Grave as the situation seemed in late 1749, however, the governor-general took no immediate action. A less decisive figure than his predecessor, La Jonquière overreacted, then dithered, contemplated half-measures, and died. The decision to oppose the growing English influence in the west would await the arrival from France of another governor-general, Ange Duquesne de Menneville, marquis de Duquesne, in 1752. Meanwhile English influence on the Ohio would continue to grow and further alarm the anxious Canadians by taking on an even more sinister aspect. For between 1749 and 1752 Virginia speculators began moving to create a permanent settlement at the Forks of the Ohio.
The Ohio Company launched its invasion of the western country in 1749 by building a fortified storehouse at the confluence of Wills Creek and the north branch of the Potomac—the spot high in the Alleghenies where Cumberland, Maryland, now stands. Not far from the storehouse lay the divide beyond which the Youghiogheny River begins its north-westward fall to the Monongahela and the Ohio. The company ultimately intended to sell Ohio land to farmers and then to supply them with manufactures, but in the meantime it planned to capitalize on its advantages in water transportation (via the Potomac, Youghiogheny, and Monongahela) to steal a march on the Pennsylvania Indian traders, who relied on slow and expensive transport by pack train. The Virginians therefore stocked the Wills Creek fort with four thousand pounds’ sterling worth of trade goods and built a second fortified structure to house their employees. The following year, they hired an experienced Maryland surveyor, trader, and guide, Christopher Gist, to explore the valley as far west as the falls of the Ohio.9
Gist’s surveys, conducted over the next two years, gave the Virginia investors a remarkable view of the Ohio Valley’s potential. He reported broad flats covered with white oak forest, fertile river bottoms, wide grassy meadows unmarred by so much as a shrub, surface deposits of coal—even salt licks holding the fossil remains of mammoths whose four-pound molars he sent back to his astonished employers. Equal in importance to his surveys, however, were the diplomatic functions that Gist also performed for the company. With the help of the ubiquitous Croghan, Gist convened a treaty conference at the Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo settlement of Logstown—the Half King Tanaghrisson’s headquarters—in the spring of 1752. This conference, at which Croghan pretended to be the representative of Pennsylvania’s government and acted as a mediator, would prove to be a critical gathering, for it secured an important concession from Tanaghrisson, whom Gist and Croghan acknowledged as spokesman for Iroquois interests in the region.10
The ostensible purpose of the council at Logstown—a substantial village about fifteen miles downstream from the Forks—was to secure the consent of the local Indians to the construction of an Ohio Company “strong house” at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. This installation, like the Wills Creek storehouse and barracks, was to be a fortified trading post at which, Gist stressed, trade goods would be made available at highly favorable rates. But it would also serve two other purposes, about which Gist had less to say. First, its location at the Forks would make it the strategic key to the valley of the Ohio; second, it would become the focus for a settlement of two hundred pioneer families that the company intended soon to establish at the Forks. These matters were of concern to every Indian leader at the conference, since they knew full well that a permanent Anglo-American settlement would gravely threaten their peoples’ ability to control their lands, and hence their destinies. But Tanaghrisson, as sole spokesman of the Iroquois League, was the only figure with whom Gist and Croghan would deal, and his overwhelming desire, in the aftermath of Céloron’s expedition, was to obtain enough material support from the British to shore up his shaky standing with the peoples he was supposed to lead.
Thus Tanaghrisson—persuaded no less by the thousand pounds’ worth of gifts that Gist had heaped on the ground before him than by the assurances of goodwill he and Croghan were piling even higher—agreed to the construction of the strong house and remained silent about the settlement it implied. But in order to gain the acquiescence of the Delawares (after the Mingos, the most numerous of the Ohio Indians) the Half King was also compelled formally to recognize one of their headmen, Shingas, as their “king,” a status that would entitle him to speak on behalf of his people, and thus to negotiate in his own right. Tanaghrisson tried to hedge his bets by maintaining that everything done at Logstown would have to be ratified by the Grand Council at Onondaga, but his actions testified to the tenuousness of Iroquois influence in the Ohio Country. With or without Onondaga’s approval, the Delawares would soon have begun to act for themselves under Shingas’s leadership anyway. They had grown too numerous and had moved too far west to remain indefinitely under the Confederacy’s tutelage. From this point onward, the Delawares and other Ohio Indian peoples would begin to steer their own course.11
Of more immediate consequence for the governments of Pennsylvania and Virginia was an event that occurred not long after the conference ended, two hundred miles farther west, at Pickawillany—the Miami town where George Croghan and his associates maintained their trading post. At about nine o’clock on the morning of June 21, 1752, a party of about 180 Chippewa and 30 Ottawa warriors, accompanied by 30 French soldiers from Detroit under the command of a French-Ottawa officer named Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade, attacked the settlement. Most of Pickawillany’s men were away hunting; most of its women, who had been working in the cornfields, were made captive. After a six-hour attack, Langlade called a cease-fire. He would, he said, return the women and spare the defenders (who numbered only about twenty) if they agreed to surrender the traders. Lacking any alternative, the defenders agreed, then looked on while the raiders demonstrated what the consequences of trading with the English could be. First they dispatched a wounded trader “and took out his heart and eat it”; then they turned their attention to the settlement’s headman, Memeskia. This chief, known to the French as La Demoiselle, had lately acquired a new sobriquet, Old-Briton, from Croghan and his colleagues. Now, to repay “his attachment to the English” and to acquire his power for themselves, the raiders “boiled [him] and eat him all up.” Then, with five profoundly apprehensive traders and a vast quantity of booty in hand, they returned to Detroit. Behind them lay the smoking ruin that, twenty-four hours earlier, had been one of the largest settlements and the richest trading post west of the Appalachians.12
Unlike Céloron’s little lead plates and letters of warning, Langlade’s raid quickly disinfested the west of Pennsylvanians. The Miami chiefs sent urgent requests to the governments of Pennsylvania and Virginia for arms and aid, but the Quakers who dominated the Pennsylvania Assembly refused to become entangled in a developing war, and the Virginians found that they had no compelling reason to support so distant a people. When no help came, the Miamis quietly returned to the protection of their French father. Langlade’s bold stroke thus drove the most irritating English traders from the Ohio Country, even as it restored an important Indian alliance. Yet all English activity in the region did not immediately cease. The Ohio Company of Virginia continued with its plans to found a settlement at the Forks, now taking the precaution of building a second fortified storehouse at the mouth of Red Stone Creek on the Monongahela River—a spot just thirty-seven miles upstream from the river’s confluence with the Allegheny. 13 Red Stone Fort gave the company its first permanent foothold in the Ohio watershed. It also suggested forcibly to the French that Langlade’s coup had been only a half victory over the English invaders.
This was not, as it happened, an accurate inference. The French had always understood English activities in the Ohio as being far more cooperative and highly organized than they really were. Pennsylvania traders and Virginia speculators had in fact never constituted two prongs of a single invasion, but rather had been determined rivals. The interests of Pennsylvanians who made their living by trading with the Indians for deerskins, bearskins, and beaver pelts were in two ways incompatible with those of the Vir
ginians. In the short run, the Ohio Company was a dangerous competitor in the Indian trade. Ultimately, however, if the company’s plans to promote the migration of farm families to the Forks succeeded, the new settlers and their livestock would inevitably displace both Indians and wildlife. Thus the Pennsylvanians had done their best to set the Indians against the Virginians, and the Virginians had done their best to return the compliment. Even the close cooperation between the Ohio Company’s man, Christopher Gist, and George Croghan, the “king of the Pennsylvania traders,” at the Logstown council had nothing to do with solidarity between the groups. In fact, the Philadelphia assets of Croghan’s trading partnership had lately been seized in bankruptcy proceedings, and he had fled to avoid arrest. Acting on his own account, Croghan had acquired a highly dubious claim to 200,000 acres of land adjacent to the Ohio Company’s patent. Because that claim would have been invalid under Pennsylvania law, Croghan promoted Virginia’s interests at the treaty conference as a means of securing his own.14
The governments of Pennsylvania and Virginia had also weighed into the competition for the west, pressing claims based on their respective charter rights to the lands near the Forks of the Ohio. Colony agents in London wrangled with one another before the Board of Trade—the British government body that supervised colonial affairs—as vigorously as their counterparts conspired against one another in the depths of the backcountry. Moreover, deep internal divisions within Virginia itself, between gentlemen belonging to different speculative companies, had also retarded the invasion of the west. The members of the Loyal Company—a syndicate interested in securing the rights to territory south of the Ohio River, in what would become Kentucky—had done their best to thwart the Ohio Company’s plans and indeed succeeded in doing so until 1749. Only when the head of the Ohio Company became acting governor of Virginia did the company begin to make headway in the west. With his death, the stockholders prudently offered a share to the newly appointed lieutenant governor of the province, Robert Dinwiddie.15
French policy makers in Paris and imperial officials in New France saw none of this. They recognized neither the real nature of the British incursions nor the fact that once Langlade had dealt with the Pennsylvanians, the Virginia menace could have been handled more effectively by diplomacy than force. Tanaghrisson, after all, had been willing to give the Virginians permission to build a trading post at the Forks only because he understood this as a gesture of alliance, and hence a measure of defense against French military domination. Had the French offered the Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingos cheap trade goods and reassurances instead of seeking to enforce a new hegemony over the Ohio Country, the outcome might have been different. Both the personality and the instructions of the new governor-general, however, precluded moderation.
The French chain of forts. This sketch map, made sometime after 1758 from the description of “an intelligent Indian who had resided there for a Considerable time,” uses small square symbols to depict the French “Logg’d Forts” constructed by order of the marquis Duquesne in 1753–54; broken lines indicate portage roads. A note accompanying the legend describes “Good water carriage from Ft. DuQuesne to Lake Erie, except the carrying place of 15 Miles from Beef River to Presqu’Isle.” Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
The marquis de Duquesne, like his predecessor and patron the comte de La Galissonière, was a blunt naval officer who preferred action to talk. A man utterly unafflicted by self-doubt, Duquesne arrived at Québec in July 1752 carrying orders that were deeply consistent with his natural bent. His superior, the minister of marine, had stressed the critical importance of preserving communication between the Canadian and the Illinois settlements via the Ohio and directed him “to make every possible effort to drive the English from our lands . . . and to prevent their coming there to trade.” Duquesne was to “make our Indians understand . . . that we have nothing against them, [and] that they will be at liberty to go and trade with the English in the latter’s country, but that we will not allow them to receive [the English] on our lands.” Accordingly the new governor required the Canadian militia (165 companies including over 11,000 men) to begin drilling every week and ordered a series of four forts built to establish a permanent military presence in the Ohio Country.
By the spring of 1753, two of the forts were already under construction. The first stood on the south shore of Lake Erie, at Presque Isle. A portage road connected it to the second, on the Rivière aux Boeufs (French Creek), a tributary of the Allegheny River. By autumn, the French had established a third post, Fort Machault, at the Delaware village of Venango, near the confluence of French Creek and the Allegheny; it incorporated a convenient complex of buildings, including a storehouse and forge, lately abandoned by a Pennsylvania trader, John Fraser. The last fort of the chain, which would stand at the Forks of the Ohio and furnish the strategic key to the Ohio Country, was scheduled for construction in 1754.16
Whether reckoned in livres or lives, this fortified system cost the French a prodigious amount. More than four hundred men perished and at least four million livres were spent in the feverish building. Duquesne believed that the English threat was so severe that the haste, cost, and lives lost were no more than the necessary price for securing French interests in the Ohio Country. But the ground on which the crucial fourth fort of the chain would rise—the post that would bear Duquesne’s own name—happened to be the spot that the Ohio Company had chosen as the site of its fortified trading post. That single fact would do more to create cooperation among the British colonies than any measures that the fragmented, competitive colonists could have devised on their own initiative.
CHAPTER 3
London Moves to Counter a Threat
1753
IN LONDON, the activities of the French in the Ohio Country had long been the focus of concern among the members of the Privy Council, that body of thirty or so courtiers and ministers who advised the king and acted as the heads of the principal executive, judicial, and ecclesiastical offices. Since 1748 the three privy councillors collectively responsible for the conduct of foreign and colonial affairs had gotten on badly enough among themselves, but they had always agreed that the greatest threat to Britain was, and always would be, France. First among these was Thomas Pelham-Holles, duke of Newcastle, who held the office of secretary of state for the Northern Department, a post that gave him responsibility for conducting foreign relations with Protestant Europe and Russia. He was one of the most experienced men in Britain’s government, and nothing in his past reassured him when it came to the French. Newcastle—a man no less remarkable for his eccentricities than for his accomplishments as a politician and diplomatist—understood French policies in Europe and the New World as complementary and aimed in no uncertain way at the aggrandizement of power. He believed that Louis XV and his ministers would not hesitate to start another war with Great Britain if they thought they could gain by it. Yet he also hoped that Britain could avert, or at least delay, that war by steadfastly resisting French influence on both sides of the Atlantic. 1
Newcastle’s counterpart minister, responsible for conducting foreign relations with Catholic Europe and the Ottoman Empire, was the secretary of state for the Southern Department. The right honorable gentleman who had held that post since 1748—John Russell, the fourth duke of Bedford—had little use for Newcastle but shared his Francophobia. Finally, the first commissioner of the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations (more commonly called the president of the Board of Trade) headed the sixteen-member panel that supervised the administration of the American colonies, as well as the trade of the empire as a whole. Although the incumbent, George Montagu Dunk, second earl of Halifax, was a person of less eminence than Newcastle or Bedford, he did his best to steer an independent course and avoid being dominated by either duke. In his distrust for France, however, he yielded to neither. From the moment of his appointment, Halifax accumulated evidence of French “encroachments” on the
frontiers of the American colonies and plotted ways to increase the efficiency of imperial administration, the better to resist French aggression. 2
Thomas Pelham-Holles, duke of Newcastle (1693–1768). This engraving depicts a youthful duke, perhaps from the 1720s, following his installation as a Knight of the Garter. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
Newcastle, Bedford, and Halifax had good reason to fear France, which seemed at the point of gaining dominance over Europe as a whole. The War of the Austrian Succession had gone badly for Great Britain and its allies. Britain’s only important conquest of the war, Louisbourg, had been returned to France at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle as the price to be paid for sparing the British army in Europe. To gain a peace it desperately needed, England had forced its chief ally, Austria, to recognize Prussian control over Silesia, an Austrian province that Prussia had conquered in the First Silesian War (1740–42). Because Austria had gone to war in 1744 intent on recovering Silesia, this concession left the Austrians deeply disaffected. Thus despite formal provisions that restored relations between France and England to the status quo ante bellum, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle left France stronger than before and weakened the half-century-old partnership by which Britain and Austria had counteracted French power. In North America there seemed equal cause for alarm, and not only because the New Englanders openly denounced the return of Louisbourg to France as a betrayal. Céloron’s expedition through the Ohio Country had been anxiously noted during the first year of peace, and French agents had been reported within Nova Scotia—a particularly disturbing development, since the overwhelming majority of Nova Scotians were French-speaking Catholic Acadians. This population, a part of the British empire since 1713, was officially held to be neutral in all Anglo-French disputes; but their loyalty to the Crown seemed, at best, dubious.
Crucible of War Page 5
