Washington extolled the bravery of the officers and of his Virginian troops, who “behav’d like Men, and died like Soldiers,” breaking for the trees and fighting the Indians with their own style of warfare. The behavior of the redcoats, on the other hand, was “dastardly”; they “were immediately struck with such a deadly Panick, that nothing but confusion and disobedience of order’s prevail’d amongst them.” Ignoring the officers’ efforts to stop them, they “broke and run like Sheep before the Hounds,” throwing aside equipment and abandoning wounded comrades to the enemy. The officers had no more chance of rallying them than “if we had attempted to have stopd the wild Bears of the Mountains.”40 Everyone agreed the officers conducted themselves well, but not all officers agreed that the rank and file deserved all the blame: “I Can’t help thinking their misbehavior is exaggerated,” wrote one, “in order to palliate the Blunders made by those in the direction, as they make no allowance for regular Troops being surprised, as was manifestly the Case here, and no manner of disposition made—but one of Certain destruction.”41 Quartermaster John St. Clair, not known for generosity to his fellow man, likewise came to the defense of the British troops, observing that “something besides Cowardice must be Attributed to a Body of men” who suffered 50 percent casualties before they retreated.42
In fact, the British stood their ground for almost three hours before their lines crumpled and broke. Among the first to run were wagon drivers at the rear of the column who unhitched their teams and rode for safety, among them Daniel Boone and Daniel Morgan, who took a bullet in the mouth.43 In the rout that ensued, Indian warriors butchered soldiers and civilians running for their lives and scrambling back across the Monongahela. The disintegrating army abandoned weapons, wagons, supplies, and horses. According to tribal tradition, Potawatomis and Hurons (Wyandots) acquired their first horses at Braddock’s defeat.44
Years later Washington claimed that “before it was too late” he had offered in vain to lead the provincials and fight the enemy “in their own way.” He presumably wanted to absolve himself of any responsibility for the disaster and demonstrate his early mastery of American-style warfare, but neither his own letters immediately after the battle nor other contemporary sources corroborate his statement. Just which of his previous experiences fighting in Indian country would have given him the confidence to make such an offer is not clear.45
He did, however, perform heroic service in defeat. He escorted the mortally wounded Braddock from the field with the straggling remnants of the army. At Braddock’s order, he rode back through thick woods and darkness to tell Colonel Dunbar to hurry forward with food and medical supplies. “The shocking Scenes which presented themselves in this Night’s March” haunted Washington for years. “The dead—the dying—the groans—lamentations—and crys along the Road of the wounded for help,” he recalled, “were enough to pierce a heart.”46 Braddock breathed his last at Great Meadows. Washington and other surviving officers buried him in the road, and the troops marched over the grave to conceal it from the Indians. Washington remained loyal to his dead commander: Braddock lacked tact and was “blunt in his manner even to rudeness,” he wrote, but he was “brave even to a fault and in regular Service would have done honor to his profession.”47
Others were not so forgiving. When Robert Hunter Morris sent General Shirley reports of the defeat—and of the death of Shirley’s son—he pinned the blame on the commanders who had been overconfident, lacked caution, “and held in too great Contempt the Indian Manner of Fighting.” They had let themselves fall into an ambush where they were exposed to the enemy’s fire from all sides and, unable to see them, “could only fire at their Smoak.” Keeping the soldiers in ranks and firing in platoons gave every advantage to enemies concealed behind logs and trees, and the resulting confusion made the slaughter more terrible. In such a situation, the soldiers’ panic was “not so much to be wondered at.” It was, said Morris, “the most shameful blow that ever English troops received.”48
Colonel Dunbar marched what was left of his army to winter quarters near Philadelphia in the middle of summer. His retreat left the road to the Ohio open to enemy invasion and left backcountry settlers in “imminent Peril of being inhumanely Butchered by our Savage neighbours.” It also left Dinwiddie fuming in letter after letter.49 Dunbar and his officers wrote General Shirley explaining why they felt it was impossible for them to mount an expedition against Fort Duquesne. In addition to lack of artillery, the lateness of the season, and the condition of the troops, they now had no Indian allies, and “nor do we hear of any Measures having been taken to get any.”50
The Indian allies were not completely lost—yet. Scarouady and several others who had fought with Braddock were meeting with Deputy Governor Morris and members of the Provincial Council in Philadelphia even as Dunbar wrote his letter to Shirley. Braddock’s pride and arrogance caused most of the Indians to leave him before the battle, Scarouady explained: “he looked upon us as dogs; would never hear anything that was said to him,” and refused to heed their warnings. Even so, Scarouady offered to gather Indian allies to assist the English in another expedition. “One word of Yours will bring the Delawares to join You,” he said; “if you will but Exert Yourselves we can beat and humble the French.” He gave them a wampum belt “to admonish You to exert yourselves.” Instead, Morris and the council thanked the Delawares for their assurances of friendship and asked them to wait until the Six Nations reached a decision. Conscious of the growing power of the French and their Indian allies following Braddock’s defeat, the Delawares were in no mood and no position to wait and see what Onondaga would do. Returning from Philadelphia with no prospect of timely support, Shingas, Captain Jacobs, and other chiefs “agreed To Come out with the French and their Indians in Parties To Destroy the English Settlements.”51 Sent by Morris to gain information at the Indian towns on the Susquehanna in November 1755, Silver Heels returned with dire news: the French had persuaded the Delawares and Shawnees on the Ohio to strike the English, and had put the hatchet into the hands of the Susquehanna Indians, “a great many of whom had taken it greedily” and were preparing to go to war against the people of Pennsylvania.52 By then Shingas and a war party of 150 warriors had already crossed the mountains and were raiding settlements in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Since the British had refused to put the hatchet into the Delawares’ hands to let them defend their homeland against the French and their Indian allies, the Delawares now took up the hatchet themselves to defend their homeland against the English. No longer willing to act as “women” or Iroquois subordinates, they ritually threw off the military restraints imposed on them by the Iroquois, abandoned their traditional practice of diplomacy, and turned to violence to achieve their goals. For Delawares, the so-called French and Indian War was a war of independence.53
washington complained in 1755 that his services in the Ohio country over the previous two years had been at considerable personal expense and had gained him nothing.54 Nevertheless, he emerged from the slaughter on the Monongahela not only unscathed but with his reputation considerably enhanced. His military experiences in Indian country amounted to one debacle and two disastrous defeats, the Jumonville affair followed by Fort Necessity and the rout at the Monongahela, but reports of his remarkable escapes from death in the battle, his undoubted courage, and his resilience in the face of defeat elevated Washington to hero status. Virginians were hungry for a hero amid so many setbacks, while in Pennsylvania, Christopher Gist wrote him, people talked of Washington more than any other officer in the army and would be willing to serve under his command as irregulars, “for all their Talk is of fighting in the Indian way.”55 Washington made it known that he wanted to command Virginia’s next campaign, and lobbied influential contacts. When the House of Burgesses voted to raise twelve hundred men organized in sixteen companies and offered him the command, he protested that he lacked the experience and could not accept; he accepted when the Assembly improved the terms of the offer. In
August 1755 Washington was appointed colonel of the Virginia Regiment and commander in chief of all Virginia’s forces with a salary of thirty shillings a day, an expense account of £100 per year, and 2 percent commission on all official purchases he made. He immediately designed a uniform for himself and his officers (blue coat, with scarlet cuffs and facings, blue breeches, and a silver-laced hat).56 Knowing his mother’s feelings on the subject, Washington wrote her: “If it is in my power to avoid going to the Ohio again, I shall, but if the Command is press’d upon me by the genl voice of the Country, and offed upon such terms as can’t be objected against, it woud reflect dishonor upon me to refuse it.”57 In another age, he might have been called “the Comeback Kid.”
Washington made his headquarters and center of operations for organizing the defense of the Shenandoah Valley at Winchester, a town of some sixty log cabins close to passes through the Blue Ridge Mountains and a major stopping point for Iroquois and Cherokees traveling the Warriors’ Path.58 He appointed Adam Stephen, his companion from the Fort Necessity and Fort Duquesne campaigns, lieutenant colonel in command of the Virginia Regiment at Fort Cumberland, to block a pass that led to Virginia; made George Mercer his aide-de-camp; appointed Peter Hoag captain of the Virginia Regiment; and promoted his cousin Andrew Lewis to major, in command of the new companies of recruits as they arrived at Winchester.59 The officers were to raise the enlisted men for the new regiment. Washington wanted another campaign against Fort Duquesne, but it was all he could do to cobble together a defense of Virginia’s 350-mile western frontier.
By the 1750s Virginians had pushed across the Potomac watershed and into the Alleghenies. Their settlements were dispersed farms in valleys, exposed, and difficult to defend.60 Pennsylvania, with a pacifist Quaker assembly, had no militia force to defend its frontier settlers. Maryland pulled its defenses back to Fort Frederick, a mere forty-five miles from Baltimore. The Virginia Assembly ordered construction of a line of forts as a defensive cordon on the colony’s western frontier. Eventually a chain of small forts, some of them no more than “log pens” or garrison houses, stretched at roughly twenty-mile intervals across almost four hundred miles of mountainous terrain stretching from the Potomac through the Alleghany Mountains to the borders of North Carolina. Mobile woodland warriors, who had little to fear from colonial soldiers cooped up in blockhouses, skirted around them with ease, but the forts did provide refuge for frontier families.61 Stephen lacked the men and resources to defend backcountry settlers against Indian attacks and atrocities: conditions at Fort Cumberland, he told Washington, were deplorable.62 Washington, meanwhile, “made himself very comfortable in Winchester,” where he rented a house, “entertained in style,” and kept an eye on his business affairs.63
Indian raids were a central part of the French war effort. Governor Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial of New France appreciated the need to treat Indian allies as equals, keep them well supplied, and shape his tactics to suit their ways of fighting, lessons Washington and the British had still to learn. Undersupplied and vastly outnumbered by the British—about twenty to one—the French kept the bulk of their regular military forces on the New York frontier and the St. Lawrence to protect Canada from invasion. At the same time, they encouraged and equipped their Indian allies waging guerrilla warfare on the western frontiers of the British colonies in an effort to divert British energies and resources from the North and demoralize the backcountry inhabitants to the point they would seek peace. “Nothing is more calculated to disgust the people of those Colonies and to make them desire the return of peace,” Vaudreuil told Versailles. François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery, the French commander in the Ohio country after 1756, was a veteran of France’s wars against the Mesquakie (Fox) and Chickasaw in the 1730s and had fought at Braddock’s defeat. He made Fort Duquesne the base for Indian raids against Virginia and Pennsylvania. Indian raiders targeted vulnerable groups and employed terror tactics and psychological warfare. Scalping, torture, and mutilations generated fear, destroyed morale, and spread panic that rolled back the frontier. “You cannot conceive what a vast Tract of Country has been depopulated by these merciless Savages,” Pennsylvania’s deputy governor wrote in November 1755. Raids that devastated one region often propelled settlers to abandon a neighboring area; Indians would then raid farther east, target another region, and generate another round of flights. People who did not flee “forted up” in makeshift stockades. With their economies and populations disrupted by war, Indian raiders carried home much-needed plunder, as well as captives who might be adopted to take the place of deceased relatives. Shingas led raids that penetrated as far as the south branch of the Potomac and into Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. The man Washington had thought fearful of the French two years before now earned the sobriquet “Shingas the Terrible.”64
For more than three years following Braddock’s defeat, raiding parties from the Ohio ravaged the backcountry of Virginia and Pennsylvania. Delawares and Shawnees made common cause with the French, along with Wyandots, Miamis, Ottawas, Ojibwas, Potawatomis, and other Great Lakes allies of the French, some of whom had made their homes in the Ohio country. But the Indians did not wage a united war. Different tribes, and even groups within tribes, fought their own parallel wars. Delawares and Shawnees fought for Delaware and Shawnee reasons, not for those of their French or Indian allies. Not all Delawares and Shawnees went to war. Delaware converts in Moravian mission villages took no part, Delawares on the Susquehanna fought for different purposes than Delawares in the Ohio country, and one group of Shawnees, under Paxinosa or Bucksinosa, remained friendly to the English. Other Shawnees, rather than serving as French auxiliaries or giving vent to general anger against English encroachment, as the French realized but the British did not, went to war in large part because they were outraged at the imprisonment in South Carolina by the English of six of their warriors, one of whom died in captivity.65
Yet there were common grievances. Delawares in the Wyoming Valley cited years of trade abuse, land theft, and unpunished murders that cried for revenge; the English “used us like Dogs,” they said, and “would make Slaves of us” if they let things go on as they had. Teedyuscung, an eastern Delaware with a reputation for hard drinking and big talking, said the French and English were both trying to “coop us up, as if in a Pen,” but the English need only look into their hearts to understand why the Indians struck them harder than the French.66 “Why can’t you get sober and once think impartially?” an Ohio chief named Ackawonothio later asked the English; it was no wonder the Indians joined the French. They were doing what any people would—defending their lives, their women and children, their land and their freedom. God had made Indian country for the Indians, not for white people, but Pennsylvanians kept encroaching (and “where one of those People settled, like Pidgeons, a thousand more would settle”), and “a Company of Wicked Men in Virginia” had tried to build a fort, no doubt intending to take over the land and make slaves of the Indians. The tribes had no love for the French but fought with them to hold back the English, who were as numerous “as Musketoes and Nitts in the Woods.”67 The consistent goal of the Indians in the Ohio country was to keep their country free of European settlement. Any peace must include a guarantee of their territorial autonomy.68
The Six Nations’ consistent goal was to limit their involvement in the conflict and minimize the war’s impact on their league and their communities.69 Iroquois efforts to restrain the Delawares and Shawnees fell on deaf ears, however. Scarouady offered the Wyoming Valley Delawares a wampum belt to dissuade them from going to war against the English, but they refused even to accept it, pushing it aside with a stick “in a contemptuous Manner,” and “gave him ill Language.” Mohawks sent messengers charging the Delaware warriors “to get sober, as we look upon their Actions as the Actions of drunken Men.” But the Delawares and Shawnees refused to be governed any longer by people who had sold their lands from under them at the Albany Congress, and by going to war t
hemselves showed they were no longer “women” under Iroquois control: “We are Men, and are determined to cut off all the English,” Delawares declared; “so say no more to us on that Head, lest we cut off your private Parts, and make Women of you, as you have done of us.”70
To the people who suffered them, and the colonial governments and troops that struggled to contain them, Indian raids seemed like unpredictable outbreaks of savagery and a wave of mindless violence. Pennsylvanians who formerly lived alongside and traded with Delawares now demonized them as the war severed decades of face-to-face interaction, cautious coexistence, and human ties. Indian warriors often attacked places from which they had been displaced, targeted communities on disputed land, and settled old scores with people they knew. The Delawares, according to one British account, “did us the greatest Mischief” because they knew the location of almost every settlement on the frontier and acted as guides for the French Indians. Shawnee raiders killed Colonel James Patton of the Augusta County militia. Patton had been one of the commissioners at the Logstown Treaty in 1752 and was now a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses with extensive landholdings. Sometimes Indian raiders addressed their victims in English or German; sometimes captives recognized their captors.71 Shingas the Terrible spared the life of Charles Stuart and adopted him into his family because Stuart had shown Delaware people generosity and hospitality before the war.72
Stuart was one of hundreds of people taken captive. For all the horrors of Indian warfare, Indians were far more likely than British or colonial soldiers to spare the lives of their enemies. They traditionally took captives in war. Iroquois and Shawnees returning along the Warriors’ Path often brought captives from raids in Cherokee or Catawba country. In this war, Shawnees and Delawares captured hundreds of people, mainly women and children. Levels of violence varied according to time and circumstance, and Indians were much more likely to kill soldiers and militiamen, but in five years of attacks on settlers, they captured more (perhaps as many as 822) than they killed (765). Indians, by comparison, were seven times more likely to be killed than captured. Shawnees, who spearheaded the attacks on Virginia and earned a reputation for ferocity, took three times as many people captive as they killed in the years 1745–64. They added at least 327 captives and converts to their communities, and although most were eventually returned, more than a hundred may have remained and lived out their lives with the Shawnees. Mary Jemison, for one, was captured as a teenager by Shawnees in western Pennsylvania in 1758 and adopted by two Seneca women in place of a brother killed in the war. She married, raised a family, and lived the rest of her life as a Seneca.73
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