Dinwiddie was all eagerness to persuade Virginia that, to forestall French attack, the colony should pay for building the fort at the Forks of the Ohio that would also serve the interests of the Virginia Company. Despite Washington’s desire to revise his journal of the expedition into better literary form, the Lieutenant Governor rushed it to the press because it revealed French intentions and would thus help his cause. This effort to persuade the citizenry failed for reasons that Washington undoubtedly took to heart. Since he was closely connected with the promoters of the Virginia Company, the charge of bias made it impossible for him to secure credence for what he had seen and sincerely believed. Most Virginians were, in any case, not anxious to take action: they considered the land over the Alleghenies so distant as to be of concern only to land speculators and the global ambitions of kings.
Through political bargains, Dinwiddie managed to secure from the Virginia legislature authorization for an army of three hundred men. The twenty-one-year-old Major was mentioned as the commander. Here were wings for ambition, but the diffidence that always accompanied Washington’s push for power took over. He wrote that he believed he could with “diligent study” prepare himself for the second rank, but admitted that the first was beyond his knowledge and experience. Dinwiddie accepted this disclaimer; circumstances (tragically, as it turned out) did not. The man appointed to the top command never caught up with his second, leaving Washington, now promoted to lieutenant colonel, as actual commander in situations that proved both politically and militarily far beyond his depth.
Dinwiddie had sent a task force of thirty-three men to build a fort at the Forks. When they reported rumors of a large French invasion, Washington was ordered over the mountains with what troops had so far been raised. The 159 men he led westward in April, 1754, built for their few cannon the road that, for the first time since the creation of the world, carried wheels into the Ohio Valley.
Washington soon saw approaching him the little garrison from the fort. They reported excitedly that they had found themselves surrounded by a thousand Frenchmen and Indians, who had come down the waterways with cannon. What was their relief not to be attacked, merely to be courteously ushered onto the trail back to settled Virginia! Washington was impressed by the news that the Half-King (who claimed that the French had boiled and eaten his father) had cursed out the invaders, expressing continued support for the English armies. In order not to let such Indian allies down, Washington decided to continue his advance, even though his force was now so greatly outnumbered.
The Half-King soon notified Washington that a French party was skulking in the nearby woods. Overlooking the fact that England and France were not officially at war, forgetting that the French had not attacked the party at the Forks and that Dinwiddie had ordered him to warn all Frenchmen away before he engaged in hostilities, Washington allowed himself to be persuaded to use the Indian tactic of a surprise attack.
Advancing through the darkest of rainy nights with forty soldiers and a posse of Indians, Washington surrounded in the morning light of dawn thirty-two Frenchmen who were lounging by their campfires. In the engagement that ensued, the Frenchmen had difficulty getting to their arms, but there was some return fire. “I heard the bullets whistle,” enthused the fledging Colonel, “and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.”
The victory Washington quickly won seemed total—ten Frenchmen killed and the rest taken prisoner. However, the survivors did not cower in humiliation. Waving documents, they shouted in outrage. Interpreters finally explained their claim that one of the men killed, Joseph Coulon, Sieur de Jumonville, had been leading the group on a mission similar to Washington’s of a few months before: to warn the British off what the French claimed was their land. Washington, the prisoners insisted, had attacked a peaceful diplomatic mission, murdered an ambassador.
The seriousness of the situation did not come over to Washington. Insisting that, whatever papers they carried, the French obviously had hostile intentions, he shrugged off charges that were greatly to excite the chancelleries of the two great European rivals.
Forest intelligence reported that the French, who were erecting a strong point (Fort Duquesne) at the Forks, had enough manpower left over to send eight hundred soldiers and four hundred Indians to annihilate Washington’s little army. Washington wrote Dinwiddie, “I have a constitution hardy enough to encounter and undergo the most severe trials, and, I flatter myself, the resolution to face what any man durst.” But he still “ardently wished” to have some experienced officer sent to command him.
He was soon deserted by his Indian allies. The Half-King was to explain that, although “a good natured man,” Washington would not listen to advice and kept the Indians as if they were “slaves,” forever on the scout. The braves foresaw a British defeat and wanted no part in it.
Before departing, the Half-King warned that the defensive fort Washington had decided to build—the Indian warrior referred to it contemptuously as “that little thing in the meadow”—was useless. “Fort Necessity” was, indeed, an exercise in pure inexperience. The stockade was not large enough to hold even Washington’s tiny force. Most were protected only by an earthen parapet with a ditch before it. Expecting, it seems, that the enemy would charge his works across the surrounding open fields, he was unconcerned by the bushy heights that looked down into the fort.
The battle developed on July 3, 1754. The French and Indians took cover on the raised places whence they could angle their fire into the battlements. Had the firearms of those days been accurate, Washington’s army would have been annihilated within the hour. As it was, the battle dragged on, each side firing at opposing musket flashes, but with the French always having the advantage. As Washington ran around giving commands, he stepped over dead and wounded bodies, slipped on blood.
When the skies opened in midafternoon, Washington was thankful—the driving rain slowed all fire—but not for long. Fort Necessity had been so ineptly placed that it became a catch basin. From one trench after another, the men were displaced by bloody water. Since the roof of the magazine leaked, the stored powder was being ruined. But Washington was unwilling to surrender. He heartened his men by breaking open some kegs of rum. There was a renewed burst of fire from Fort Necessity, even if the musket barrels reeled.
Darkness gathered when, to Washington’s amazement, the triumphing French offered to parley. Van Braam, still Washington’s interpreter, went out to meet the enemy. The ceasefire enabled Washington to assess more clearly his hopeless situation. A third of his force—more than a hundred men—were dead or wounded. There was hardly any food or usable powder. The harshest surrender terms seemed in order, yet van Braam returned all smiles.
The commander of the French force, Coulon de Villiers, proved to be a brother of the dead Jumonville. In the engagement when Jumonville had fallen, Washington had taken the surrendered Frenchmen prisoner; yet de Villiers now offered to agree that Washington’s troops could go home. The Virginia stripling was too pleased to puzzle for an explanation. Either because of relief, exhaustion, or a bad translation by van Braam, Washington signed, on July 4, a document which stated that the French, averse to troubling “the peace and harmony which reigns between two friendly princes,” had acted solely from the need to avenge the “assassination” of their diplomat, Jumonville.
If only Dinwiddie had paid heed to Washington’s protestations of inexperience! If only the youthful Colonel had refused to accept responsibilities he knew were beyond him—or had been cautious once thrust into power! In a short three months, he had sown havoc. The Indians, realizing that the conflict between European encroachers was not theirs, saw their advantage in being allied to whichever side was going to win. They were persuaded by Washington’s ridiculous defeat at Fort Necessity to go over in a body to the French.
And the repercussions in Europe were disastrous. On the verge of a war with France, the British Crown had been branded not only as the aggressor but as a murdere
r of diplomats. A French poet wrote, “The assassination of Jumonville is a monument of perfidy that ought to enrage eternity,” and an English pamphleteer said that the surrender Washington had signed was “the most infamous a British subject ever put his hand to.” In the eyes of the British command Washington had demonstrated himself the very nadir of an animal they commonly laughed at and distrusted: the incompetent provincial officer.
However—so sharp was the separation of attitudes—Washington’s own Virginia hailed him as hero: had he not won a victory and then, with great bravery, induced his little force to stand up to a superior enemy? In his innocence, Washington hoped to be rewarded with a commission in the regular army that would enable him to make a lifetime career as a professional British officer.
Washington’s few soldiers had been designated “the Virginia Regiment.” It seemed to him that nothing could be more natural than for the British, on the verge of a declaration of war with France, to incorporate the regiment in the regular establishment. This would make Washington a regular colonel at the age of twenty-two. He did not realize that such a commission was worth thousands of pounds and was, in any case, open to so young a man only under the circumstance of the highest aristocratic birth.
As Washington awaited, half confidently, this promotion, he was notified that the Virginia Regiment was not to be incorporated but broken up. No provincial would be allowed a commission higher than captain.
George Washington resigned from the army.
THREE
Love and Massacre
(1754–1755)
During December, 1754, for an annual rent of fifteen thousand pounds of tobacco, Washington rented Mount Vernon and the eighteen resident slaves from the widow of his half brother Lawrence. He had determined to become a planter. Although, as he put it, “my inclinations are [still] strongly bent to arms,” he spurned the suggestion of the new British commander, Governor Horatio Sharpe of Maryland, that he serve as adviser on conditions over the mountains. The title of colonel offered him was to be purely honorary. He wrote, “You must entertain a very contemptible opinion of my weakness.”
Washington’s existence at Mount Vernon was being troubled and made fascinating by the woman to whom he wrote, when he was old and celebrated, that none of the subsequent events of his career “nor all of them together have been able to eradicate from my mind those happy moments, the happiest of my life, which I have enjoyed in your company.” What surely was the most passionate love of Washington’s life had dark overtones: Sally was married, married to his neighbor and close friend George William Fairfax.
Washington’s love was no flash fire that burns away quickly. He had first met Sally when she was eighteen and he was sixteen, and she had come to Belvoir as a bride. Her two years’ seniority must then have created a significant gap, but the sixteen-year-old grew into the impressive giant whose physical and military adventures electrified all Virginia. The exact nature of their relationship cannot be defined. Washington was to write Sally that he recollected “a thousand tender passages”; and a mutual female friend admonished Washington, just before his defeat at Fort Necessity, to seek “some unknown she that may recompense you for all your trials” and make him abandon “pleasing reflections on the hours past.” Whatever transpired did not break Washington’s friendship with Sally’s husband; the suitor remained welcome at Belvoir.
Unlike the Fairfax family into which she married, Sally Cary (as she had been) was an American product. She was descended from one of the richest and most cultivated families in Virginia. The only picture of her that remains is a primitive daub, yet it indicates a high forehead, dark brows that arch out over large and deep-set dark eyes; a nose that in the classic manner continues the line of her brow; a long neck and sloping shoulders. She had, as Washington wrote her, “mirth, good humor … and what else?” She seems to have been driven by her overpowering admirer into a somewhat desperate coquetry. Washington’s surviving communications to her are those of a complaining lover who is being taught by experience how impossible it is for him to revive what he has once known. She forbids him to write her letters, but if he withdraws, she comes forward, writing him a saucy letter of her own, keeping him forever off balance.
Although war had not yet been officially declared, France and Britain were getting more and more embroiled. Up the Potomac that flowed past Washington’s lawn there sailed a British armada. In March, 1755, Major General Edward Braddock arrived at Alexandria with two British regiments. When he invited the neighborhood to a review, Sally and George each had an ambition. Sally wished to persuade the British regular that she was the most dashing of all the ladies. George wished to attach himself to the General in a way that would unblock his military career and enable him to gain more “knowledge of the military art.”
The review revealed how deeply he needed that knowledge. He had his first sight of the precision with which regular soldiers drilled, of how the crowded ranks could wheel and move, like an unrippling stream, in any direction. He had the chance to be overwhelmed by the multitudinous equipment, so much more complicated and efficient than anything he had imagined, of a well-supplied professional army.
Sarah (Sally) Fairfax, the wife of Washington’s neighbor and close friend, the great love of his youth, the most passionate love of his life (Photograph of a lost portrait. Courtesy of Mrs. Seymour St. John)
The first page of a letter George Washington wrote Sally Fairfax less than four months before his marriage to Martha Custis (Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)
With the Commanding General, he did better than Sally. She was cut out by a Mrs. Wardrope, but Braddock had been informed that Washington knew more than anyone else about the wilderness through which the army would have to march on its objective to capture Fort Duquesne at the Forks of the Ohio. Impressed (as almost everybody always was) by the fiery and grave Colonial, Braddock set up a meeting to determine Washington’s part in the campaign.
On the appointed day, just as Washington was about to set out for Alexandria, there was a sound of hooves on the Mount Vernon driveway and in dashed his mother. She had heard of her son’s intentions. She mourned that he would go into danger while neglecting his duty to her. As Washington listened to her voice and responded as soothingly as he could, he saw the clock hand advance, revealing him ever more grievously late for the appointment on which he believed his whole future might hang. However, he could not bring himself to turn his back on his mother. Finally, she herself stamped angrily out. Then he got in touch again with Braddock, who proved not to have been offended. Since the General could not offer Washington any rank he considered suitable, Washington agreed to serve at headquarters with no rank, as a volunteer aide.
Braddock was having the greatest difficulty procuring the supplies and horses that were necessary to get his army across the mountains. Although Washington himself complained that you could as easily raise the dead as raise the force of Virginia, he became angry when Braddock cursed out the Colonials. “We have,” he wrote, “frequent disputes on this head, which are maintained with warmth on both sides, especially on his, who is incapable of arguing without it, or giving up any point he asserts, let it be ever so incompatible with reason.”
Braddock enjoyed arguing. On closer acquaintance more than ever taken with Washington, he promised that once the campaign was successfully concluded, he would secure for the young Colonial “preferment” in the regular army “agreeable to my wishes.” But the regular did not listen to Washington’s warnings that “the Canadian French” would not fight like the French in Europe, and that the Indians had their own ways. Braddock felt only disdain for irregular forces, white or red. The possible Indian allies which the English agents painfully scratched up for him were rebuffed.
Washington, who had cut his own wheel track across the mountains, could not help being impressed with the smooth, elegantly graded, elaborately bridged boulevard which the British engineers were creating—but he knew that the
ir slow advance could not possibly carry the army to Fort Duquesne before winter. The Colonial’s protests were cut short by his becoming so “excessively ill” (probably with dysentery) that he had to be altogether left behind. His physical suffering and fear that he would miss the capture of Fort Duquesne were heightened by Sally’s refusal to keep in touch.
Although far from recovered, Washington finally undertook a painful trip forward in a wagon. He rocked queasily past the site of Fort Necessity; the place of the Jumonville affair; and beyond into territory his little force had not reached. The British were now—he later claimed they followed a suggestion he had made—traveling more lightly, speeding the engineers. Washington caught up with the army two miles from the Monongahela and twelve from Fort Duquesne.
The next day, July 9, 1755, was to be the most catastrophic in all Anglo-American history. But Washington’s concern at dawn was only over finding a way by which he could, without too much pain, ride a horse so that he could be present at what he foresaw as the investiture of Fort Duquesne. By tying pillows to his saddle, he managed to join the aides around Braddock. The most dangerous maneuver the officers anticipated was a double crossing of the Monongahela. This was achieved against no opposition with professional snap and skill.
The army now proceeded over relatively level ground in a twelve-foot-wide clearing cut by the engineers through thick forest. A shot that rang out ahead was followed by Indian whooping and then the sounds of much firing, which indicated that the advance guard was heavily engaged. Braddock, with Washington beside him, led the main column quickly forward. They had not gone far before the clearing filled with red-coated soldiers rushing toward them in terrified flight. The fugitives dashed headlong into the advancing reinforcements, shattering all order; and at the same time the sound of firing came running down the woods on both flanks. No enemy was visible, but the men in the road began to fall in bloody heaps. Panic now took over completely.
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