George Washington

by Stephen Brumwell

  By October 23, Washington and his men had covered the fifty miles to Loyalhanna, a post soon renamed Fort Ligonier in honor of the British Army’s commander in chief and Forbes’s patron, Sir John Ligonier. This “sudden” march from Raystown gave Washington the opportunity of assessing the controversial connecting road for himself, and the experience only confirmed his dire predictions: “I can truly say that it is indescribably bad,” he wrote to Governor Fauquier. Indeed, only the providential discovery of an alternative pass over Laurel Hill had enabled the wheeled transport to get through. General Forbes and his escort caught up on November 2. As Washington now recognized, with the bulk of the army pushed forward to Loyalhanna, the campaign’s crisis was fast approaching; on November 5, he conceded to Fauquier that the time for harping upon difficulties was now past.47

  The very next day, however, Washington was casting doubts on the viability of any further advance. That evening, following an interrupted conversation with Bouquet, he sent him his “crude thoughts” on that head. Washington’s letter highlighted the risks involved in moving against Fort Duquesne with no guarantee of adequate supplies and of the potentially disastrous consequences of a clash in the woods. A renewed offensive would consume provisions needed to garrison Loyalhanna, he argued, perhaps leading to the abandonment of that post and its artillery. As for a battle, even if the enemy was routed, recent experience suggested that the Anglo-Americans’ own losses would be “perhaps triple.” If it was certain that the enemy’s defeat would prompt an immediate evacuation of their fort, or if adequate supplies could be stockpiled, then they shouldn’t hesitate to advance—“but one or the other of these we ought to be assured of,” Washington warned.48

  Washington’s bleak analysis articulated the concerns of other senior officers. On Saturday, November 11, Forbes summoned a council of war including Bouquet, St. Clair, and all his colonels. The case against a further advance, which included those reasons already emphasized by Washington, carried the day. The council concluded: “The risks being so obviously greater than the advantages, there is no doubt as to the sole course that prudence dictates.”49

  Forbes’s campaign seemed set to end ignominiously at Loyalhanna after all. But a chance event the next day, November 12, changed everything. Seeking to repeat their success of a month before, the French at the Forks sent a strong party to reconnoiter Forbes’s camp and rustle his livestock. The general countered with a force of 500 men, including Washington and his Virginians. According to a report published soon after in the Pennsylvania Gazette, Washington “fell in with a number of the enemy” about three miles from Loyalhanna, attacked them, and took three prisoners—“an Indian man and woman, and one Johnson, an Englishman (who, it is said, was carried off by the Indians some time ago from Lancaster County).” Hearing the firing, Lieutenant Colonel Mercer went to Washington’s aid. Approaching at dusk, and seeing the two captured Indians, Mercer’s men mistook their fellow Virginians for the enemy; Washington’s made the same mistake, upon which “unhappily a few shot were exchanged.” Recounting this episode some thirty years later, Washington remembered things rather differently, being adamant that he had gone to help Mercer. In Washington’s recollection, the encounter was also far deadlier and more traumatic than the cursory newspaper coverage suggested; indeed, it had placed his life “in as much jeopardy as it had ever been before or since.” The uncontrolled spasm of “friendly fire” was checked only by Washington’s personal intervention. Using his sword to knock up the leveled muskets, he “never was in more imminent danger by being between two fires.” Captain Bullitt, the hero of Grant’s Defeat, later claimed that he stopped the firefight, which had resulted from Colonel Washington’s mistake. Whatever the cause, Washington did not exaggerate the risks: Forbes reported two officers and almost forty men killed or missing.50

  The capture of the renegade Johnson offered compensation. In exchange for his life, he gave vital intelligence, revealing that Fort Duquesne was virtually bereft of Indian support. There were several reasons for this swift erosion of tribal manpower. Glutted with glory and plunder won in their destruction of Major Grant’s command, western warriors from the Great Lakes had promptly left for their distant villages, taking their captives with them; these included young Ensign Gist, who set out with his Wyandot captors on 15 September, loaded with “about fifty pound of plunder . . . got chiefly from the Highlanders”; the party only reached their village near Detroit after trekking and paddling for almost a month.51

  In addition, the Indian conference at Easton, engineered by the dedicated Pemberton and Post and attended by representatives of the Six Nations, the Delawares and Shawnees, had convinced the wavering Ohio tribes that their best interests now lay with the British, not the French. Last, but not least, the capture of Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario by a force detached from Abercromby’s mauled Lake George army in August under Colonel John Bradstreet shut off the supply of Indian trade goods from Canada via the St. Lawrence River; France’s influence among the tribes had always hinged more upon economic reality than sentimental attachment, so such shortfalls in everything from vermilion face paint to gunpowder mattered. Washington’s New York friend Joseph Chew reported this “glorious stroke” while nursing a hangover, “having sat up late last night and finished several bottles to the health of Colonel Bradstreet and his army.”52 Taken together, these three factors stripped Captain Lignery of Indian support. Armed with this intelligence, instead of digging in at Loyalhanna for the winter, Forbes resolved to push on and seize his objective.

  The final advance was made by 2,500 “picked men,” accompanied by just “a light-train of artillery” and unencumbered with baggage or even tents. This select force was divided into three brigades. Washington, who had been forgiven his earlier subterfuge, commanded the 3rd Brigade. It was composed of his own 1st Virginia Regiment, plus artificers, North Carolinians, Marylanders, and “Lower County” troops from Delaware, some 720 in all. Although nominated the 3rd Brigade, Washington’s actually formed the army’s 1st Division. With Bouquet and Colonel Montgomery commanding the other two brigades, Washington was the only provincial officer to be given such heavy responsibility: at long last, he was receiving the kind of recognition that he believed his efforts deserved.53

  As Forbes’s army edged closer to its objective, so the threat of ambush increased. For the final fifty-mile phase of the advance, therefore, it was agreed that fortified camps should be established at far shorter intervals than before, just a few days’ march apart. Some 500 Pennsylvanians were sent on ahead of Washington’s brigade to construct the first secure base; this spearhead force was commanded by Colonel John Armstrong, an experienced frontier fighter renowned for leading a long-distance raid that had torched the Delaware town of Kittanning on the Allegheny River above Fort Duquesne in September 1756.

  Equipped with felling axes, Washington’s brigade was to hack a rough road along the trail that Armstrong’s men had blazed. On November 15, in bone-chilling cold and steady rain, his artificers began to hew their way through the dripping forest. Driving their cattle with them, Washington’s men advanced some six miles before making camp on Chestnut Ridge. Reporting his progress to Forbes, even now Washington couldn’t resist reminding the general of the advantages of the old Braddock Road: it was “in the first place good, and in the next, fresh,” so offering the best communication between the “Middle Colonies” and Fort Duquesne should the army be fortunate enough to take it.54

  Negotiating tough terrain in depressing, wintry weather, the army’s progress was painfully slow. Despite laboring “from light ’til light,” Washington’s exhausted brigade covered only another six miles before it was necessary to halt again. From his temporary camp on November 17, Washington sent Forbes a letter that provides further evidence of his strong paternalism toward the men of his regiment. Sergeant William Grant had been confined at Loyalhanna on a charge of behaving insolently toward two officers of the 2nd Pennsylvania Regiment. The sergeant was tri
ed by a general court-martial, but, as the sentence was not known when the 1st Virginia Regiment marched out, Washington hoped that Forbes would look into the matter “and forward him if it is found consistent . . . as he is a very fine fellow, and as desirous of coming on as I am to have him do so.”55 Given his own attitude toward Pennsylvanians, Washington may have approved of his sergeant’s response when Ensign Edward Biddle and Lieutenant Jacob Kearns interfered while he was arguing with a sutler over a bill for rum, threatening to send him “to the Devil that instant”: Grant had presented his musket at the ensign and then threatened to blow the lieutenant’s brains out. Given the provocation, and as the night was too dark for Grant to identify the pair as officers, he was acquitted.56

  By late morning on November 18, Washington’s men had reached the base already established by Armstrong, known as “New Camp.” While his brigade halted to slaughter bullocks and dress their rations, axmen started work to clear the next stage of the route. Washington moved on, now taking the lead from Armstrong, who stayed behind to hold the camp with his Pennsylvanians. A rapid march covering ten to twelve miles brought Washington to Turtle Creek. There, during November 20, he built a second fortification, “Washington’s Camp.” Besides the men of his own brigade, Washington now commanded elements of the other two, about 1,500 men altogether—his largest field command prior to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.

  While Montgomery’s brigade cut the road connecting the first two camps, Washington’s worked to clear the path to the third and final base. Known as “Bouquet’s Camp” and some ten miles from Fort Duquesne, it would provide the jumping-off point for the assault. By November 23, Forbes and all three of his brigades were assembled there. Now so close to his prize, Forbes had no intention of stumbling into the kind of chance encounter that had wrecked Braddock’s campaign. Next day he gave orders for his army’s final march, employing a formation intended to allow a swift and effective response to attack. Despite claims by historians that this followed the plans recently drawn up by Washington, it clearly owed more to the drills devised and practiced by Bouquet back at Raystown camp; indeed, weeks after receiving Washington’s suggestions, Forbes was still undecided about the best formation to adopt and urged Bouquet to “have something cut and dry” to propose.57

  Rather than marching one behind the other in the single column proposed by Washington, the three brigades were ordered to advance abreast, with each split into four parallel columns, like the prongs of a fork. By shortening their lines of march, these could rapidly deploy into an extensive firing line that the enemy would struggle to overlap. In addition, there were flanking parties of the “best gunmen,” while “Indians and light horse” probed in front and drums beat at the head of each column to avoid confusion; this exact formation is illustrated in a drawing among Forbes’s papers in the National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh. Paper plans were one thing, moving men through the dark and disorienting forest quite another: despite all the elaborate precautions, as one officer reported, when they moved forward, “it was a matter of vast difficulty to keep the narrow columns from intersecting.”58

  In the event, Forbes’s brigades never faced the ultimate test of combat in the woods. Nor were his gunners obliged to bombard Fort Duquesne with shot and shell. Rather than stand their ground, the garrison demolished the fortifications, then withdrew to the north in hopes of returning to fight again when the odds were better. On November 24, as they shivered at Bouquet’s Camp, Forbes’s troops heard the thud of a distant explosion. That evening their Indian scouts reported a great pall of smoke hanging over the Forks; a few hours later they claimed that the French had gone after burning everything; light troops sent to investigate confirmed their reports.59

  When Forbes and his army reached the Forks on the morning of November 25, 1758, they found charred and smoking ruins. It was a dismal scene, made ghastly by the unburied bodies of Major Grant’s men slain more than two months before, which still strewed the ground around for miles about, “so many monuments to French inhumanity.” They were given a decent burial, along with the skulls and bones of Braddock’s soldiers, killed in 1755 and left lying above ground ever since like some backwoods Golgotha.60

  Forbes, who had joined the advance in his horse-borne litter and who was now sicker than ever, renamed the abandoned strongpoint Fort Pitt in honor of the minister who’d sent him there. For all its sense of anticlimax, the conquest marked the end of three years of warfare on the Virginian frontier and was widely recognized as a remarkable achievement. Reporting the destruction of that “terrible fort . . . that nest of pirates which has so long harbored the murderers and destructors of our poor people,” Henri Bouquet had no doubt where the credit lay: “After God the success of this expedition is entirely due to the General,” he wrote. Forbes had engineered the Treaty of Easton, which “knocked the French in the head”; he had secured “all his posts . . . giving nothing to chance”; and, not least, he had refused to yield “to the urging instances for taking Braddock’s Road, which would have been our destruction.” Washington was chief among those who had lobbied for that route, but he too acknowledged Forbes’s achievement. In a letter to Governor Fauquier, he paid tribute to the indefatigable Scot’s “great merit”; many years later he remembered his old commander as “a brave and good officer.”61

  With winter fast closing in, it was resolved to install a garrison at Fort Pitt, including part of Washington’s long-suffering Virginia Regiment under Colonel Hugh Mercer of the Pennsylvanians; like Forbes and so many other soldiers fighting for the Ohio Country, Mercer was a Scot who had begun his career in medicine. Now a loyal subject of King George, he had once been a rebel in the Jacobite army of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Mercer had come to America in the wake of the Young Pretender’s bloody defeat at Culloden in 1746. Ten years later, he had distinguished himself as a captain of Pennsylvanian troops during Colonel Armstrong’s celebrated attack on Kittanning. A former insurgent, in time Hugh Mercer would become one again.62

  Washington himself had no intention of wintering in the wilderness. The eradication of Fort Duquesne had restored peace to Virginia’s frontiers, “which was the principal inducement to his taking arms” in the first place. In addition, the ailments that plagued him during the previous autumn and winter had returned. His health, which “had been declining for many months . . . occasioned by an inveterate disorder in his bowels,” now grew so poor that he decided to resign his command, and this time in earnest.63

  Before riding back to Virginia, Washington’s last regimental duty was to organize clothing and supplies for his men left behind at Fort Pitt. That done, the twenty-six-year-old formally resigned his colonel’s commission. On New Year’s Eve, the officers of the Virginia Regiment implored Washington to reconsider his decision and lead them on for another campaign that would surely bring the entire American war to a victorious conclusion. Their “humble address” testified to Washington’s popularity and to the esprit de corps he had instilled within his regiment. They expressed sadness at the “loss of such an excellent commander, such a sincere friend, and so affable a companion.” If anything, the loss to their “unhappy country” was even greater than their own: when it came to military experience, allied to “patriotism, courage and conduct,” Washington was irreplaceable and uniquely qualified to uphold “the military character of Virginia.”64

  Washington was clearly touched by his officers’ sentiments. On January 10, 1759, he replied that their affectionate and public declaration of approval for his conduct in command of Virginia’s troops was “an honor that will constitute the greatest happiness of my life, and afford in my latest hours the most pleasing reflections.”65

  But Washington did not intend to change his mind. Four days earlier he had married Martha Custis, turning his back on the military career that he’d always craved and had pursued during four hard, frustrating, and sometimes bloody years. Now a family man, Washington traded his dreams of martial distinction for the reality o
f peaceful domesticity as a gentleman planter. Writing from Mount Vernon some months later, he assured his longtime London correspondent, the merchant Richard Washington: “I have quit a military life, and shortly shall be fixed at this place with an agreeable partner.”66

  In 1759, there was nothing to suggest that George Washington’s decision to exchange his sword for a plowshare would not be final.

  5

  Between the Wars

  On his twenty-seventh birthday, February 22, 1759, George Washington assumed his seat in Virginia’s House of Burgesses. Four days later, he stood in the chamber to receive the formal thanks of the House “for his faithful services to His Majesty, and this colony, and for his brave and steady behavior, from the first encroachments and hostilities of the French and their Indians, to his resignation, after the happy reduction of Fort Duquesne.”1

  This public acknowledgment of Washington’s efforts as a soldier over the previous five years must surely have given him considerable satisfaction: while he had failed to secure the British officer’s commission that he craved and had enjoyed precious little opportunity to slake his lust for glory on the battlefield, his hard years of military service had not gone unrecognized.

  In 1759, as his devoted biographer Douglas Southall Freeman maintained, Washington was “Virginia’s most distinguished soldier,” and this immense prestige had a profound impact upon his prospects within the Old Dominion. Indeed, Washington’s soldiering had propelled him from obscure planter augmenting the income from his run-down Rappahannock farm with his earnings as a local surveyor to one of the most respected men in Virginia, consulted by the colony’s leadership. Colonel Washington’s growing renown as defender of Virginia’s frontier had clearly contributed to his decisive victory in the previous summer’s Assembly elections, although the £40 he spent to treat thirsty voters to 160 gallons of beer, rum, wine, punch, and cider no doubt helped.2