George Washington

by Stephen Brumwell

  Meanwhile, Governor Dinwiddie awaited William Shirley’s adjudication of that “great dispute.” When Shirley’s response finally arrived, it could scarcely have been more unsatisfactory for Washington: Governor Sharpe of Maryland had been appointed to settle the row with Dagworthy—his own colony’s officer. Goaded beyond endurance, Washington now secured Dinwiddie’s permission to approach Shirley in Boston and present him with a “memorial” from his officers for the Virginia Regiment to be accepted into the regular British Army. While Washington was preparing for his trip to Massachusetts, Shirley himself took action, instructing Sharpe to order Dagworthy to stop exercising command over the Virginians. However, as the question of his regiment’s status remained unresolved, Washington decided to head north regardless and plead its case to Shirley in person. Washington had good reason to expect a sympathetic hearing. Not only had he met Shirley at Braddock’s Alexandria conference in April 1755, but he had become friendly with the governor’s son William, who served as the general’s personal secretary and was slain at the Monongahela.

  In early February 1756, in company with his aide Captain George Mercer and another close friend, the Scottish Highlander Robert Stewart, Washington set off on a round-trip of more than 1,000 miles to Boston. All three officers wore the brave blue, red-faced, and silver-laced uniform that Washington had specified, and they were accompanied by two liveried servants. This conspicuous display had a purpose of its own, helping to enhance George Washington’s standing in colonies already growing familiar with his name and exploits.

  The journey introduced Washington to British America’s Middle and Northern Colonies, and to its three largest cities, all of them thriving urban centers without counterparts in the Old Dominion. His party traveled via Philadelphia; with about 18,000 inhabitants and 3,000 houses, it was then the largest city in the American colonies. Fronting the Delaware River, its formal grid of streets made straggling Williamsburg look like a glorified village. From there they rode on to New York, a city still jammed into the tip of the peninsula flanked by the Hudson and East Rivers, but already boasting a population of some 14,000. Leaving their horses at New London in Connecticut, Washington and his entourage took ship to Newport, Rhode Island, before continuing by water to Boston. With a population of 15,000, the busy port, balanced on its narrow “neck,” was second only to Philadelphia in size and importance.21

  En route, the thriving provincial press took flattering note of Washington’s progress and of his mixed fortunes as a soldier. At his destination, the widely read Boston Gazette praised him as “a gentleman who has deservedly a high reputation for military skill, integrity, and valor; though success has not always attended his undertakings.”22 While such public recognition was surely gratifying, the long-awaited meeting with Shirley brought little satisfaction. Now that the Dagworthy conundrum had been resolved, the governor was surprised that Washington had even bothered to make the arduous trip north. All the same, he provided him with written confirmation that Dagworthy no longer held a royal commission and that Washington was his superior.23 But Shirley was not empowered to upgrade the Virginia Regiment or any of its officers to regular status: Washington—like all other colonial field officers—would remain subservient to any redcoat captain. Even worse, before Washington’s arrival, Shirley had already approved the appointment of Governor Sharpe as commander of all forces raised not only in Maryland, but also in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.24

  Besides a hefty bill in expenses and gambling losses and a half-hearted dalliance with the well-heeled and long-faced heiress Mary Eliza Philipse, which was conducted intermittently as he passed through New York, Washington had little to show for his month’s jaunt. More frustrated than ever, he was once again resolved to resign his commission.

  Back in Virginia, Washington’s mood was not improved by the first signs of what would become a mounting wave of criticism against the conduct of his regiment’s officers. There were clearly some grounds for these gripes. In January, for example, a court of inquiry had found Ensign Leehaynsious De Keyser guilty of behaving in a “scandalous manner such as is unbecoming the character of an officer and a gentleman” after he cheated at cards. During a game of brag at Fort Cumberland, De Keyser had hidden the nine of diamonds under his thigh—“foul play” that was revealed when he rose from his chair and the card flopped to the floor.25

  Washington capitalized on the ensign’s disgrace to send an “Address” from Winchester that was read to the assembled officers of the seven companies at Fort Cumberland by Lieutenant Colonel Stephen. He wrote: “This timely warning of the effects of misbehavior will, I hope, be instrumental in animating the younger officers. . . . Remember, that it is the actions, and not the commission, that make the officer—and that there is more expected from him than the title.” Besides indulging their pleasures, Washington added, his officers would do well to devote leisure time to professional study. Much information could be gleaned from reading military texts—for example, Humphrey Bland’s Treatise of Military Discipline; first published in 1727 and already in its seventh edition by 1753, this was the era’s most popular and influential English-language military manual. A standard primer for the young British Army officer of the mid-eighteenth century, Bland’s book would be quarried by Washington for decades to come.26

  Lieutenant Colonel Stephen believed that a regiment so top-heavy with officers could afford to shed several “without hurting the service.” Resorting to vocabulary from his medical days, he was sure that a “purgation” would be positively beneficial, leaving behind the “men of spirit and honor,” of whom “proper things” might be expected. While acknowledging that some of his officers had “the seeds of idleness very strongly ingrafted in their natures,” Washington assured Dinwiddie of his own efforts, “both by threats and persuasive means . . . to discountenance gaming, drinking, swearing, and irregularities of every other kind.” Regrettably, the problem had been aggravated by “that unhappy difference about the command” at Fort Cumberland, which had kept him from enforcing his orders in person.27

  Given Washington’s decision to walk away from a direct confrontation with Dagworthy, this was lame stuff. Virginia’s speaker, John Robinson, had urged him to silence the critics once and for all by shifting his own headquarters forward to Fort Cumberland, so that he could oversee the situation personally. Determined to ride out the storm, Washington refused to budge. Replying to Robinson, he grew even more prickly and defensive, while again seeking to offload the blame onto the Maryland officer. Indeed, while Washington couldn’t be answerable for the behavior of individuals, his intentions were pure. No one had acted more for Virginia’s interests than he, and if anyone was responsible for the “many gross irregularities” at Fort Cumberland, it was Dagworthy. He assured Robinson: “It will give me the greatest pleasure to resign a command, which I solemnly declare I accepted against my will.”28

  For all this blustering, Washington soon changed his mind. Men of influence were quick to caution against anything as rash as resignation. Colonel Landon Carter sought to cool Washington’s temper by assuring him that such criticism could not have come from anyone who knew him. But this reassurance was double edged: if Washington relinquished his command, Carter added, he and his friends would be hard pressed to justify his conduct. For Washington, as Carter cheerfully continued, surely death was preferable to such dishonor: better to share “Braddock’s bed” than allow anything to tarnish those laurels that still lay in store for him. The final touch was an unsubtle thrust at Washington’s chivalric soft spot. “A whole crowd of females” had tendered their wishes for his success, Carter reported, and were even now praying for his safety. The canny Carter must have known that gallant Washington, so hungry for acclaim, and for the admiration of young women like Sally Fairfax, could never have disappointed them.29

  Besides such direct appeals to his sense of duty and honor, other factors gave Washington reason to reconsider his latest threat to resign. Governor S
harpe, it seemed, had a higher opinion of his abilities than he had imagined: in the event of any intercolonial westward offensive, Sharpe wanted Washington for the plum job of second in command. In addition, active steps were finally being taken to increase Washington’s manpower: Dinwiddie anticipated that the House of Burgesses would vote funds to increase the Virginia Regiment to 2,000 men; if necessary, one in every twenty militiamen from all save five exposed frontier counties would be conscripted. This initially raised the alluring prospect of a powerful regiment of two battalions, each ten companies strong. In fact, it soon became clear that the total “number in pay”—if they could be raised at all, of course—would be just 1,500, with new recruits added to the existing sixteen companies to constitute a single, expanded regiment.30 It was not an ideal solution, but it seemed that at least something was being done to augment Washington’s resources.

  Above all, Washington shelved all thoughts of resignation because of a fresh crisis on the frontier. The French and Indian raiders, who had been quiet over the winter, now resumed their assaults with a vengeance, striking with devastating effect against soldiers and settlers alike. On the evening of April 18, 1756, in a textbook decoy ambush, they inflicted a heavy blow on the garrison of one of the outposts between Winchester and Fort Cumberland, Fort Edwards on the Cacapon River. Three soldiers searching for stray horses had encountered hostiles close to the fort and raised the alarm. A party of about forty to fifty men under Captain John Fenton Mercer promptly sallied out to give chase. But the first Indians were merely bait. When Mercer and his men had been lured a mile and a half from the fort and were breathlessly “rising a mountain,” the trap was sprung. Fired upon “very smartly,” outnumbered two to one and in danger of being totally surrounded, after half an hour of heavy fighting, the surviving Virginians retreated while they still could. More than a third of them failed to get back to the stockade: Captain Mercer—a veteran of Fort Necessity and the brother of Washington’s close friend George—was killed, along with Ensign Thomas Carter and fifteen men; another two came in wounded. It was, in Washington’s words, “a very unlucky affair” and all the more galling because it was impossible to avenge: given the continuing lack of men, a council of war at Winchester reluctantly resolved against marching to the scene.31

  Elsewhere, isolated settlers who refused to abandon their farmsteads fell prey to the raiders. In an episode that underlined Washington’s helplessness and frustration, on April 22, a small war band of six Indians crossed the mountains within five miles of another stockade, Cunningham’s Fort, surprising David Kelly and his family. Kelly was killed and scalped; his wife and six children hustled off as captives. One of Kelly’s teenaged sons escaped and brought tidings of the raid to Winchester. As the Pennsylvania Gazette reported, Colonel Washington immediately sent off a detachment of thirty men. It was a futile gesture: they buried what was left of Kelly and found the raiders’ tracks but could not “get up with them.”32

  The raid underlined the fundamental flaw in the defensive “chain of forts” strategy that Washington was reluctantly obliged to accept: isolated stockades and blockhouses were worthless beyond the limited zones that their paltry garrisons were prepared to patrol and were therefore unable to stop the infiltration of swift-moving Indian war parties. It also highlighted a phenomenon that only exacerbated the sufferings of the settlers. Like those who descended upon the Kellys, Indian raiders often killed potentially troublesome adult males, while sparing women and youngsters seen as more biddable and likely to be assimilated into the tribe. Such widespread adoption of white captives left raw wounds among settler communities: the dead could be decently buried and mourned; captives, whose fate remained uncertain, granted grieving kinfolk no such sense of closure. Unsurprisingly, the practice only intensified “Indian hating” among the beleaguered inhabitants of the “backcountry.”33

  The shock engendered by the upsurge of enemy activity had a major impact upon Washington and was the decisive factor in causing him to shelve his plans of relinquishing a command from which he could never expect to “reap either honor or benefit.” As an emotional letter to Dinwiddie, written on the same day that the Indians descended upon Kelly and his brood, makes clear, he was deeply affected by the sufferings of the inhabitants and felt a personal responsibility for them. He pledged: “The supplicating tears of the women, and moving petitions from the men, melt me into such deadly sorrow, that I solemnly declare . . . I could offer myself a willing sacrifice to the butchering enemy, provided that would contribute to the people’s ease.”34

  In lieu of recruits or Indian allies, the beleaguered Virginia Regiment was bolstered by militia summoned to Winchester from ten Tidewater counties. Some 1,200 militiamen answered the call, yet, from Washington’s perspective, these undisciplined, costly, contrary, and unreliable amateur soldiers were more of a hindrance than a help. Many of them lacked firearms, yet all made inroads into his carefully hoarded stockpiles of supplies.

  The new crisis subsided when the Indian raiders withdrew, but the frontier’s defenders were soon fighting among themselves. Drunkenness and brawling prompted Washington to issue orders on May 1 threatening five hundred lashes, without benefit of court-martial, to “any soldier, who shall presume to quarrel or fight” and one hundred lashes for drunks. The militia faced no such sanctions, with predictable results. A week later, Washington noted, the militia detachment from Prince William County began to demonstrate “superlative insolence” toward his soldiers and officers. After a militiaman was sent to the guardhouse for abusing an officer of the Virginia Regiment, his own officer instigated a rescue bid, swearing that Washington’s officers were all scoundrels, and he could “drive the whole corps before him.” When one of them called his bluff, the militia officer took “fright” and publicly acknowledged his fault the following morning.35

  Washington’s exasperation at the shortcomings of the temporary militia, in particular their inferiority to regularly maintained troops, would only intensify in coming years. In May 1756, however, his complaints drew an increasingly unsympathetic response from Williamsburg. Even Washington’s old patron and friend Colonel William Fairfax cautioned him to stop grumbling about a force that he had himself called upon, and instead seek to emulate those stoic Roman heroes who had happily overcome far greater “fatigues, murmurings, mutinies and defections” than he was ever likely to face.36

  Once the alarm was over, most of the militia was sent home, save for about 500 from frontier counties who were posted to bolster garrisons until the Virginia Regiment could be brought up to strength by the expected drafts. The long-anticipated draft act was finally implemented during May, but the results were disappointing, not least because those selected by lot could avoid service by finding another man to take their place or by immediately paying a £10 fine. In consequence, as Dinwiddie reported, “the draughts in most of the counties paid fines rather than go to Winchester, [and] these fines were given to volunteers that enlisted and received the 10 pounds.” In a pattern that would be repeated in future wars, the burden of Virginian military service fell most heavily on the poor and desperate: those drafts who could not afford to pay the fine—which amounted to a poor man’s annual earnings—and substitutes unable to resist an offer of hard cash. The yield was unimpressive: of the 246 drafts brought into Winchester by June 25, several deserted, three were discharged as unfit for service, and another six were Quakers who refused to serve on religious grounds. In mid-July, the Virginia Regiment mustered just 591 men—not even half of the promised 1,500. As an act of Parliament had been passed to allow the British regulars to recruit indentured servants, provided their masters were compensated for the time they still had to serve, Washington hoped that the Virginia Regiment could do likewise. If so, the regiment could soon be completed, he believed, although Dinwiddie cautioned him “not to enlist any convicts who probably may be fractious, and bad examples to the others.”37

  British units like the bloodied 44th and 48th, and the newly
authorized “Royal American Regiment” had enjoyed considerable success in seeking recruits among the servants of Pennsylvania and Maryland. By attempting to tap into the same pool of manpower, the Virginia Regiment was drawing ever closer to the British regular model. A muster roll for Washington’s own company, listing eighty-six men present during August 1757, shows that only twenty-three—just over a quarter—were natives of Virginia. Of the rest, there were one each from New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Holland, and Germany; but the majority—fifty-six men, or 65 percent of the total—had been born in the British Isles. The percentage of native-born recruits for the regiment as a whole was higher, at 41 percent, but the preponderance of incomers remains striking, particularly compared with the Massachusetts provincials, where more than 80 percent of personnel had been born in that colony.38

  Now that Dagworthy’s pretensions had been curbed, there was nothing to stop Washington from joining the bulk of his regiment at Fort Cumberland and taking command in person. Yet he maintained his headquarters at Winchester. With the Blue Ridge now effectively Virginia’s frontier, Washington argued, that town could become a rallying point for inhabitants who would otherwise flee. Emphasizing Winchester’s suitability as a base for assembling reinforcements and supplies and for reacting against raids, Washington convinced Dinwiddie that a large and strong fort should be built there.39

  When Washington paid another visit to Fort Cumberland in early July, however, his presence was immediately apparent through intensified discipline and training. On July 6, a general court-martial sentenced several deserters to severe floggings of a thousand lashes: they were to “receive as much of their punishment as the surgeon . . . shall judge they are able to bear.” Next evening all the men except the new drafts were to practice the official “exercise,” followed by a stint of unofficial “bush fighting.” The following afternoon, the garrison fired at targets, then formed up into a single battalion to “go through the platoon exercise and evolution.”40