Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  The British had suffered a devastating casualty rate, with fully two-thirds of the men and officers of the flying column killed or wounded. The French and their Indian allies in comparison had lost only twenty-three dead and sixteen seriously wounded, or about one in every twentyfive of those who had taken part in the battle.17 Yet victory, ironically, left Fort Duquesne more vulnerable than ever. Within two days most of the Indians had gathered their plunder, trophies, and prisoners and gone home, leaving Contrecoeur with only a few hundred men to defend the Forks. The English forces, despite the magnitude of their defeat, still numbered nearly two thousand when a muster was finally held at Fort Cumberland on July 25. More than 1,350 of them were fit for duty. Until the officers in the rear guard had ordered the destruction of the train’s supplies and mortars during the retreat, in other words, it would have been possible, in theory at least, to return to Fort Duquesne and destroy it.

  But whatever the numbers of men and arms and barrels of beef at Fort Cumberland might be read to say, psychologically it was impossible for Thomas Dunbar, the sole surviving colonel of Braddock’s command, to do more than order the retreat to continue. After reorganizing the men who remained unhurt and giving the surgeons a chance to care for those among the wounded who could still be helped (“the wether being very hot [having] Ca[u]sed a great many magets in the mens wounds,” one witness observed), Dunbar headed for Philadelphia. There he compounded defeat with humiliation by demanding winter quarters for his troops, in July.18

  The extent to which the debacle at the Monongahela could be blamed on Braddock himself was a matter of intense concern to contemporary Americans, who searched the event for its meanings and generally concluded that a mindless adherence to European tactics had caused his downfall. In their conclusion lay the origins of the myth that Americans were uniquely fitted for fighting in the wilderness, and by extension the belief in the superiority of American irregular troops (no matter how poorly trained) over European regulars. Fixing the degree of Braddock’s responsibility for the disaster is of less compelling interest today, however, than is the character of contemporary criticism. His civilian detractors were, of course, mainly armchair generals; but the reactions of two participants in the action merit attention.19

  The man who remained closest to Braddock throughout the battle and who had a better chance to observe him than anyone else never criticized him at all. Rather he blamed the “dastardly behaviour of the Regular Troops.” “How little does the World consider the Circumstances,” George Washington exclaimed, “and how apt are mankind to level their vindictive Censures against the unfortunate Chief, who perhaps merited least of the blame[!]” Indeed, even after more than a quarter century had passed and Braddock had become one of the most vilified figures in American popular memory, Washington barely criticized the general’s behavior. Far from concluding that Braddock’s professionalism lay at the root of his defeat, the Virginian emerged from the battle determined to impose a more stringent discipline on his men when he resumed command of the Virginia Regiment. Scarouady had severer strictures for a man he thought proud and foolish. Braddock, he told the governor and council of Pennsylvania, “was a bad man when he was alive; he looked upon us as dogs, and would never hear anything what was said to him. We often endeavored to advise him of the danger he was in with his Soldiers; but he never appeared pleased with us. . . .” 20

  Taken together, the opinions of Washington and Scarouady reveal much about the character of the war that was developing in America. Braddock, a confident and highly professional European soldier, had had little time for anyone who did not see the campaign as he did: that is, as a contest between French and British forces, distinguishable from any similar clash in Europe only by the smallness of the forces involved, the remoteness of the setting, and the uncommon difficulty of operations. For Braddock, war was war, an activity to be conducted according to the norms of civilized European powers, and those dictated preeminently that one fought for the control of territory. George Washington, a young and eagerly Anglophile provincial gentleman, affirmed Braddock’s system of values and his approach to warfare without question. That was why he believed that the fault lay not with Braddock but his men, and why he concluded that a combination of better discipline and training adapted to American conditions would have saved the day. Given such views, it is hardly surprising that Washington should have shared Braddock’s disdain for Indians, but he also shunned them as allies for powerful reasons of his own. In the first place, he was a speculator who knew that a continuing Indian presence in the Ohio Valley would only delay the day that settlers would begin buying Ohio Company lands. Moreover, because his military disappointments had all in one way or another resulted from the actions of Indians, he had strong emotional reasons to want them, no less than the French, driven from the Ohio Valley.

  Scarouady, loyal to the old and now nearly defunct idea that the valley belonged to the Iroquois, had no choice but to make common cause with Braddock if he hoped to see the French expelled. But his hope that the war would be a fight of Indians in alliance with the English to restore Indian autonomy in the west was a vision shared by almost no one else. To Braddock he had not been an ally but a partisan auxiliary. To Washington he was more hindrance than help, a probable obstacle to civilized settlement. To his own people, living with the fact of French dominion in the valley, he was irrelevant. And so, although Scarouady would continue to seek English aid for the Ohio Indians until his death in 1757, the potential for Anglo-Indian alliance that he represented diminished almost to the vanishing point after Braddock’s defeat. Only the Mohawks in the north, swayed by an Anglophile tradition, the loyalty of Chief Hendrick, and the blandishments of William Johnson, would be actively allied with the English—and only for a little longer.

  Braddock had been taught a valuable lesson about wilderness war at the Monongahela, but he did not live long enough to understand it: there could be no success without the cooperation, or at least the acquiescence, of the Indians. It was a lesson lost on Washington and other provincials like him, whose cultural preferences were entirely English and whose practical concerns for realizing the speculative potential of western lands made them even more averse to cooperating with Indians. By contrast, the French understood the importance of Indian alliances very well and used them to foil virtually every Anglo-American military initiative for the next three years. Thus on a strategic level the collapse of the British force at the Monongahela foretold much of the shape of the war that was to come. But the conflicting views and the underlying attitudes of Braddock, Washington, and Scarouady also hinted at what neither they nor any contemporary fully understood, the cultural dimensions of the conflict. Before it would end, the Seven Years’ War in America would become the stage on which the members of very different cultures— French, Canadian, British, Anglo-American, and Amerindian—would meet and interact in ways that were by turns violent and accommodating, shrewd and fraught with misunderstanding: encounters and actions that would define the character of American history for decades to come.

  CHAPTER 10

  After Braddock WILLIAM SHIRLEY AND THE NORTHERN CAMPAIGNS

  1755

  BRADDOCK’S DEFEAT shocked all of British America, but the backwoods settlements of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia felt it like a blow to the solar plexus. Dunbar’s flight to Philadelphia left Braddock’s road as an undefended avenue of approach for raiders from Fort Duquesne. Only a small garrison of Virginia provincials and an independent company from South Carolina remained at Fort Cumberland—a force barely adequate to defend the fort itself, let alone 250 miles of discontinuous valley settlements stretching from the Susquehanna to the Shenandoah Valley. Pennsylvania had no militia to mobilize; the Quakers who dominated the assembly agreed to appropriate a thousand pounds that frontier settlers could use to buy weapons but otherwise left the westerners to shift for themselves. Maryland had a single company of soldiers under arms. Virginia had raised about eight hundred men to
accompany Braddock; approximately a quarter of them, three companies of infantry and one of light horse, were with him on the Monongahela. Of these troops, who numbered twelve officers and more than two hundred men, perhaps thirty survived the battle. Among those who had not been in combat, desertion picked up sharply. 1

  With so few soldiers to protect it, the frontier simply collapsed. Before the end of July, reports had already reached Williamsburg that Indian war parties had killed thirty-five Virginia backwoods settlers. In August, frontier inhabitants who could afford to abandon their homesteads were streaming back to more heavily settled regions in the east. By autumn over a hundred Virginians were known to have been slain or lost to captivity, and the flood of refugees had grown so heavy at Winchester that one could hardly cross the Blue Ridge to the west “for the Crowds of People who were flying, as if every moment was death.”2

  Governor Dinwiddie shipped muskets to the frontier, called out the militia of three northwestern counties, and summoned the House of Burgesses into emergency session. Before the end of August, the Burgesses had voted to raise a thousand-man provincial regiment and appropriated forty thousand pounds to equip and pay it. Dinwiddie offered Washington the command, and—following negotiations to make sure he would have more control and better support than in 1754— Washington accepted. By the end of their session, the Burgesses had stiffened the penalties that backed the militia laws, authorized the payment of bounties on Indian scalps, and provided for the construction of forts as refuges for settlers and bases from which Washington’s troops could patrol the frontier. This arrangement would offer essentially all the security backwoods Virginians would know for the next three years. The redcoats would never return to the Old Dominion during the war.3

  For the Ohio Indians as much as the white inhabitants of the Virginia-Pennsylvania backcountry, Braddock’s defeat marked a point of no return. The Shawnees in the valley had already accepted French control, but the Delawares and Mingos had held back. By the middle of July, however, they had little room left for maneuver. The French had demonstrated their ability to call large numbers of Wyandot, Ottawa, and other allies down to the valley, and the risk was steadily growing that they would punish the Delawares and Mingos for any further reluctance to take up the hatchet against the English. Still, the Delaware chiefs decided to make one last attempt to obtain English aid and sent emissaries (including Captain Jacobs, their greatest warrior) to Philadelphia. From August 16 through 22, the delegation met with Governor Morris and the Pennsylvania Council to ask for arms. Still conforming to the protocols of Iroquois diplomacy, Scarouady the half-king spoke on their behalf: “One word of Yours will bring the Delawares to join You; . . . any Message you have to send, or answer you have to give to them, I will deliver to them.” But Morris and the council had no message to send and answered only that the Ohio Indians should await further instructions from the League Council at Onondaga. No word would ever come from Onondaga, the ambassadors of which would soon be making their way to the mission of La Présentation to reassure the new French governor-general, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, marquis de Vaudreuil, that the Iroquois intended to remain neutral in the fighting between the French and the English. Leaving Philadelphia “without meeting with the necessary Encouragement,” Captain Jacobs and his fellow delegates returned to Fort Duquesne and “agreed To Come out with the French and their Indians in Parties to Destroy the English Settlements.” That fall, Shingas and Captain Jacobs helped lead combined French and Indian war parties that took captives, plunder, and scalps throughout the Virginia-Pennsylvania backcountry.4

  Word of Braddock’s defeat reached William Shirley in early August at his headquarters in New York. There, at a portage between the upper Mohawk River and Wood Creek, he was supervising the transit of troops and provisions to Fort Oswego, the trading post on Lake Ontario that was to be the jumping-off point for his planned attack on Fort Niagara. Shirley was frustrated, his campaign weeks behind schedule. Both the Niagara and the Crown Point expeditions had been staged from Albany, which—predictably—had become the scene of fruitless, time-consuming competition between the supply officers of the two armies. A bitter dispute had erupted between Shirley and the De Lanceys, who had “thrown all imaginable obstructions in [his] way,” even denying him, on the flimsiest of pretexts, the use of New York cannon that were lying unused at Albany. His relations with William Johnson and the Indians had deteriorated into open hostility. Shirley had infuriated Johnson by shifting men from the Crown Point expedition to his own forces, and in retaliation Johnson had refused to provide him with any Mohawk scouts. Shirley had tried to obtain them on his own by employing the odious John Henry Lydius as a recruiter—a serious error, which had served only to offend the Mohawks and thus to render his situation even more difficult. Already the strain had begun to tell on the sixty-one-year-old governor: now the news of the disaster in Pennsylvania came as a stunning double blow. Shirley’s son William Jr., Braddock’s personal secretary, had been shot through the head and killed in the battle. This shock, coming in tandem with the realization that he was now commander in chief of His Majesty’s forces in North America, was almost more than Shirley could bear. The responsibilities he now assumed were ones for which his training as a lawyer and politician had done little to prepare him.5

  Taking stock of the situation over the next weeks, Shirley saw little to hearten him. Reports arrived that Admiral Edward Boscawen, dispatched in April to patrol the Gulf of St. Lawrence and prevent French reinforcements from reaching Canada, had failed in his mission. Of a large convoy carrying six battalions of regular troops, Boscawen had intercepted only two ships and ten companies, or fewer than four hundred of the three thousand regular reinforcements; the remainder had reached safe harbor at Louisbourg and Québec. Their commander, Baron Jean-Armand de Dieskau, maréchal de camp, sent to assume overall direction of Canada’s defense, by now had had more than enough time to deploy them against the British. Colonel Dunbar, meanwhile, cringed at Philadelphia, awaiting orders and holding immobile the remnants of Braddock’s force. Johnson’s campaign against Crown Point was proceeding at a snail’s pace.6

  William Shirley (1694–1771). This nineteenth-century lithograph shows Shirley as a fashionable London portraitist, Thomas Hudson, depicted him, c. 1750. He appears as the selfconfident royal governor of Massachusetts, a post he occupied from 1741 to 1756. The architect of the Louisbourg expedition of 1745 and of the successful operations in Nova Scotia during 1755, Shirley’s broad strategic vision served him best before he became commander in chief; thereafter his lack of administrative and organizational skills would prove to be his downfall. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

  Shirley’s own force, short on provisions, was looking less able to mount an assault on Niagara with every passing day. A lack of ready money hindered everything, for in the confusion that followed Braddock’s defeat, the deputy paymaster general was refusing to honor drafts that various military contractors were presenting for payment. Shirley still pressed forward with his men to Lake Ontario, but once he arrived at the shore it quickly became evident that he could proceed no further with the campaign. The old trading post, Fort Oswego, was virtually indefensible, and therefore unsuitable to serve as a supply base for the army’s advance by boat against Niagara. Shirley therefore ordered the decrepit structure repaired and fortified, arranged for supplies to be brought up, and sent his two regular regiments into winter quarters there. The next spring, he thought, they could attack Niagara. In the meantime they would have to make Oswego a suitable base of operations while he returned to New York City to sort out the muddle into which everything had fallen and lay plans to recover the initiative the next year.7

  The only bright spot visible in the campaigns of 1755, from Shirley’s perspective, was the New England expedition against French military posts in Nova Scotia. He had promoted this campaign as a means of resolving longstanding difficulties in British control over the region,
which had remained unstable since the end of King George’s War. One of the earl of Halifax’s pet projects had been to Anglicize Nova Scotia and make it a bastion of defense against New France. To that end he had ordered Halifax built in 1749, as a counterweight to Louisbourg, and he had promoted immigration by New Englanders and other Protestants. This worried the French—in part because the French-speaking Acadian majority in the region would be swallowed up in a tide of Anglophone newcomers, and in part because the Acadians would be unable to continue, as they had for years, to sell provisions covertly to the fortress of Louisbourg. The English worried, in turn, that the French were intriguing among the Acadians and the local Abenaki and Micmac Indians, seeking to stir up rebellion. And, in fact, they were: a French missionary priest among the Micmacs, Abbé Jean Louis de Le Loutre, openly agitated for an insurrection to return Acadia to French control and ultimately offered to buy the scalps of English settlers for a hundred livres each. Early in 1750, affairs had reached a crisis when the French erected a substantial pentagonal fort, Beauséjour, on the narrow isthmus of Chignecto, which connected the peninsula of Nova Scotia to the Canadian mainland. This had moved the British to construct a countervailing post, Fort Lawrence, on the opposite side of the Missaguash River. Between these two forts, bristling with cannon, an uneasy balance of power had rested until the beginning of 1755. Then the ministry had adopted Shirley’s plan to send two New England battalions and a detachment of regulars from the Halifax garrison against Beauséjour.8

  Shirley, as usual, had had practical reasons for promoting this expedition—it promised a harvest of patronage that would increase his influence over Massachusetts politics—but he had also realized that it would be popular among New England colonists interested in finding lands to colonize outside their own increasingly crowded region. Recruitment had gone well. Since the Crown had agreed to pay the wages of the troops, no political objections had been raised in the New England assemblies, and as Shirley had guessed, popular enthusiasm for the expedition quickly filled the ranks. And for once, at least, everything went according to schedule. While Braddock was still fuming at Fort Cumberland and waiting for his horses to arrive, the New England regiment was sailing for the Bay of Fundy. On June 2, when Braddock’s engineers were blasting rocks out of the road less than twenty-five miles from Wills Creek, the New Englanders were off-loading cannon and provisions at Fort Lawrence, a half-day’s march from Fort Beauséjour. Ten days later they were digging trenches before the French fort; in two more they were bombarding it. On June 16—after “one of our Large Shell[s] had Fell threw what they Called thare Bum Proof & Brok in one of thare Cazments whare a Number of thare officers ware Seting [and] Killed 6 of them Dead”—the French garrison capitulated. While the New Englanders were gawking at the guns in the fort that their commander had just renamed Fort Cumberland, Braddock had moved less than fifty miles and in frustration was preparing to detach a flying column to speed the march toward his objective.9