by Simon Schama
There was, however, something other than British obtuseness and self-interest in the way of realizing Franklin’s dream of a westward-ho empire of freedom, and that was French strategy. French settlement in America consisted of three regions: ‘New France’ (Canada), from the St Lawrence to the Great Lakes; the mid-Mississippi ‘Illinois country’ (claimed as a result of a French expedition, by Sieur de la Salle, to the Mississippi delta in 1682); and Louisiana at its delta. They were all, of course, separated from each other by vast distances, and it was the determination of the ministers of Louis XV and especially his governors in Quebec to connect them with a chain of roads, navigated rivers, portage trails and forts. Critical to making the first connection between Canada and the Mississippi was the broad stretch of territory between the Alleghenies and Lake Erie known as the ‘Ohio Country’. And it was in this densely forested land, crossed by rivers and peopled by Native American tribes, such as the Shawnees, Delawares and Mingos – roughly the region of modern eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania – that the fate of America would be decided.
The Virginians – who claimed that the hinterland of America, all the way to the Pacific, including ‘the island of California’, had been included in their original charter of 1609 – had formed the Virginian Ohio Company in 1747, to survey and lay claim to trans-Appalachian lands. And the mid-Atlantic colonies – New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland, whose own populations had boomed in the first half of the eighteenth century, were themselves acutely interested in preventing the French and their Native American allies moving south from Canada, robbing them of the fur trade there and pre-empting territory for westward expansion. The word most commonly used of French designs (and there were few more damning in the lexicon of colonial competition) was ‘artful’: the artful extension of ‘lines within our colonies’; the artful seduction of the Native Americans to deny the British their proper share of fish and furs. But behind all that art was brute force, the application of a deadly choke-hold, crushing the life out of British America. The time had come to resist or expire.
In 1744 the Treaty of Lancaster was signed at Newtown in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and solemnized by the presentation of belts of wampum (freshwater shells used as currency) between commissioners of the British colonies and the Six Iroquois Nations. The Native Americans were given free passage across the British territories to hunt down their tribal enemies like the Cherokee and in return appeared to cede sovereignty over virtually the entire Ohio Country. Trying to remain neutral in the Anglo–French wars, the Iroquois soon indignantly repudiated any suggestion that they had permanently alienated their rights over this enormous area; but it was enough to send a wave of trappers and mappers into the Ohio Country to stake claims for King George, the Ohio Company and not least themselves. The French responded in the ways they knew best, sending out pre-emptive expeditions to lay down little lead plaques on a 3000-mile arc of territory; and followed that in the summer and autumn of 1752 with an intensive campaign of fort building, done on a Roman scale that cost 400 lives and 400 million livres. The French forts may have been built of logs, but, like Fort Duquesne, named after the strategically minded new governor in Quebec, they were serious structures with walls 10–12 feet thick, the corners shaped in the arrowhead projections stipulated in European military text-books, and capable of garrisoning hundreds of men.
By early 1753 the battle of the hatchets and the surveying rods had become official. Even the Duke of Newcastle had become persuaded that something important was at stake in the backwoods of the colonies. The Scottish merchant turned American surveyor Robert Dinwiddie, who was to become Lieutenant-Governor of Virginia in 1754, dispatched a six-foot-two, twenty-one-year-old major with absolutely no command of French to carry a letter to the commandant of Fort Le Boeuf, demanding that the French cease and desist from garrisoning territories self-evidently belonging to King George.
George Washington may have had no French, but he understood the compelling interests of the British Empire very well. His half-brother Lawrence, after all, had named their property in Virginia ‘Mount Vernon’, after the hero of Porto Bello, and he first practised his profession as a land surveyor on behalf of the English aristocrat Lord Fairfax, who was the dominant magnate in the northern neck of Virginia. But his early experience of defending those interests was unhappy. At a Native American village on the fork of the Ohio he met up with a French platoon that invited Washington to sup. ‘The Wine, as they dos’d themselves pretty plentifully with it, soon banish’d the restraint which at first appeared in their Conversation . . . They told me it was their absolute Design to take Possession of the Ohio & by G— they would do it, for tho they were sensible that the English could raise two men for their one; yet they knew their Motions were too slow and dilatory to prevent any Undertaking of theirs.’ At Fort Le Boeuf, Washington had much the same dusty reply, phrased with exquisite courtesy. The following year, 1754, he prepared and led an expedition. An early success (followed by a scalping and general massacre of French prisoners) turned into a much bigger disaster on 4 July, when Washington’s soldiers, trapped inside their ‘Fort Necessity’, found their muskets unusable in a July rainstorm. Leaving wounded and dead behind, they ignominiously marched out from the fort and limped back to Virginia, leaving the French in jubilant command of the Ohio Country.
For those in America and London who were not prepared to accept the French stranglehold on the western frontier, two options were left. Either a counterattack should be mounted by a force raised from all the colonies, in alliance with Indian warriors in substantial numbers. Or a true army, dominated by British regular troops and commanded by a British general, should do the job for them. Franklin, of course, was in favour of the first, more authentically American way and was one of Pennsylvania’s representatives at a pan-American congress at Albany in the Hudson Valley, just a week after Washington’s débâcle at Fort Necessity. For the first time a working military and political confederation of the British-American colonies was discussed in some detail. But the fires lit by the Albany meeting were immediately doused by the rejection of its agenda by all the separate colonial assemblies, who were too preoccupied with their own sectional interests. (The New Englanders wanted fishery protection; the New Yorkers wanted everyone else to pay for forts guarding their northern frontier.) But the ideals of a federation remained warm inside Franklin’s head and heart. Some time during the latter part of 1754 he wrote to Governor Shirley outlining what he hoped for the future of British America. First, the western frontier had to be uncompromisingly defended against the French. But that defence had to be undertaken in a true spirit of the indivisibility of the empire: American citizen-soldiers and British regular soldiers in concord. And if the British government were truly prescient it would understand that its own best interests would be served not by subjecting America but by co-opting it; that it should make good the understanding that Americans were responsible for their own internal government; and that if money were needed for a common defence it ought to come from the consent of their own institutions. Economically, too, the interests of the mother and the children should be seen not as competitive but as complementary, so that the industries of America ought not to be penalized for narrow interests at home but should be regarded as the strength of the common empire.
Franklin’s rational and benevolent vision of the British Empire paid its ideological inventors the compliment of taking their rhetoric about liberty at face value. But he presupposed a breadth of understanding, an appreciation of the strengths of American culture and society that had barely impinged on the conscience of the empire-builders at home. Their policies were designed not to respect distance but to abolish it, not to make room for diversity but to impose ‘order’ and uniformity. By the 1750s, the politicians at Westminster believed they already had a model of orderly, industrious integration, and it was called Scotland.
So naturally it fell to the Duke of Cumberland, the ‘Butcher of Cu
lloden’, to nominate the general who would take the Ohio Country campaign to the French and sort out, once and for all, who was sovereign. Edward Braddock was the ideal Cumberland protégé: a thorough-going, unsentimental administrator and a stickler for discipline. To show he meant business Braddock would take with him two regiments, the 41st and the 48th. Even the announcement had the British press relishing the assured victory and sketching an early self-portrait of the character of the British Empire: averse to conquest, slow to provoke, but, when roused, frightening in its might. ‘We have now shown the world that the Dominion of the Sea is not an empty boast,’ trumpeted Jackson’s Oxford Journal, ‘but such a one as we can and dare assert whenever it becomes absolutely necessary. We never disturb our Neighbour with our Intrigues, we never encroach on their Territories. . . . But when we are threatened, deceived and encroached upon ourselves . . . then . . . it [military action] appears to us as Justice.’
The French, it was confidently felt, must be shaking in their shoes. One British force was to retake Louisbourg, denying reinforcements; a second was to capture the forts at Niagara, travelling up the rivers from the Hudson; while Braddock himself would march on Fort Duquesne, where Washington had come to grief. Once that had been dealt with Braddock would advance north, rolling up resistance, and join the Niagara battalions at the lake: simple, decisive, swift. Washington and Franklin met the general at Frederickstown in Maryland just before the march of his two regiments. Washington went as aide-de-camp on the strength of his knowledge of the country, and Franklin had provided a spectacular token of Pennsylvania’s appreciation of British protection by supplying each officer with the equivalent of the imperial pantry: 6 pounds of rice, raisins, chocolate, coffee and sugar; a pound each of green and Bohea black tea; half a pound of pepper; a whole Gloucester cheese; 20 pounds of best butter; two hams; 2 gallons of Jamaica rum and two dozen bottles of Madeira. This was what made it worth being British.
Unfortunately it was also what doomed Braddock to bloody fiasco on 9 July 1755. It was not just the 150 wagons and 500 packhorses bearing all these supplies that slowed him to a plod en route to the Monongahela forks. It was the necessity of cutting a laborious way through deep forest, widening tracks to make a road wide enough and level enough to get his supply train through without getting into potentially dangerous difficulties. His Mingo Native American guides had doubtless alerted Braddock to these obvious logistical realities, but as a Mingo chief, Scarouady, noted, he treated them barely better than ‘dogs’. The dogs could bite. The ‘contemptible savages’ fighting for the French did not form up in the open like sporting Jacobites to take on Braddock’s light infantry, but raked them with fire from invisible positions deep inside the forest. Weakened by dysentery and suffering acutely from haemorrhoids, Braddock let his training as an officer and a gentleman take over. As his boxed-in infantry attempted to return fire into the piny nowhere he remained imperturbable in the saddle, riding the line, encouraging the soldiers even as they fell in hundreds: a deliberately perfect target for the inevitable musket ball in the chest. Down went the redcoats like lead soldiers in text-book platoon formation, their fellows taking their place in the firing line, staying put as they dropped. By the time a modicum of self-preservation took over, and men actually began running for their lives, two-thirds of Braddock’s force was dead or critically wounded. The French and their Native American allies had lost just twenty-three dead and sixteen wounded. Braddock died on the retreat and was buried along the road his sappers had cut. George Washington, who took the general’s blood-soaked cloak back to Mount Vernon, did not in fact conclude that Braddock had been woefully mistaken in his tactics, only that his men had been inadequate to the task.
If one kind of Cumberland war guaranteed defeat, another, just as depressing, guaranteed a kind of ‘success’. In Nova Scotia the Governor, Charles Lawrence, was engaged not just in pacification but in something more ominously modern: mass deportation. By the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 the French-Catholic Acadians had been allowed to live peacefully in southern Nova Scotia, on the wrong side of the Anglo-French divide, provided they refrained from actively assisting the enemy. But as the Franco-British conflict in America heated up, their refusal to take a formal oath of loyalty to King George made them seem like a permanent fifth column, egging on the Native Americans to attack the outnumbered British. Lawrence was determined to get to them before they got to him, and set in motion the appalling policy known to the Acadians euphemistically as ‘le grand dérangement’. At least 6000 of them who had been living on the shores of the Bay of Fundy were forcibly uprooted from farms, homes and land, and assembled for trans-shipment to Massachusetts, South Carolina and Virginia. The move was so sudden and so brutal that, even as the boats were being prepared to take them away, they could not quite believe they were ‘actually to be removed’. On 8 October the first group was loaded. The British officer in charge wrote: ‘Began to embarke the Inhabitants who went of very Solentarily and unwillingly, the women in Great Distress Carrying Off their Children in their Arms, Others Carrying their Decrepit Parents in their carts and all their Goods moving in Great Confusion and appeared a scene of Woe and Distress.’ Colonists from New York and Massachusetts took their place in northern Maine and Nova Scotia. Half of the passengers on the first ship to the Carolinas died on board in conditions of extreme filth and hardship. Some thousands managed to escape to Canada, only to find the country changing hands with the imminent Seven Years’ War. Another group made a great odyssey down Duquesne’s strategic trail on the Mississippi all the way to Louisiana where they finally resettled, exchanging a diet of lobster and cod for crayfish and catfish as Acadian culture metamorphosed into Cajun.
The dogs of war had been unloosed (even if the American tails had wagged them). And from the beginning it was thought of as a world war, even by the habitually cost-conscious Duke of Newcastle. The strategy, though, was not in fact any different from the way in which the war of the 1740s had been fought. There would be a heavily subsidized European ally, Prussia, whose armies would pin the French down in Europe and divert both men and resources away from the imperial theatres in India, West Africa, the Caribbean and America. The bulk of the Royal Navy would, as always, be assigned to guard the home waters and raid and blockade French ports from the Mediterranean up the Atlantic coast, stopping reinforcements from reaching Canada. In America itself, ‘long-injured, long-neglected, long-forgotten,’ as Pitt said (exaggerating as usual), the old Braddock plan of simultaneously attacking Canada, the upper New York lake fort at Ticonderoga and Fort Duquesne in the heart of the Ohio Country was revived. But along with it came many of the old mistakes. Braddock’s replacement as coordinator of these campaigns was yet another Cumberland stop-gap, the Ayrshire aristocrat John Campbell, fourth Earl of Loudoun, whose enthusiasm for the military life had led him to plant a wood resembling a regiment of the line and who came with a retinue of seventeen servants, travelling mistress and mistress’s maid. If anything, Loudoun’s contempt for the colonials and their savage allies was even more patrician than Braddock’s. Convinced that the whole bloody shower needed smartening up, he courted the hatred of American officers by insisting on the War Office policy of ranking Americans far below their counterparts in the regular British regiments and alienated the men by demanding that the British whip-happy code of military discipline (500 lashes for insubordination, 1000 for stealing a shirt) be imposed on the colonial troops who had never seen it, much less endured it. Exasperated by contraband trade between the French-Caribbean and British colonies, Loudoun’s answer was to shut down trade altogether.
Loudoun’s way of running the war represented a clear choice and the Americans knew it. An alternative would have been to co-opt the colonial troops and the Native Americans in a genuinely imperial coalition. This would mean entrusting the colonial assemblies and their governors with the power to raise men and money in the ways they best saw fit, and the ways best suited to part-time bachelor soldiers w
ho would want to feel assured that when the worst was over they could get back to their farms and forges. Raising funds for these troops, as the governors knew, was better done through consent than by imperious demand. But men like Braddock and Loudoun saw the assemblies and even the governors as mere subalterns to be told what was needed and when and where to deliver it. To allow them any sort of latitude in military affairs, they believed, was to indulge their natural tendency to insubordination, to compromise discipline and to court defeat. Loudoun continually expressed his horrified astonishment that the colonials, especially the ‘leading people’, presumed to venture criticism or even opinion on imperial strategy. And the raw material of American troops he believed to be unfit for serious combat. Only integrating them into regular regiments and teaching them, fiercely if need be, how real soldiers conducted themselves would create a viable army.
