Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  What lay beyond his control, as much as anything else, was the mountainous, heavily wooded terrain through which his army would have to march, building a road as it went to permit the passage of its baggage column and train of artillery. Only a man with supreme confidence in his own abilities and his men’s stamina would have dreamed of trying to haul siege guns, including monstrously heavy eight-inch howitzers and twelve-pound cannon, through “an hundred and ten Miles [of ] . . . uninhabited Wilderness[,] over steep rocky Mountains and almost impassable Morasses,” but Braddock never doubted he could do it. The terrain, of course, took its toll: at the end of the first week, only thirty-five miles from Fort Cumberland, Braddock decided to divide his army into a “flying column” of picked men that would press forward as rapidly as possible and a support column that would follow with the bulk of the baggage, improving the road as it went. Thereafter the lead element moved comparatively fast—at least three, and sometimes as much as eight miles a day—while the second division, hauling most of the army’s food, ammunition, and about half of its artillery, fell farther and farther behind. Men sickened with dysentery, wagons shook themselves to kindling, horses dropped dead at an appalling rate: eventually sixty miles separated the two divisions. Still Braddock pressed on, emboldened by the lack of opposition that the flying column encountered and by the ease with which his men dispersed the few Indians who appeared to scout his force.4

  By the morning of July 9, Braddock’s force had advanced to within ten miles of Fort Duquesne. As the army forded the Monongahela River near the ruins of John Fraser’s trading post, the troops were short on food but high in morale. They expected to invest the fort on the following day, or even to hear the roar of its works being blown up and abandoned by the French. By now the march was proceeding in what had become its usual order, with its 7 Mingo guides and George Croghan in front preceding an advance guard of about 300 light infantry and grenadiers under an earnest young lieutenant colonel named Thomas Gage. Next came a New York independent company led by Captain Horatio Gates, guarding the 250 or so pioneers who widened the road under the direction of Sir John St. Clair and two engineers. A half-dozen wagons bearing tools and supplies accompanied the fatigue party. The main body followed, perhaps a hundred yards behind, with more guards, more axmen and laborers, Braddock and his staff (including Washington, “very weak & low” from dysentery and suffering such pain from hemorrhoids that he could ride a horse only by tying cushions over the saddle), and 500 infantry in parallel columns that flanked a long line of wagons, artillery pieces, camp women, and cattle. At the end trailed a rear guard of 100 or so men, mostly Virginia provincials under Captain Adam Stephen, a veteran of Fort Necessity. Sweating and swearing their way through the woods on either side of this mile-long column were small parties of flankers, alert for enemy scouts. Three days earlier the flanking parties had repelled Indian raiders, and now they were especially alert. Everyone knew that Fort Duquesne lay just ahead, and the force proceeded with great caution, skirting likely spots for ambush.5

  Braddock’s opposite number at Fort Duquesne, Contrecoeur, had followed the reports his scouts had brought of the approaching army with mounting concern. Fort Duquesne was now complete and in good repair but too small to hold more than about 200 of the 1,600 French regulars, Canadian militiamen, and Indian warriors who were presently under his command. Moreover, Contrecoeur was experienced enough to realize that his Indians would not fight to defend ground but only to destroy enemies or take captives and trophies. They would, he knew, disperse if the English successfully invested Fort Duquesne. His best hope was to disrupt the English advance, and so on the morning of July 9 he gave Captain Daniel Liénard de Beaujeu command of half the men at the fort—36 officers, 72 colonial regulars (troupes de la marine), 146 Canadian militiamen, and 637 Indians—and ordered a sortie against Braddock’s column. The Indian group included a few Mingos and Delawares and a somewhat larger contingent of Shawnees but was mostly composed of French allies from the north and west—Ottawas, Mississaugas, Wyandots, Potawatomis—lured by the prospect of captives and booty. Among the leaders of the Far Indians was Charles Langlade, that tough and experienced officer who had destroyed Pickawillany in 1752. The party, well armed but otherwise unburdened with supplies and equipment, set out from the fort at about nine in the morning, intending to ambush Braddock’s column.6

  Braddock’s advanced party. Another of Orme’s set, this plan shows the disposition of troops and pioneers at the head of the column, more or less as they would have been arrayed on the morning of July 9, 1755. Far from a column blundering blindly through the woods, Braddock’s advanced party had secured its flanks with the equivalent of a company on both the left and the right. The main body—including Braddock and his staff, the baggage train, most of the artillery, and five hundred troops—followed the advance guard, a hundred or so yards to the rear. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  It was about one o’clock when Scarouady and Croghan spotted the French and Indians through open woods, no more than two hundred yards to their front. The French party, surprised, halted to organize itself. Gage’s men hurried forward and fired three quick volleys; despite the great range, one of the balls killed Captain Beaujeu as he stood in front of his men, waving his hat to direct their disposition. The sudden loss of their commander threw the regulars and militiamen into confusion, but the Indians needed no one to tell them what to do. Streaming into the forest along either flank of the British force, they took up positions wherever they found cover: behind trees, in a defile, on a hill to the column’s right. Then they began to pour fire into the British advance guard, which responded with a few ineffectual volleys and began to fall back.7

  According to St. Clair, the woods for most of the march had been so dense and choked with vegetation that “one may go twenty Miles without seeing before him ten yards.” Once across the Monongahela, however, the forest had opened out and was now so clear of underbrush “that Carridges Could have been drove through any part.” The openness of the forest meant that Braddock’s column had entered an Indian hunting ground, a region from which the undergrowth was annually burned to improve the fodder qualities of its vegetation, to reduce the cover available to game animals, and to allow the easy movement of hunters. Conditions that ordinarily favored Indian huntsmen now favored Indian marksmen, who dispersed, took cover, and fired at will into the British column.8

  The Indians fought in the ways they knew, and the redcoats did their best to do the same, trying repeatedly to form themselves into companies and return fire, a process that drew them ever more tightly together in the road. As the pressure of Indian fire drove Gage’s men back and the unarmed laborers fled pell-mell to the rear, Braddock ordered the troops from the main body forward. As the retreating and advancing parties collided, units mixed together in confusion. Officers tried to control and reorganize their men; but the officers themselves, mounted on horses, waving swords, and wearing glittering silver gorgets at their throats, made the best targets of all. Within the first ten minutes of the battle, fifteen of the eighteen officers in Gage’s advance party had been killed or wounded. Discipline and control disintegrated as more and more officers fell.

  Braddock, who had ridden to the front at the sound of the first shots, tried to restore order by directing that the colors of the two regiments be “advanced,” or posted as rallying points for their units, but he never succeeded in reorganizing his men. Within minutes, nothing larger than a platoon retained its integrity. The regulars, “with little or no order, but endeavouring to make Fronts towards the Enemys Fire,” huddled together in a confused and hopeless mass, crammed into an area less than 250 yards from end to end and perhaps no more than 100 feet wide. The rear guard was left to defend itself and the twelve-pound fieldpiece it had been pulling, while the civilian teamsters unhitched their horses from the wagons and rode away. The women who had been traveling with the wagon train and driving the cattle fared less
well. Of the fifty or so with the column in the morning, almost all would be lost—fewer than half of them, apparently, taken captive.9

  We cannot easily imagine how the battlefield looked on that day; hardest of all would be to imagine how it looked to the British soldiers trapped in the road. Circumstances favored the French and Indians to an almost incredible degree. They were well fed and well rested, accustomed to the woods, and could easily see their enemies, who “were always in column, unfortunately for them, for that made them easy to kill.” The British, on the other hand, had endured days of hard marching, hunger, thirst, and heat; weeks of anxiety, compounded by tales of Indian barbarity; and now they found themselves in the midst of a battle that nothing in their training had prepared them to fight.10

  The forest itself was entirely outside the experience of most of them, for the bulk of the troops whom Braddock had chosen for the flying column were hardy, thoroughly disciplined “Old Standers” who had come with the 44th and the 48th from Ireland. The woods hid their enemies almost completely. “The French and Indians crept about in small Parties so that the Fire was quite round us, and in all the Time I never saw one, nor could I on Enquiry find any one who saw ten together,” one survivor recalled. “If we saw of them five or six at one time [it] was a great sight,” another remembered; “and they Either on their Bellies or Behind trees or Runing from one tree to another almost by the ground.” The redcoats’ training had prepared them to confront adversaries they could see, to fire their muskets upon order and in volleys, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in orderly ranks, and to follow the commands of their officers and sergeants precisely, no matter how great the confusion and slaughter around them. But trapped as they were on the road, virtually all the sensory cues they had been trained to look for were missing. There were no massed enemies in sight; no drums beat them to order; few officers were visible in the tangle of men, and no one was giving coherent orders. Instead, all around them were trees, smoke, the screams of wounded men and horses, incessant gunfire. The war cries of the Indians—“ravenous Hell-hounds . . . yelping and screaming like so many Devils”—came from every direction, terrifying men whose imaginations had fed on tales of how Indians tortured and mutilated their prisoners. Weeks after the battle one witness would write that “the yell of the Indians is fresh on my ear, and the terrific sound will haunt me until the hour of my dissolution.”11

  Disposition of Braddock’s column at the Battle of the Monongahela, July 9, 1755. Although this map radically understates the distance from the field of battle to Fort Duquesne, it gives a good idea of the organization of the British column at the moment of encounter with Beaujeu’s Franco-Indian force. The main body, drawn forward by the firing, collided with the advanced party as it fell back; the battle took place between the hill, at the right center of the map, and the ravine, or “Dry Hollow Way,” leading down to the Monongahela, on the left. From Captain Robert Orme’s set of plans and maps, 1768. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  Amid chaos and disorientation the regulars clutched at what shards of discipline they could. Even in the absence of their officers they maintained platoon formations, and indeed continued to fire together, as they had been trained to do. This was worse than useless under the circumstances, for “if any got a shott at one [of the enemy] the fire imediately ran through ye whole line though they saw nothing but trees.” So strong was the instinct to perform as they had been trained that, to their officers’ horror, platoons fired volleys directly into one another. “Capt. Mercer marching with his company to take possession of an advantageous post, was fired upon by our men from behind, and ten of his men dropt at once. Capt. Polson lost many of his men by irregular platooning behind him, on which he faced about, and intreated the Soldiers not to fire and destroy his men. They replied they could not help it. . . .” The only sign of order in the British ranks was Braddock himself, riding through the shambles with astonishing composure as horse after horse was shot from under him. Clinging madly to the patterns that had ordered their lives, the troops did not begin to break and retreat until a musket ball slammed into Braddock’s back and knocked him out of the saddle. By then his men had stood their ground for more than three hours.12

  Not everyone in Braddock’s command behaved as his redcoats did. The Americans with the army, lacking years of training, fled or took cover as soon as the attack began; many of those crouching behind trees were mistaken for the enemy and killed by British volleys. In the rear guard, Captain Adam Stephen’s Virginia provincials even managed to fight effectively from behind the trees, because after his previous year’s experiences as a company commander under Washington, Stephen had taught his men how to load and fire from cover. Following the battle, recovering from his wounds, Stephen heaped scorn on Braddock, who he believed had allowed the enemy to “come against Us, creeping near and hunting Us as they would do a Herd of Buffaloes or Deer; whereas you might as well send a Cow in pursuit of a Hare as an English Soldier loaded . . . with a Coat, Jacket, & c. & c. &c. after Canadeans in their Shirts, who can shoot and run well, or Naked Indians accustomed to the Woods.”13

  Yet it was not, as Stephen charged, Braddock’s absurd adherence to European tactics of “formal attacks & Platoon-firing” that destroyed his force, but rather the redcoats’ training and Braddock’s own courage. No matter how horrifying their losses or how terrifying their situation, the regulars had been conditioned to stand their ground and fight; and fight they did, even if they did it in suicidally dysfunctional ways. Braddock, brave and stubborn, sat calmly on his mount and waited for the enemy to give way, as he assumed all irregulars must, before the regulars’ superior discipline.

  Instead it was his own men who gave way, without any formal order being given, once word spread that he had been shot. Yet even then the redcoats maintained a semblance of order until they reached the river, where the Indians charged them with hatchets and scalping knives and their retreat disintegrated into a rout. Men fled screaming in terror, sometimes running for miles before they collapsed, exhausted. Only when the panic had finally spent itself could the surviving sergeants and officers reassert control and organize the men into units once more.

  The British broke and ran, of course, because they believed that they were about to be massacred. In fact they were in less danger at that moment than at any time since the attack began—not because the Indians lacked the capacity to pursue and destroy them, but because they no longer had a reason to try. Unlike European soldiers, Indians did not fight to destroy their enemies so much as to take the captives, plunder, and trophies by which they could gain spiritual power and prove their merit as warriors. What they valued most therefore lay behind them: the captives they had left tied to trees, the wounded and dead who lay on the field of battle, and the abandoned equipment strewn everywhere about.

  The killing of the wounded and the taking of scalps from corpses went on for some time after the battle; so, too, did the consumption of the expedition’s stock of rum, two hundred gallons of which was soon discovered in the supply train. For Private Duncan Cameron of the 44th Foot (who had been wounded at the start of the fight and left behind in the retreat, but who managed to hide himself in a tree, from which he observed the battle’s aftermath), the Indians seemed “ravenous Hell-hounds” and their behavior mere savagery. Like most Europeans, he did not understand that in fact the warriors did not kill and mutilate indiscriminately. Captives were symbolically valuable because warriors demonstrated greater valor by taking men alive than killing them. Among groups that had not converted to Catholicism, prisoners had great cultural value as replacements for dead kin, whether as adoptees or as the objects of ritual sacrifice. Canada’s converted Indians saw another kind of value in them, as slaves who could be sold or ransomed. Unharmed or lightly wounded captives therefore stood a good chance of being spared, as children and female captives almost always were, provided that they were fit enough to make a forced march back to the villages o
f their captors. The deaths that came speedily to the more gravely wounded at least spared them further suffering, did not hinder the retreat of the war party, and provided the victor with a scalp, which, while less desirable than a captive, still offered evidence of prowess in battle.14

  None of this was evident to the terrified refugees; nor, for that matter, did Braddock’s young aide, Washington, understand much more than the grisly horror of the experience. Unwounded though he had ridden beside the general all afternoon and had two horses shot from under him, he rode all night to bring aid from the army’s rear element. Years later he would recall “the shocking Scenes which presented themselves in this Nights march” vividly: “The dead—the dying—the groans—lamentation—and crys along the Road of the wounded for help . . . were enough to pierce a heart of adamant. The gloom & horror . . . was not a little encreased by the impervious darkness occasioned by the close shade of thick woods. . . .”15

  Two days of flight brought the survivors of Braddock’s command at last into contact with the army’s second division, where they rested briefly and ate their first full meal in days. The only wounded who now remained with them were those who could walk or the few who (like Braddock) had been carried by their comrades; the rest had been abandoned to die in the woods. Now the troops destroyed mortars, ammunition, baggage, and supplies, and loaded the remaining wounded in the empty wagons. Covering the remaining seventy-five miles to Fort Cumberland took five more agonizing days. Braddock, with a musket ball lodged in his chest, did not live to see the fort. On July 14 his men buried him without ceremony in the middle of the road, then the entire army marched over his unmarked grave to keep it from being discovered by the enemy troops, who everyone believed were still in pursuit. The spot was within five miles of Jumonville’s Glen and perhaps a mile from the site of Fort Necessity.16