, the next morning one hundred Indian allies of the French ransacked the British baggage, completing their humiliation. On the road back to Wills Creek, the Indians taunted and harassed Washington’s men. The Virginia Regiment began to crumble from wholesale desertions, and the hapless Washington felt powerless to stop it.
In the rifled baggage, the French stumbled upon the diary that Washington had kept, and it was duly passed along to Governor Duquesne, who devoured its contents. “There is nothing more unworthy and lower and even blacker than the sentiments and the way of thinking of this Washington,” Duquesne gloated after perusing the diary.39 To Washington’s mortification, it was published in Paris two years later to a jeering public. The French had a field day with the articles of capitulation, brandishing them as proof that Washington had murdered Jumonville, a man on a peaceful mission. In this manner, they cast the British as the first belligerents in the French and Indian War. The sudden celebrity that Washington had attained in Virginia turned to instant notoriety abroad. One English writer, in high dudgeon, lambasted the articles of surrender as “the most infamous a British subject ever put his hand to.”40
The Fort Necessity debacle pointed up Washington’s inexperience. Historians have rightly faulted him for advancing when he should have retreated; for fighting without awaiting sufficient reinforcements; for picking an indefensible spot; for the slapdash construction of the fort; for alienating his Indian allies; and for shocking hubris in thinking that he could defeat an imposing French force. Yet the major blame must lie with Governor Dinwiddie and the Virginia legislators, who had failed to fund the campaign properly and sent an insufficient force. Some Washington virtues stood out amid the temporary wreckage of his reputation. With unflagging resolution, he had kept his composure in battle, e
ven when surrounded by piles of corpses. He had a professional toughness and never seemed to gag at bloodshed; a born soldier, he was curiously at home with bullets whizzing about him. Even in the wilderness, there was no doubt that he would faithfully execute orders. He was always tenacious and persevering and never settled for halfway measures. Utterly fearless, he faced down dangers and seemed undeterred by obstacles. Washington knew he had shown personal courage, contending that he had “stood the heat and brunt of the day and escaped untouched in time of extreme danger.”41
It’s also worth noting that Washington had received an invaluable education in frontier warfare. European conventional warfare stressed compact masses of troops, arrayed on open battlefields. In the New World, by contrast, the Indians had perfected a mobile style of warfare that relied on ambushing, sniping from trees, and vanishing into the forest. That June Washington noted that “the French all fight in the Indian method,” and the Fort Necessity defeat demonstrated how lethal this could be .42 Washington had seen how soldiers could defeat an enemy through speed and cunning. Two other lessons informed his later experience in the American Revolution. One was the futility of trying to hold posts that could become death traps for soldiers cooped up inside—a lesson Washington would have to relearn in the subsequent war. The other lesson, as President Washington repeated it to Indian fighters in his administration, was the resounding dictum “Beware of surprise!”43 George Washington always demonstrated a capacity to learn from missteps. “Errors once discovered are more than half amended,” he liked to say. “Some men will gain as much experience in the course of three or four years as some will in ten or a dozen.”44 It was this process of subtle, silent, unrelenting self-criticism that enabled him to rise above his early defeats.
