This satisfied Washington’s sense of honor; he needed virtually no time to think about it. He put his younger brother Jack in charge of the plantation. He was ready to ride.
Then a familiar impediment stepped forward. His mother arrived at Mount Vernon and positively forbade him to go on the grounds that she couldn’t do without him. She took up so much of his time in hectoring and complaining that he wrote again to Orme apologizing for his delay, and actually blamed it on “my Mother,” who was, he admitted, “alarmd” at his leaving for so dangerous a mission.
In the end, he did go. The procession of Braddock and his army was the biggest thing ever to happen to the region, and he hurried to be a part of it. At Alexandria, Braddock had brought together the governors of five different colonies; Indians of various tribes received invitations to take part in a great military adventure, and many showed up to assess the situation in order to see what they would get out of such an alliance.
Washington caught up with Braddock in Frederick, Maryland. First impressions were disappointing. The general was fat and squat, and where Washington had an innate fondness for elaborate English mannerisms and high style, Braddock was blunt, rude and imperious. He however, seemed to take to Washington from the start.
But little else pleased the general just now. Braddock had issued orders to the colonial governors: he wanted men, arms, money, wagons. He got almost nothing he demanded. He didn’t seem to understand that he was dealing with representatives of several political entities rather than army officers who were duty-bound to carry out his orders. In order to accomplish such a mission, he would have to get each governor and each provincial assembly to want to work with him, so that each would work with still others to make the expedition happen. Instead it was a disaster in the making. There were no wagons or horses to cart the vast artillery train the general had insisted on assembling.
Washington arrived on the scene in time to witness some deft politicking. When all looked lost for Braddock, Pennsylvania’s cleverest resident—Benjamin Franklin—appeared, fresh from his efforts to forge a union of colonies in Albany. Braddock’s impending mission had set off a competition among the various colonies, each of which hoped to benefit from it. Franklin came determined to promote Pennsylvania’s interests and saw opportunity in the general’s predicament. He took out advertisements in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, which promised financial rewards to those who could provide the needed supplies and at the same time suggested that if the supplies weren’t forthcoming Braddock’s army would just take them. In this way he rounded up 150 horses and dozens of wagons from Pennsylvania farmers. Braddock was delighted. He promised Franklin that, once he had kicked the French out, the road west would go through Pennsylvania.
When he heard of the coup that Franklin had pulled off, Washington was furious. Washington had considered his difficult missions through the wilderness as being not on behalf of America but of his Virginia homeland. He had expected the opening up of the Ohio Country to benefit Virginia. The work of Dinwiddie and the other investors in the Ohio Company was likewise meant to ensure that the territory eventually became part of Virginia. Now Pennsylvania, which had provided no assistance to Washington’s Fort Necessity mission, was to be rewarded by the mother country with a prize that would benefit it far into the future.
But first the army had to get to the Forks. The Ohio Company had built a storehouse for supplies at Wills Creek, on the shores of the Potomac River in the mountains of western Maryland; the army turned this into a fort, which Braddock saw fit to name after the Duke of Cumberland, the man who had given him his assignment. Fort Cumberland—the westernmost outpost of English civilization in North America—was to be the staging area for the march of Braddock’s army. From here, Washington would guide the 2,400 men—the largest army ever assembled in North America—on a grueling summertime march 120 miles west to the Forks. They would hack their way through thick forest, clearing a 12-foot road as they went.
In the midst of this major event in George Washington’s life—with soldiers, Indians and horses milling, with a massing army getting itself ready to be led by him on a mission of vital importance to all the colonies—an acquaintance named Charles Dick arrived in camp bearing a letter from his mother. As though he were still the eleven-year-old she had leaned on after his father had died, she wrote that she wanted him to drop what he was doing and send her some butter, and to find a “Dutch servant” for her. And she complained that he had not stopped to see her as he headed off to join the army. With some impatience, he sent a reply:
Honourd Madam: I was favourd with your letter by Mr. Dick, and am sorry it is not within my power to provide you with a Dutch servant or the Butter agreeably to your desire, We are quite out of that part of the country where either are to be had, there being few or no Inhabitants where we now lie Encampd, & butter can not be had here to supply the wants of the army.
I am sorry it was not in my power to call upon you as I went to, or returned from Williamsburg. The business I went upon (viz.: money for the army) would not suffer an hour’s delay.
I hope you will spend the chief part of your time at Mount Vernon, as you have proposed to do, where I am certain everything will be ordered as much for your satisfaction as possible . . .
As nothing else remarkable occurs to me, I shall conclude, after begging my love and Compliments to all Friends
Dear Madam Yr most Affecte and Dutiful Son
Go: Washing . . .
Soon afterward, the army began its march, but Washington did not lead the way. Dysentery had swept through the camp, and as they were about to set off, Washington fell so ill he was carried in a cart at the rear, and finally had to be left behind. The army would have to find its way without its guide.
The march was staggeringly difficult. Washington had counseled Braddock to lighten the load of artillery; now Braddock, whose battlefield experience had been on the plains of Europe, understood what it meant to try to haul heavy equipment across forested mountains with no roads in the heat of summer with pro-French Indians harassing the men from the wooded darkness. (One night, as they slept, Indians stole into camp and killed and scalped five men.) And it was harder still for the road-building team that went ahead, blasting rock with gunpowder, leveling rises, building bridges across streams. The army fell silent as it slogged past the grim ruins of Fort Necessity, where one officer observed “many human bones” littering the site.
Two weeks after they had set out, Washington stirred himself at last, and, though still sick and weak, plunged into the forest, riding hard to catch up with the main body. When he did, they were just a few miles from their destination. He brought his horse up to Braddock’s side as the general was surveying a twist in the Monongahela River. The plan was to cross the river, make camp for the night, then attack Fort Duquesne the following day. Braddock knew the French in the fort numbered only in the hundreds, while his army was well over 2,000. He was confident that his charge of Fort Duquesne would mark the beginning of the end of the French presence in British North America.
Before setting out, Braddock had asked his young American aide for his advice on several matters. He followed what Washington had to say on one or two points, but he chose to ignore Washington’s main plea. Washington had learned at Fort Necessity that the Half King had been right and he had been disastrously wrong: The way to fight in this landscape was not in the sort of traditional battle formation that armies engaged in in Europe. Here you had to take advantage of the forest. Washington didn’t like the measured way Braddock was proposing to lead his men in the assault on Fort Duquesne, which completely exposed them to attack. A small party of Iroquois was also on hand, and they too felt Braddock’s tactic was spectacularly unsuited to the landscape.
Indeed, just as the army crossed the river, French guns began firing. The enemy, knowing it was undermanned, had not waited for the English to come at them in the fort but had moved forward to meet them. Bullets came seemingly fro
m nowhere, as the French and their Indian allies had staked out positions in the woods on both sides of their column. The officers on horseback were easy targets. Washington was shouting at men to stand their ground when he felt his horse give way beneath him. Bullets tore through his coat as it flapped, and through his hat. He watched appalled as inexperienced soldiers dropped to one knee and fired—directly into the forward line of their own men.
Washington was shouting now at Braddock over the din of battle: he wanted permission to lead a contingent of provincials on a flanking run, to, as he said, “engage the enemy in their own way.” That wasn’t how battles were fought; Braddock refused. Washington found another horse; it too was shot out from under him. He saw fellow officers go down. He watched men break ranks, leaving the artillery and ammunition as they ran. They were being routed by an inferior force. Then Braddock fell.
The battle ended in a total victory for the French, with 500 English and colonial soldiers dead. Washington led the remnant of Braddock’s army in an eastward retreat, back along the road they had built, hauling the grievously wounded general in a horse-drawn cart. Four days later, near the site of Fort Necessity, Braddock died. One of his last acts was to give Washington his pistols and his ceremonial sash. Despite his exasperation at the old warrior’s tactics and personality, despite the disastrous results, the young man felt a rush of warmth for the first general under whom he had served. Honor, after all, was bound up with loyalty. He would treasure the possessions for the rest of his life.
They came staggering through the ramshackle stockade and into the city of Albany, dazed and wild-eyed: Dutch families from the settlement of Hoosick, 30 miles away, out beyond the falls at Cohoes. The stories Abraham Yates heard were chaotic, but they soon clarified into a simple image. As the farmers were in their fields bringing in the harvest, a party of French soldiers and Indian allies had swept in. Two residents were killed, all the buildings set ablaze. The settlement was destroyed in no time. The whole community stood here now among them, looking around abstractedly, needing refuge.
So this was it: war.
The immediate problem, as far as Albany was concerned, was that the city’s stockade was in shambles. Yates joined others in hastily setting up logs to patch gaps in the perimeter. Other rural dwellers soon appeared, also looking for protection. Albany’s population doubled. The city sat within Albany County, 500 square miles of pasture and forest, which somehow needed to be protected. And the chief law officer, Sheriff James Wilson, chose this moment to become caught up in a sex scandal involving a daughter of one of the area’s prominent families. Wilson was the hand-picked man of William Johnson, the power broker to the Iroquois, and Johnson was pushing to keep him in office. But the governor was under pressure to replace him.
Sensing an opportunity amid the chaos, Abraham Yates paid a visit to Robert Livingston, the sixty-six-year-old paterfamilias of one of Albany’s powerful old clans. The major landowners—like Livingston, like William Johnson—had a big say in who the sheriff would be; each had their own candidate, who, they expected, would take special care to protect their property.
With Livingston’s backing, Yates got the job. He wasn’t in the least bit qualified for it. The sheriff’s duties were rough: spending long days and nights on horseback, corralling fugitives, smugglers and rogue Indian traders, serving legal writs, running the city jail, overseeing hangings. The one extant picture of Yates shows a man who seems slight of build, squinty and short-sighted. But the work as deputy to the Indian Affairs commission had given him some involvement in the complex affairs of the county. And while he was not a trained lawyer, he had been voraciously reading up in his spare time.
In becoming the sheriff of Albany County, Yates knew he was stepping with both feet into the middle of local politics. He was Livingston’s man now, and William Johnson’s enemy. After Johnson got himself named as Sole Superintendent of the Affairs of the Six United Nations he disbanded the commission that Yates had been working for. But Yates had no time for the Indian Affairs job now anyway: the war with the French soon dominated everything. Word came into Albany about Braddock’s encounter at the Forks of the Ohio. “A victory,” Yates recorded. Then the next day came the correction: in fact, a massive defeat. Meanwhile, the English government was determined to knock the French out of Canada. William Johnson, now given the rank of general, had taken 1,500 Englishmen and 200 Mohawks northward with a mission to attack the French fort at Crown Point. Before they reached the fort, though, they encountered a French and Indian army of equal size at what the French called Sacrament Lake (which Johnson renamed Lake George in honor of the king). News trickled into Albany: the outcome was uncertain, but people were appalled to hear of hundreds killed on each side.
Yates became consumed by the war—but it wasn’t French troops who occupied him night and day. As the fighting escalated, Albany found itself transformed into the military staging ground for the northern theater. British soldiers streamed into the city by the hundreds. William Shirley, the governor of Massachusetts, whom Braddock had made a general, appeared in Albany in November of 1755 and demanded that his 48th regiment be billeted. Yates told him it was “next to impossible” for “a great part of our houses were doubled by the people from Saratoga, Schaghticoke, Halfmoon, Nistigeione and Hoosick that have been obliged to fly from their habitations for fear of the enemy.” Nevertheless, troops were packed in.
The soldiers got rowdy. Yates complained to James Abercrombie, the British general in charge of the northern theater. Soldiers who were billeted in private houses were behaving “like Brutes in Human Shape,” trashing their homes. Abercrombie—a hardened veteran, who had fought in Flanders a decade earlier in the same battle at which George Sackville had been wounded—was unmoved. More soldiers arrived. On top of that the general sent military prisoners and ordered that the city hold them. The Albany jail, which Yates oversaw, was a small building with only two cells. The prisoners filled it, and chaos ensued, caused not only by the prisoners but by the soldiers assigned to guard them, who got drunk and fought with Yates’s jailer. On another occasion soldiers arrived with bayonets fixed and demanded that Yates take a prisoner of theirs in his jail. When he refused, they broke into the jail, deposited the man, and left.
Meanwhile, residents were shocked when soldiers began dismantling the town stockade and using it for firewood. With mounting fury, Yates went to Abercrombie. The general told him it wasn’t his responsibility to maintain the city’s stockade, that in fact his only concern was for his soldiers. If Albany were attacked by the French, Yates recorded the general as saying, he would “let the City Burn and be Damd.”
Yates hoped for better when, in 1756, John Campbell, the Earl of Loudoun, who after Braddock’s death became the Commander in Chief of British forces in North America, took up residence in Albany, superceding Abercrombie. Loudoun had the power to fortify the city and restore sanity. Nothing of the kind happened. Instead, Loudoun determined that the city needed to develop proper respect for the military. He had a criminal hanged on one of its busiest streets and left the body dangling there all day—“to impress an idea upon the inhabitants,” Yates surmised, “that he could dispossess, hang, burn and destroy when he pleased.” Yates had befriended a twenty-year-old man named Peter Silvester, who had recently been admitted to practice law. Silvester rented a room from Yates and his wife, and Yates had begun doing legal work for him, serving writs in cases that Silvester handled. At Yates’s instigation, Silvester issued a writ against a British officer, accusing him of misconduct. In response, a group of soldiers attacked Silvester on Market Street, leaving him for dead. Yates quoted another officer as saying, “Let him now again take out writs against officers of the army.”
While to the north the British and French armies went at each other in battles that would determine the fate of the continent, Abraham Yates worked day and night trying to keep his city from collapsing under the weight of what was supposed to be a friendly army. Townspeople
came to him to report one form of depredation after another committed by British soldiers. Homes were broken into, furniture and family objects taken, women subjected to sexual harassment. Yates complained to Loudoun; Loudoun rebuffed him, belittled his civil authority. Yates then did what he thought was his duty. He arrested certain offending British soldiers and locked them up in his jail. At this Loudoun erupted and told Yates that if he imprisoned one more of his soldiers he would tear down the prison. Yates, in turn, said he would not condone any further quartering of military officers in private homes. Loudoun countered this move by having soldiers put military prisoners in Yates’s civilian jail.
Yates wrote to Governor James De Lancey, carefully detailing Loudoun’s abuses. Loudoun came to Yates and the two had a remarkable public confrontation. Loudoun said he had seen the letter Yates sent to De Lancey and that it was filled with lies. Yates replied that every sentence could be proved and supported by witnesses. Loudoun warned Yates against discharging a military prisoner from his jail. “Sir,” Yates replied, “I have already discharged him.” “By whose order?” Loudoun demanded to know. “By the King’s writ,” Yates responded. Loudoun then ordered the sheriff to stay daily within his sight—“and if you do not do so I shall send for you with a file of muskets, with their bayonets fixed.” The people of Albany who were witness to the exchange must have thought that would be the end of it. Instead, the inexperienced and not terribly threatening-looking sheriff replied, “My Lord, I have no time to wait upon you. I have other business to attend.” Loudoun, barely containing his fury, vowed that for Yates’s insolence he would turn his house into a hospital for wounded soldiers and the local church into an artillery storehouse. “I don’t know what you will do, My Lord,” Yates replied coolly, “but I know you have no right to do it.” At that, Loudoun informed him that he did indeed have a right: that the Lord Chancellor in England had decreed that when the army was required to defend a place, “there the law ceased” and the army’s rule prevailed.
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