Washington- The Indispensable Man

by James Thomas Flexner

  The British regulars were entirely untrained in fighting out of formation, as individual men. Now haphazardly huddled together in the middle of the long, thin, exposed clearing that was the road, they hysterically shot down their companions in anguished efforts to protect themselves from an unseen and deadly foe. The officers could think of nothing but to try to get the men into an orderly parade-ground formation. Braddock indignantly denied Washington’s request that he be allowed to lead the provincial troops into the woods “and engage the enemy in their own way.”

  The officers on their horses were perfect targets. One after another they went down. Washington’s horse was shot from under him. He leapt on another. Bullets tore his coat. Braddock toppled over. Washington’s second horse crumpled; his hat was shot off. However, as he later wrote, “the miraculous care of Providence … protected me beyond all human expectation.” He was now “the only person then left to distribute the [wounded] general’s orders.” This he was hardly able to do because his sickness was rising upon him. The dead and dying lay in piles. The survivors, no officers being left to stop them, were at long last saving themselves by running away. Having loaded Braddock into “a small covered cart,” Washington led into retreat those men who could move and had remained to be led.

  The wounded Braddock ordered Washington to ride back forty miles through the night to summon reinforcements. Washington’s amazing body summoned up the necessary strength, although he recalled that illness, fatigue, and anxiety had left him “in a manner wholly unfit for the execution of the duty.… The shocking scenes which presented themselves in this night march are not to be described. The dead, the dying, the groans, lamentations, and cries along the road of the wounded for help … were enough to pierce a heart of adamant, the gloom and horror of which was not a little increased by the imperious darkness occasioned by the close shade of thick woods.” At times, he had to crawl on hands and knees to find the road. Washington reached his objective, but the reinforcements he had been ordered to call forward were too terrified to march.

  Braddock died. What was left of the British army fled to Philadelphia. Washington staggered to Mount Vernon, too “weak and feeble” even to call at Belvoir. From Sally a note: “I must accuse you of great unkindness in refusing us the pleasure of seeing you this night.” If he did not appear on the morrow, she and the other ladies would try “if our legs would not carry us to Mount Vernon.”

  FOUR

  Desperation and Disillusionment

  (1755–1759)

  By his compatriots, Washington was regarded as the hero of Brad-dock’s defeat. Had he not urged the regular General to adopt a different method of warfare? When finally permitted, had he not led the survivors out of the Indian ambush? His reputation now passed beyond the borders of Virginia, becoming continental. Franklin was reported to have praised him, and a preacher intoned that God had surely preserved the youth during the holocaust for some great service to his country. The British regular officers who had served with him endorsed his “courage and resolution.” But the official British inquiry into the causes of the defeat reached a conclusion opposite to that of Washington’s admirers: the army’s disastrous panic was attributed to Colonials, men like Washington, who had persuaded the common soldiers that if they fought Indians in the only way that it was correct to fight, they would be annihilated.

  The British command had had their fill of the Ohio wilderness. Moving their American operations further north, they abandoned the area west of Virginia to the French and France’s Indian allies. This left completely unprotected Virginia’s settled frontier: the Shenandoah Valley between the Alleghenies and the Blue Ridge, where Washington had, as a surveyor, started his career.

  The valley now boasted one town, Winchester, whose sixty or so houses (mostly log cabins) were close to passes that led through the Blue Ridge to well-settled Virginia. More than fifty miles northwest and at the mouth of passes through the Alleghenies from the French-held wilderness was Fort Cumberland. The rest of the valley was dotted with isolated homesteads which it became Washington’s task, during two desperate years, to defend from hit-and-run Indian raids.

  The Virginia Assembly created their own army, variously authorized between twelve hundred and two thousand men. Washington, now twenty-two, was elected “Colonel of the Virginia Regiment and Commander in Chief of all Virginia forces.” Although he still expressed doubts as to his competence, he felt that, since his reputation was at stake, he should hold all the reins in his own hands. He should not be forced to rely on others. He wished to appoint his own officers and procure his own supplies. Delighted to pass the buck, the Assembly handed the whole war effort over to Washington. He was thus enrolled in a school of experience that would in many ways prepare him for the world-shaking task he was to undertake almost twenty years later.

  In a major particular, Washington was worse off than he was subsequently to be. During the Revolution, most of the troops believed in what they were fighting for. This was not now the case. Virginia’s draft laws were so unfairly slanted against the poor that those men who were caught felt active resentment. Desertion was always to be a problem during Washington’s military years. Now he learned in the most difficult of possible schools how to hold men by a combination of authority, violence, threats, persuasion, and inspiring leadership.

  In the area of supply, Washington met many problems he was to meet again. Laws existed which he could theoretically use, but they were in practice almost useless. He was always short of money. Efforts to requisition wagons resulted only in carts and horses vanishing into the woods. To further complicate matters, Virginia produced no manufactured goods. Many necessities had to be got from Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvanians would not accept the money Virginia printed. To keep Washington’s cantonments populated, fed, and armed required eternal labor, eternal attention to even the smallest detail.

  During the shank of the fighting season that followed Braddock’s defeat, there were some Indian raids—about seventy settlers were killed or reported missing—but the frontier was not really aflame. Washington’s bitterest problem was grounded on the pretensions of the English in relation to the Colonials, and on rivalries between the colonies themselves.

  Although Fort Cumberland was for Virginia the necessary advance post, it was over the border in Maryland. There lurked in the fort a middle-aged Marylander, John Dagworthy. He was only a captain, but he insisted that, since his commission was in the British regular army, he outranked even the Commander in Chief of all Virginia. Supported by Governor Sharpe of Maryland, he gave orders to Washington’s troops and commandeered the supplies Washington had so painfully raised.

  Washington was too outraged to stay with his troops at Fort Cumberland. And his indignation was so strongly echoed by Virginia’s political leaders that Dinwiddie became worried lest the pretensions of the low-ranked regular from Maryland might bring Virginia’s war effort to a halt. He wrote the temporary British commander in chief in America, Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts, that Dagworthy would have to be curbed. Undoubtedly at the urging of Washington, whose energetic services he had come to consider indispensable, Dinwiddie added that future such contretemps could be avoided by enrolling the Virginia Regiment (if only for the duration of this conflict) in the regular army.

  During February, 1756, after winter had stilled all forest warfare, Washington rode for Massachusetts to persuade Shirley. The youthful Colonel advanced in a style suited to his rank and the prestige of Virginia. His two servants were dressed in livery colored to go with the Washington coat of arms, and he and a companion wore the uniform he had himself designed for his regiment: scarlet and blue decorated with gold and silver lace. Yet when he reached Philadelphia, he stared in amazement. He had never before seen a city. Like any other newly arrived countryman, he went on a shopping spree.

  In Boston, Shirley condescended to take some of Washington’s money at cards. He did squash Dagworthy’s pretensions, but in a way—by decl
aring him not really a regular—that created no precedent. Thus, since the Governor ignored the suggestion that the Virginia Regiment be taken into the British service, Washington was still in the position where any authentic regular officer—even a mere lieutenant—could order him around. Furthermore, Shirley notified the man whom Virginia had commissioned commander in chief that his old enemy, Governor Sharpe of Maryland, was to be given a command that included the Virginia forces.

  Even the British regulars with whom Washington had served agreed that he would be justified in resigning and returning to private life. An American view was that Washington had received from Shirley such unfair treatment as was always to be expected from “persons conversant at the courts of princes.”

  Virginia was as annoyed as Washington. The Assembly repudiated Sharpe’s pretensions by voting that their tiny force had been raised for local defense exclusively and had no connection with any other army. Washington was again in the saddle, a situation he soon had great cause to regret.

  When spring reopened the fighting season, his method of defense—garrisoning little forts a day’s march apart—proved absolutely useless. The Indians passed invisibly between the forts to fall on isolated homesteads. Survivors of burnings and scalpings flooded into Washington’s headquarters at Winchester.

  “The supplicating tears of the women and moving petitions of the men,” Washington cried out, “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.… If bleeding, dying! would glut their insatiate revenge, I would be a willing offering to savage fury, and die by inches to save a people!”

  Washington called for reinforcement from low-country militia and then, having had his first experience with this amateur military arm, wished he had not sent out the call. Militiamen arrived by the hundreds, ate up his long-hoarded provisions, refused discipline and undermined the discipline of his own troops, and then in response to rumors that the Indians were again on the warpath, fled in disarray back across the Blue Ridge. Washington penned the first of hundreds of letters in which he was to beg authorities—now Dinwiddie, later the Continental Congress—to forget about militia and strengthen the regular forces—now the Virginia Regiment, eventually the Continental Army.

  The reaction in Virginia’s capital to Washington’s diatribe against the militia was not what he expected. Since the militia companies were in essence political clubs, the officers had the ears of legislators. Solid yeomen with a high opinion of themselves, they had resented being ordered around by Washington’s officers, whom they considered pretentious whippersnappers wallowing in vice. The spirited young warriors were indeed not living according to respectable bourgeois canons. Their Colonel drank with them even if he did not drink to excess; he thoroughly enjoyed gambling; and when he returned to Winchester after an absence, he received the following message from one of his lieutenants: “I imagine you by this time plunged in the midst of delight heaven can afford, and enchanted by charms even stranger than the Cyprian dame (+ M’s Nel).”

  The Colonel came vigorously to the defense of his regiment, mourning (with his tongue in his cheek) that the Assembly had not supplied them with a minister.

  Washington and his regiment were highly vulnerable to criticism because they had been assigned an impossible task. A force many times larger could not have defended so wide a frontier from the endlessly mobile Indians. As was again to be the case during much of the Revolution, the amazing thing was not that Washington failed to do better, but that he managed to keep from being discharged as a failure, that he managed to keep an army in the field at all.

  Washington’s greatest strength was the passionate allegiance of his officers. Despite his training by the Fairfaxes, he had repudiated the British system that based military rank on family influence. Although he believed that men with position in their neighborhoods would be the more likely to procure recruits and then be obeyed, he tried to find among them the most able. And he was determined to base subsequent promotion entirely on merit. A captain wrote the juvenile Colonel, “I have altogether depended on you for protection and am sensible that, as far as justice is on my side, I may depend on your favor.”

  But Washington had not yet learned the unwisdom of attacking his civilian superiors for deficiencies beyond anyone’s power to remedy. After having ridden dangerously through all the Indian-infested forests of his Shenandoah command, he wrote a horrifying report of the complete collapse of the defenses. Having thus made shockingly clear the failure of his efforts, he assigned the blame to the Governor and the Assembly for not having come up with the men and supplies they had promised. His superiors, of course, tossed the blame back on him. They accused him of spending too much time away from the front lines amusing himself—he insisted he was attending to supply—and revised his strategy in a series of peremptory, humiliating (and useless) orders.

  Hearing that another British professional general, Lord Loudoun, was crossing the ocean to assume the American command, Washington decided to appeal to him against the civilian authorities of the colony which the angry Colonel commonly referred to as “my country.” Surely this representative of the Crown would accord him justice! He sent to the Scottish peer a long letter criticizing, among others, Dinwiddie, who was also a Crown official. He then urged that an army of Colonials (presumably with him in the command) be entrusted with doing what Braddock’s professional force had failed to achieve: save the frontier by driving the French from Fort Duquesne.

  Supposing Loudoun had listened, would this have cemented Washington’s allegiance to the Crown, thus changing the course of history? But it was, of course, impossible for the nobleman to listen to what he considered an insolent plea, in opposition to established authority, from a dubious Colonial. After Washington had journeyed to Philadelphia to see Loudoun, the peer kept him cooling his heels for weeks, and then accorded him a brief, cold interview. The local hero was not allowed to open his mouth, while the imported regular slashed his authority and dictated tactics and strategy for the Virginia Regiment. After this disillusioning interview, Washington complained, “We can’t conceive that being Americans should deprive us of the benefits of being British subjects.”

  The Virginia draft law of 1757 was the most disastrous yet. Washington’s regiment did not come within several hundred of the 1,272 authorized, and of these, 400 were marched off by Loudoun to South Carolina. French Indians were soon burning and scalping within ten miles of Winchester. The helpless Colonel tried to find comfort in “the highest consolation I am capable of feeling”: his conviction 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.”

  With autumn, Washington became deathly ill. The dysentery he had suffered from during Braddock’s campaign returned with ferocity, but it did not come alone. After the death of the brother he had so passionately nursed, Washington had come down with what seemed to be Lawrence’s tuberculosis. He had then recovered, but now he was seized with “violent pleuritic pains.”

  The army doctor, James Craik, believed that “the fate of your friends and country are in a manner dependent on your recovery.” Yet he did not know what to do. What might help one malady would harm the other, and the “whole mass of blood” was “corrupted.” Craik, who was to bleed Washington on his deathbed, did so now. The Colonel remained so weak that he could hardly walk. He was transported to Mount Vernon, whence he piteously called for help from his neighbor Sally Fairfax.

  Washington sank into the deepest dejection. Sally did not visit him as often as he wished. His hopes of making a military career in the regular army were over. In any case, he was surely dying. In January, 1758, he tried to get to Williamsburg and better medical attention, but had to turn back on the road. It was March before he could reach the Virginia capital and by then his majestic physiq
ue had regained control. When a doctor told him he had nothing to fear, he suddenly discovered he was well.

  Having finally planned another attack on Fort Duquesne, the British sent to the middle colonies Brigadier General John Forbes. He was to lead between six and seven thousand men, three times Braddock’s force. Since it had finally been ruled that provincial officers would no longer be commanded by regulars of inferior rank, Washington could at last serve in a royal expedition as a Virginia colonel without feeling demeaned. But he had abandoned all hope of being himself accepted as a regular, and he soon entered into a controversy with the British high command that rose in his mind to an obsession.

  The route over the Alleghenies to the Ohio that Washington had pioneered and Braddock had followed started from the Potomac Valley. If further improved by Forbes’s engineers, it would with peace lead the produce of the expanding West through Virginia and make Alexandria, that center nearest to Mount Vernon, the metropolis where goods brought overland would be reloaded onto oceangoing vessels. But Forbes, who had to buy his supplies in Philadelphia, saw no reason to take a sidestep in order to profit Virginia. He envisioned cutting a new road that would enter directly into Pennsylvania.

  Although Washington had never explored the area involved, he was convinced that the new road would meet such insuperable geographic difficulties as would wreck the expedition. The whole scheme was a trick of the Pennsylvanians and an insult to Virginia; that Forbes would even consider it proved him a dupe “or something worse.” The Virginia authorities were equally outraged. In letters to them, Washington envisioned himself as being sent across the ocean to complain to the royal government against their commander in chief.