Washington

by Douglas Southall Freeman

  Reflection suggested a means of achieving both ends. On May 18 George wrote the Governor a letter that was at once boyish, wrathful and shrewd. He confessed his sympathy with the protest and went on to explain that the officers would have resigned their commissions had they not felt themselves obligated by the nearness of danger to remain on duty. Then he deliberately began a new paragraph to distinguish their intentions from his own: “Giving up my commission is quite contrary to my intention. Nay, I ask it as a greater favor, than any amongst the many I have received from your Honor, to confirm it to me. But let me serve voluntarily; then I will, with the greatest pleasure in life, devote my services to the expedition without any other reward than the satisfaction of serving my country; but to be slaving dangerously for the shadow of pay, through woods, rocks, mountains—I would rather prefer the great toil of a day laborer, and dig for a maintenance, provided I were reduced to the necessity, than serve upon such ignoble terms. . . . Be the consequence what it will, I am determined not to leave the Regiment, but to be amongst the last men that quit the Ohio, even if I serve as a private volunteer, which I greatly prefer to the establishment we are now upon.”

  Ward brought, also, a message from Dinwiddie to Half King, whom the Governor was anxious to have with him at the conference soon to be held in Winchester. George did not forward the message itself. He reasoned that Half King and the other Chiefs, possessing full measure of curiosity, would proceed more quickly if informed that a speech from the Governor was at the headquarters of the English. Speed seemed imperative, in spite of high water, because two friendly Indians who came to camp now reported that Frenchmen on reconnaissance had been within six or seven miles of the English. George continued to hope he would be able to bag some French. To do this he would need the assistance of Half King, and he consequently took much pains with the “speech” of invitation to the Chiefs.

  On the twenty-third Stephen had a strange report to make. The Captain and his men had reached the Monongahela not far from Red Stone Creek, and there they had met Indian traders whom the French had permitted to return towards the English settlements. All that these men could tell Stephen was that some French soldiers under a young officer styled Jumonville had been reconnoitring along the Monongahela, but had gone back the previous day to the fort at the forks of the Ohio, Fort DuQuesne as it now was styled.

  The next day some small information of a reliable character began to arrive from the country ahead. The Indian previously sent to Half King returned with a companion who had a message from the Sachem. This was a clear warning and a definite encouragement. The French in undetermined number were advancing to fight; Half King was coming to counsel. Later in the day, after the column had reached the Great Meadows between Laurel Hill and Chestnut Ridge, an Indian trader reported that he had seen two Frenchmen the previous day. He was certain that a strong hostile detachment was on the march. This information appealed to George as accurate and as calling for immediate defensive preparation. He sought out favorable ground in the Meadows and at length found two gulleys that were close together and, to his inexperienced eye, adequate as natural trenches. These he promptly manned and then he placed his wagons between them.

  The morning of May 27 brought the most explicit information George had received of the movements of the French. Gist rode into camp and described how the previous noon La Force and fifty soldiers had come to his new settlement, which he had left in the charge of two Indians. The French were in hostile mood; Gist hurried off to warn Washington. En route, about five miles from camp, Gist found the tracks of numerous white men whom he took to be those who had been at his place on the twenty-sixth. The canoes of this advance party, Gist had learned, were at Red Stone Creek. If the Frenchmen were far from their landing place, and close to his camp, George thought he had an excellent chance of cutting them off.

  Night was bringing the blackest of darkness when, about 9 P.M., an Indian runner subsequently known as Silverheels came to the camp with stirring news from Half King. The Chief sent word that he was about six miles away and that he had seen footprints of two Frenchmen who had crossed the trail. Half King believed these men belonged to the party who had passed Gist’s. All of them, the Chief thought, were nearby.

  George resolved immediately to join Half King and attack the French. Although he had scarcely more than eighty men, he called up forty of them and, within an hour, started for the bivouac of the friendly natives. Day was breaking when the guide stopped at the crude shelter of Half King. The inevitable council was brief. Half King and the others agreed to make common cause and join the English in attacking the enemy. Quickly the Virginians and the natives went to the spot where the footprints of the Frenchmen had been seen. Then Half King told two of his Indians to follow the trail and ascertain where the French were encamped.

  At length the two Indian scouts returned: They had found their quarry! About half a mile from the trail, in a bower well concealed among rocks, was a body of French troops. The situation was ideal. By proceeding carefully, George’s men could surround the French and attack on all sides.

  Between 7 and 8 A.M. deployment was completed. The Virginians and Indians crept nearer until they were within a little more than a hundred yards of the unsuspecting French. George waited until he was sure everything was in order. Then he stepped forward and gave his command. Almost on the instant his tall figure was under the eyes of Frenchmen. As fast as they could, these soldiers ran back to their bower to get their rifles. A moment later, shots rang out. Men began to fall. George heard the whistle of passing bullets as they cut the air and somehow felt exhilarated. Stephen closed in with his platoon and captured an officer. Some of the French gave ground, made off, and then, at a shout from their commander, came running back with uplifted hands. These men had seen the Indians in their rear and, knowing what their fate would be at the hands of the savages, preferred to surrender to the British. Behind them came half a dozen Indians who fell upon the wounded, brained and scalped them.

  By this time firing had ceased. All the twenty-one unwounded French survivors had thrown down their weapons. On the ground were ten dead and one wounded man who had escaped the hatchet of the Indians. One French soldier, Mouceau by name, had been seen to make off. An Englishman was dead. The wounded on Washington’s side numbered only two or three. From first shot to last surrender, not quite fifteen minutes had elapsed. The surprise had been complete; George’s first skirmish had achieved the ideal of the soldier, the destruction of the adversary as a fighting force. The commander of the French part, Joseph Coulon, Sieur de Jumonville, had been killed by Half King, or at least the Chief so boasted. Jumonville’s second in command, Druillon, and two cadets were among the captured; but the most valuable of the prisoners was La Force, whom Washington described as “a bold, enterprising man and a person of great subtlety and cunning.”

  Washington started the prisoners and his men back to the camp in the Meadows. On the way, the captured French officers began to protest that they had come as an embassy to serve notice on the English to leave the domain of the French King. They insisted they should be treated as attendants of an ambassador, not as prisoners of war, and should be returned with an escort to Fort DuQuesne, precisely as the French had treated Washington the previous winter.

  Washington’s officers argued, if the French were an embassy, why were they so numerous and why so careful to hide themselves? Why did they not come boldly out and declare their presence and their mission? There was evidence that the French had been two miles closer to the camp than when they were discovered and that they had moved back and had sent off runners to report to Claude Pierre Pécaudy, Sieur de Contrecæur, the strength and position of Washington’s party. Behind this reasoning was conviction that the French seizure of the fort at the forks had been an act of war. In the minds of Washington and the other Englishmen, the French already were the enemy. Half King was wholly of this view. The French, he said, never intended to come otherwise than in hostility: if the
English were fools enough to let them go, he never would assist in taking another Frenchman.

  George announced no decision after this discussion of the twenty-eighth. The next morning the French formally asked him in what manner he regarded them. They were prisoners, said George; they were to march under guard to Winchester, where Dinwiddie was assumed to be. In a letter written later that day George cautioned His Honor against listening to the “smooth stories” of the Frenchmen concerning their alleged embassy. . . In strict justice,” he said, “they ought to be hanged as spies of the worst sort. . .”

  Not for an instant did Lieutenant Colonel Washington permit the protests of the French prisoners to divert him from two other matters of much concern—his answer to the Governor on the sore question of pay, and his preparations to meet the attack he expected in retaliation for the defeat of Jumonville’s party.

  The Governor’s reply to the protest George had forwarded was a sharp letter written from Winchester May 25 in which Dinwiddie took up the complaints of Captain Stephen and the other officers. Where the Governor thought the complaint justified, he promised such correction as he could make; where he believed the officers wrong, he said so, and reminded them that other applicants for commission “were desirous to serve on those conditions.” The Governor gave the commander a verbal spanking, professed his understanding of George’s difficulties and assured the young man that merit would not “pass unnoticed.” The letter disturbed George. It touched his pride and his pocket, concerning both of which he was sensitive, and it raised, vaguely, the question of his continuance in command. On the day after the fight with Jumonville, he sat down and wrote Dinwiddie an answer that displayed his youth and his ambition. He argued the issues in detail, and not unskillfully, and promised to do what he could “to reconcile matters”; but he could not forbear stating how he figured he was receiving almost ten shillings less per day than an officer of like rank on the regular establishment would receive, to say nothing of the fact that he had no prospect of half-pay on retirement. As he did not consider his circumstances permitted, he would not insist on serving without pay and would continue to accept the per diem of 12 s. 6d. Not until he made this completely, indeed tediously, plain, did he even announce to the Governor the victory he had won.

  The effect of that success on his state of mind was what might have been expected in the case of an inexperienced but intelligent soldier: It increased his self-confidence and created an unwarranted contempt for the enemy at the same time that it admonished him to prepare against an attack by a force numerically much superior to his own. He began on May 30 to strengthen the ground where he had found the “natural entrenchments” between which he had placed his wagons. The French did not approach, but the fort was not finished in reasonably defensible form until June 3 and then was by no means as strong as its young engineer believed. The English escort brought in, on June 2, eighty or more Indians, but that total included women and children.

  Badly as George needed more men, the arrival of the squaws and the children along with the warriors gave new seriousness to a condition that had troubled him for several days: Food had become scarce; flour, in particular, was almost exhausted. Every issue lowered the supply until, on June 6, the sergeant came to the bottom of the last sack.

  In the wretched crisis this shortage of food presented him, George had new responsibility placed on his shoulders: Gist, on the very day of the exhaustion of the flour, brought news that Fry was dead. The Colonel had sustained a fall from his horse, several days prior to May 29, and had succumbed on May 31. As a result, George now had the chief command of the expedition, the post to which he had not dared aspire a few months previously.

  As if to exemplify his extension of command, George received on June 9 the first reenforcements, aside from Indians, that had joined him after he had left Wills Creek. These were the remaining three companies of the Virginia Regiment under Capts. Robert Stobo and Andrew Lewis and Lieut. George Mercer, who had been advanced slowly by their temporary commander, Maj. George Muse. In the charge of Stobo, Lewis and Mercer were approximately 181 soldiers, few of whom had ever fired a rifle at any other target than game. These men brought scant supplies, but with the convoy there arrived nine small guns and the swivels on which to place them so that they could be fired horizontally in any direction. These were the first swivel guns George had received and they were to be the principal armament of the little stockade.

  More interesting than anything else Major Muse brought with him was an emissary and interpreter, Andrew Montour, who spoke good French and English, as well as several Indian tongues. Along with Montour and the English reenforcements, or on their heels, George received three letters from Dinwiddie. In one written after receipt of the news of the death of Fry, the Governor informed George that he was to take Fry’s place with the rank of Colonel. Muse was to be Lieutenant Colonel; the senior Captain, Stephen, was to be made Major. The executive went on to say that Col. James Innes, “an old, experienced officer,” was expected daily and “is appointed Commander-in-Chief of all the forces, which I am very sensible will be very agreeable to you and the other officers.”

  Dinwiddie already had written George that the Independent Companies were on their way to the fort, and now renewed his admonition that controversy with the commanders of these troops be shunned. The coming of the Independent Companies most certainly would raise the vexatious issue of rank and command. George was a Virginia Colonel; the officer in charge of the nearest Independent Company was James Mackay, a Captain by royal commission. Was rank so to be disregarded that the Captain would command the Colonel, or—what was more probable—would the Captain be exempt from the orders of a man three grades his senior? George asked himself the question in manifest disturbance of spirit. “Your Honor may depend I shall myself and will endeavor to make all my officers show Captain Mackay all the respect due to his rank and merit; but [I] should have been particularly obliged if your Honor had declared whether he was under my command or independent of it; however, I shall be studious to avoid all disputes that may tend to the public prejudice, but as far as I am able, I will inculcate harmony and unanimity.”

  Righteous resolution and correspondence alike were interrupted that June 10 by reports of the approach of a party of French. George at once sent out Indian scouts and made ready to receive the enemy, but no French appeared and no fire was opened. The next day, Washington pushed out another detachment to find the foe. Two of these scouts returned on the twelfth with news that they had seen a small number of French in the woods.

  On about June 14, Captain Mackay arrived with the Independent Company from South Carolina. George was at a loss how to act or what to do concerning the use of the company, but he was determined to receive Mackay as a gentleman and a comrade. When, therefore, he saw Mackay ride up, he greeted him in friendly manner and gave him no orders. Mackay picked his own campsite; George did not go to the company or inspect it. The first test came when Washington, as commander, sent the Captain the parole and countersign. Mackay replied that he did not think he should receive these from the Colonial Colonel. Mackay insisted that his command was a separate force and maintained that the Governor could not issue a commission that would command him. Another complication arose over the duty the Independent Company was to perform. The Colonials were working on the road to Red Stone. Would Mackay have his troops share in this labor? No—that was to say, not unless Colonel Washington was prepared to allow the men the regular pay of one shilling sterling per day for such special service. George, it will be remembered, was allotted eight pence daily for his own soldiers; he could not give more to those of the Independent Company.

  At first, George did not know what to do when he came to this impasse. He wished that Mackay were somewhere else. As the Virginia Colonel could not detach the Independent Company, he concluded that he would himself leave: He would take his own men and their part of the remaining provisions, and would start for Red Stone Creek; Mackay could remain at t
he Meadows with the Independent Company. George assembled his troops on the morning of June 16 and prepared to start for Red Stone Creek. By persistence and in spite of many obstacles, he reached Gist’s new settlement and from that point sent back all except two of his wagons and teams to haul provisions.

  The Colonel now had to return to a diplomatic role. George had heard that the Delawares and the Shawnees had taken up the hatchet against the English. Doubtless on the advice of Half King, the commander had sent messengers and wampum to those tribes and had invited them to a council at Gist’s. Washington felt better equipped now for negotiations with the savages because he had as his counsellors not only Montour and Half King but also the trader, Indian diplomatist and interpreter, George Croghan.

  The Delawares and several Shawnee emissaries came promptly, but before Washington could employ Croghan’s arts on these Indians, there arrived from Logstown eight Mingoes who seemed curiously in a hurry. They asked to see Washington without delay and told him they had a commission that required an immediate council. Surprised by this haste, the Colonel brought some of his advisers together and let the Mingoes explain themselves. They went on with so many expostulations in discussing the French that George and his companions became suspicious: These Mingoes might be spies! Because of this possibility, George proceeded to act with appropriate caution and told the Mingoes that he could not receive their speech until Half King could be present. Delaware spokesmen similarly were asked to wait until that friend of the English could sit with the white men.