Captains Stobo and Van Braam watched the columns disappear, trying to maintain a look of professional detachment. “As the English have in their Custody an officer, two Cadets and other prisoners,” the signed capitulation had noted, “and which they promise to send with a Safe guard to Fort de Quesne . . . Mr. Jacob Vanbram & Robert Stobo, two Captains, are to be left with us as Hostages until the arrival of our said Canadians & Frenchmen.” The officers had turned themselves in the night before, Van Braam wearing a uniform coat he’d bought from Washington so as not to appear shabby, and Stobo having given his new sword to his lieutenant, Will Poulson. Torching Fort Necessity, de Villiers turned toward Fort Duquesne, his hostages in tow. Whatever English homesteads they encountered along the way, including Gist’s farm, were burned.
The shock waves from Great Meadows reverberated well beyond the Ohio Valley. Across the colonies, political leaders were stunned by the news but, riven by rivalries and hamstrung by ingrained timidity, did little but wring their hands, despite Dinwiddie’s pleas for concrete assistance. Recriminations filled the air. “The Misfortune attending our Expedition is entirely owing to the delay in your Forces,” Dinwiddie wrote to Colonel James Innes, whose reinforcements never reached Washington, “and more particularly to the two Independent Companies from N.Y.; how they can answer their disobedience to His Majesty’s Commands I know not.”
The response was more forceful in England, where a grandly hawkish plan was devised to sweep the French from the Ohio, the Great Lakes, and the Maritimes, overseen by a single, supreme commander in chief—Major General Edward Braddock, a man chosen less for his experience than for his connections and politics. No sooner was the supposedly secret strategy drawn up than word leaked to the French, who rushed to strengthen their defenses and garrisons against the anticipated British attacks the next spring. For hardliners on both sides, unsatisfied with the status quo ante bellum conclusion of King George’s War in 1748 and itching for a fresh imperial confrontation, things were going splendidly.
In Williamsburg, the notoriously tightfisted House of Burgesses feted the returning army by awarding a gold coin “for each Man as a reward for their bravery in a late engagement with the French.” Captain Stobo was promoted, in his absence, to major, while his fellow hostage, Van Braam, already under a cloud for the “assassination” faux pas, was pointedly ignored. Washington, too, came in for public criticism for his leadership. As summer faded to autumn, Washington found himself increasingly frustrated—by the lack of funds to clothe and feed his men, by Dinwiddie’s grandiose plans for attacking the French, and ultimately by the governor’s restructuring of the regiment into ten companies, which would have effectively demoted Washington from colonel to captain. In October, he resigned his commission and returned to the private life of a planter.
The effects of Great Meadows were, of course, felt most directly on the Ohio frontier, where the defeat was an enormous setback for British interests. Croghan, like most of the western traders, had been bled dry by French depredations over the previous two years, and the loss at Fort Necessity ended any hope that he could recover his business there. He avoided Philadelphia, afraid he’d be imprisoned for his debts, and moved deep into the mountains to a small farm at Aughwick, along the upper Juniata River on the main foot trail to the Ohio, where his workers and a few black slaves stockaded a log house and tilled fields of squash and corn.
Pro-British Mingos from west of the Alleghenies gathered where they could to find safety and food. Among them was Tanaghrisson, now living at Harris’s Ferry along the Susquehanna, who in September 1754 accompanied Conrad Weiser on a trip west to Aughwick. Along the way, they found dozens of Lenapes and Shawnees living at Andrew Montour’s house, where the métis’s wife had to kill their sheep to feed the Indians. There were far more Indians at Croghan’s, including Scarouady and Tamaqua, a Lenape chief also known as “the Beaver.” “I counted above twenty Cabbins about his House,” Weiser reported to Hamilton, having delivered £300 to Croghan for supplies, “and in them at least two hundred Indians . . . and a great many more are scattered thereabouts.”
Croghan begged for help from the province. “There is such a number of Women and Children and more coming; they have almost destroyed thirty acres of Indian Corn for me, exclusive of other Provisions, which are very dear and hard to be got,” he said. But amid his worries and petitions for assistance, the trader also forwarded to Hamilton two remarkable pieces of correspondence smuggled out of Fort Duquesne.
“I here enclose the Copy of a Letter from Captain Stobo,” he wrote, “which I received two days ago by an Indian named Moses.” It was the second of two copies, both carried into Aughwick by pro-British Natives. The mere existence of the letters, addressed to Washington, must have raised Croghan’s suspicions about their importance. When he broke the seals and read their contents, his eyes undoubtedly widened, and he immediately drafted copies for Hamilton and Dinwiddie, sending them by separate runners.
Stobo was making the best use he could of what he expected to be his short time among the French. Under the conventions of war, both the British and French hostages seized in the two battles could expect a rapid exchange and a return to their companies, probably within a matter of months. Although the defeat at Fort Necessity was clearly a blow, Stobo doubtless took comfort in the words he’d read many times in his thumb-worn copy of A Treatise of Military Discipline: “When an Officer has had the misfortune of being beat, his honour will not suffer by it, provided he has done his duty, and acted like a Soldier.”
After the surrender, Stobo was escorted with Van Braam to Fort Duquesne. There they were treated cordially, billeted in one of the newly constructed cabins, and given the freedom to wander as they wished within its confines. They were, naturally, expected to obey the unwritten rules of parole, under which a captured officer would, in return for certain liberties, neither seek to escape nor work against his captors.
Robert Stobo’s Map of Fort Duquesne
Drawn to meticulous scale, Stobo’s map—smuggled out in the breechclout of Conrad Weiser’s adoptive Mohawk brother, Moses the Song, and forwarded by George Croghan to colonial authorities—laid out the details of the French fortification. It also placed the captive Stobo’s head squarely in the noose when his espionage was discovered. (Montreal Archives)
There was nothing to prevent an active young captain from using his eyes, however, and Stobo applied himself to a thorough examination of the fort. The French had done wonders since dislodging the Virginians, raising walls twelve feet high and more than ten feet thick, with four corner bastions and a six-pointed entrenchment with breastworks. The interior of Duquesne was jammed with barracks, officers’ quarters, a smithy, a powder room, and a kitchen, while most of the thousand soldiers, joined by a growing number of Indians, slept outside the walls in bark-covered cabins. Day after day, Stobo the regimental engineer casually but carefully paced off dimensions, memorizing every detail.
No one could fault his behavior were he to carry this information himself back to Virginia, his captivity over and his parole fulfilled. But Stobo decided to take a far more dangerous step—to send it back to Washington by secret courier. Stobo later argued that he had seen prisoners from his own company held by the Indians at Fort Duquesne in violation of the surrender terms and thus considered himself under no obligation to observe those terms either. Whatever the justification, he decided to cross the line from hostage officer to active spy—a choice that could put his head squarely in the noose if he were caught. He was also ignoring another line from A Treatise of Military Discipline—one regarding the tendency of young, untried officers “being hurried on, by . . . the impetuosity of their temper, to do something that is great and noble, without considering the consequences that may attend it.”
Working quickly but efficiently, he sketched out a remarkably detailed plan of the fort, complete with cross sections of the walls, the layout and function of each building, distances to the river and forest edge,
positions of cannons, and more. He added notes on the disposition of the Ohio Indians, many of whom were coming to the French side, in part because of rumors that Scarouady had been murdered by the British and his family given to the hated Catawba and Cherokee. He cautioned that Laforce, the French officer captured by Washington, “is greatly wanted here; [there is] no scouting now, he certainly must be an extraordinary Man among them, he is so much regretted and wished for.”
The fort, Stobo said, was weakly garrisoned. “Strike this Fall, as soon as possible . . . One hundred trusty Indians might surprize this Fort.” One such trusty Indian was a Mohawk named Moses the Song, who had approached Stobo a couple of days earlier and offered to carry a document through French lines. Besides being Scarouady’s brother-in-law, he was Conrad Weiser’s adoptive brother, their friendship extending back to their boyhoods together in New York.
Stobo’s final lines were a mix of bravado and naiveté. “When We engaged to serve the Country it was expected We were to do it with our Lives, let them not be disappointed, consider the Good of the Expedition without the least Regard to Us; for my part I wou’d die ten thousand deaths to have the Pleasure of possessing this Fort but one day, they are so vain of their Success at the Meadows, ’tis worse than Death to hear them.” New as he was to military matters, it’s likely that Stobo also underestimated the consequences if he was found out. “If they should know I wrote I should at least lose the little Liberty I have,” he said. And with that, he signed his name to the document.
Moses slipped off through the forest, Stobo’s letter and map hidden in his breechclout. The next day, the captain smuggled out a second copy with a sympathetic Lenape named Dillaway (or Delaware) George. Then he sat back waiting to be exchanged, satisfied that he’d done his duty.
Actually, Robert Stobo had gotten himself into a pickle. When his letter arrived in Williamsburg, the French prisoners were on their way to be exchanged. But when Dinwiddie read Stobo’s remarks about Laforce’s value, he recalled them. Under a flag of truce, a British officer met with Contrecoeur, the French commander, offering to swap three junior French officers, but not Laforce or the rest of the men, for Stobo and Van Braam. Contrecoeur refused; he had already learned that information regarding the fort’s defenses had leaked to the British—had even been printed in Virginia newspapers—and he suspected his prisoners of cheating on their parole. By late September, Stobo and Van Braam were heading for Montreal.
At the same time Stobo was plunging into espionage, Conrad Weiser was elbow-deep in sordid dealmaking at a great congress in Albany, New York—a gathering of provincial officials and Indian leaders meant to shore up the flagging alliances with the Iroquois and other Natives that the events at Great Meadows made even more critical.
The Covenant Chain of treaties, forged in the late seventeenth century, was in tatters. The League of the Six Nations was fracturing, its long policy of neutrality collapsing as the Seneca sided more and more openly with France, the Mohawk and Oneida aligned with New York, and the Ohio Indians followed their own path. Yet even the Mohawk were growing weary of Britain’s ceaseless hunger for land. In June 1753, the aging Mohawk sachem Hendrick announced to a stunned meeting, “The Covenant Chain is broken between you and us. So brother you are not to expect to hear of me any more, and Brother we desire to hear no more of you.”
Hendrick may have been playing to the crowd, but his threat of war got Britain’s attention. King George himself—not his fractious colonies—would summon the league’s sachems and provincial commissioners to Albany in the summer of 1754 to heal the rift in the chain of friendship. At the same time, those advising the king hoped the provinces would find some measure of the unity that had so long evaded them.
That seemed unlikely. Pennsylvania, facing French intrusions to the west, also confronted the prospect of a second invasion from a wholly unexpected quarter—Connecticut. Pennsylvania had already been squabbling with New York for years over the upper Susquehanna, but because of still another pair of overlapping royal grants, the land between the forty-first and forty-second parallels (essentially, the northern third of the modern state of Pennsylvania) was claimed by Connecticut as well, and settlers from New England were preparing to move into the Wyoming Valley along the north branch of the Susquehanna. “Tho’ I can scarce persuade myself that any considerable Number would engage in so rash and unjust a Proceeding,” Hamilton told Connecticut governor Roger Wolcott, he warned that anyone doing so would be considered “Enemies to their Country,” who risked “raising a Civil War.”
“I beseech your Honour further to consider that the Six Nations will be highly offended if these Lands . . . be overrun with White People, for they are their favorite Lands and reserved for their Hunting,” Hamilton concluded. It wasn’t the Iroquois who would be furious, though; it was the Lenape, who had been forced out of the Forks of the Delaware following the Walking Purchase, and who had settled in the Wyoming Valley with a promise that it would remain Indian land. Hamilton was worried enough to urge Weiser to make another winter trip to Onondaga to discuss Connecticut’s inroads with the Iroquois League. Weiser refused, recalling how, on his winter march with Shikellamy in 1737, he “almost starved by misrys and Famine I suffered,” even though he was then a young man. Now “I am old and Infirm,” protested Weiser, who had turned fifty-seven a few months earlier. “I could Expect nothing . . . now than my Grave, or feeding the Wolves and Bears with my Body.”
Instead, he traveled to Albany that summer, gliding up the Hudson on a sloop with the Pennsylvania delegates, including Benjamin Franklin, who was hoping to hammer out plans for a “United Colonies,” much as New England had tried to forge in the 1600s. A month earlier, Franklin had published a cartoon in the Pennsylvania Gazette showing a snake, representing the colonies, chopped into pieces; the legend read “Join, or Die.” The verdict seemed to be die. Franklin’s proposed Albany Plan of Union failed, rejected by both the colonies and the Crown because, he said, the provincial assemblies “all thought there was too much [royal] prerogative in it, and in England it was judg’d to have too much of the democratic.”
Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island were represented at the Albany Congress, while others, notably Virginia and New Jersey, stayed away. Sachems of the Six Nations were there, wearing a colorful mix of Native and European clothing, wrapped in red or blue blankets, silver earrings, and ceremonial gorgets flashing in the sun, their finery masking the very deep divisions among their members. The Ohio Indians were, as usual, not invited; the league would speak for them. In fact, the direct negotiations Pennsylvania and Virginia had been conducting with the Ohio tribes were a sore point among the Iroquois, as their sachems made clear.
Weiser had two big jobs—to forestall Connecticut’s land grab in the Wyoming Valley, and to try to engineer another on behalf of the Penns. Two months earlier, Weiser had sent a message to friendly elements in the Iroquois League, carried by the sons of his dead friend Shikellamy. The plan laid the groundwork for a sweeping land purchase “for the whole Province”—meaning, as the commissioners explained in Albany, from the Susquehanna “as far Westward as the Province extends, and as far North of the Kittochtinny Hills . . . as You shall think proper to part with, and the larger the Tract the more agreeable to Us, and the larger our Present to You will be.”
Weiser was jockeying with the Connecticut Susquehanna Company’s hired man at Albany, a Dutch-born trader and speculator named John Henry Lydius. Tall and lanky, the fifty-year-old Lydius had been skirting the edge of French, British, and Mohawk law for years, developing a decidedly checkered reputation. One Oneida later accused him of being “a Devil [who] has stole our Lands,” someone who takes “Indians slyly by the Blanket one at a time, and when they are drunk, puts some money in their Bosoms, and perswades them to sign deeds.”
Sly he was, but also effective. “He went in the following clandestine manner to work,” reported one witness, “and with
tempting the Indians he could prevail upon, with Plenty of Dollars.” Moving among the Mohawk, “by many false persuasions, with the offer of 20 Dollars each, [he] brought them to sign their Names.” Visiting the Oneida, “Lidius treated them plentifully with Victuals and Drink, & then laid 300 Dollars before them.” Employing such rum-and-lucre methods, Lydius got more than a dozen sachems to sign a deed to the Wyoming Valley—few, if any, of them with the authority to do so.
The land swindle was also an invitation to war, which Weiser predicted would erupt should the New Englanders actually move to settle the north branch of the Susquehanna. Hendrick, the Mohawk sachem, told the Pennsylvanians his people reserved the Wyoming Valley “for our hunting Ground,” issuing “Orders not to suffer either Onas’ People nor the New Englanders to settle any of those Lands.” Repeatedly, he drove home the point: “We will never part with the Land at Shamokin and Wyomink; our Bones are scattered there, and on this Land there has always been a great Council Fire.”
Hendrick was the lead signatory to Pennsylvania’s own deed negotiated at Albany, a document “that reeked somewhat less strongly of fraud” than Connecticut’s, but that was still proved to be a profound cheat. The pious Weiser was not above using underhanded methods of his own. “I may perhaps fall in with some greedy fellows for Money, that will undertake to bring things about to Our wishes,” he advised Pennsylvania council secretary Richard Peters before going to the congress. Weiser did just that. In return for a thousand golden pieces of eight and the promise of a thousand more to follow—£800, or about $100,000 in modern currency—Hendrick and twenty-two other sachems cheerfully signed away an enormous swath of the central Appalachians.
The First Frontier Page 38
