George Washington

by David O. Stewart

  By the second week of June, dismayed by the slow advance, Braddock sent some of the equipment back to Fort Cumberland. On June 15, he assigned half the men to push wagons up a difficult slope. So many horses died that the baggage train lagged. Wagons began to carry half loads to each new campsite, then doubled back for the rest.10 The army abandoned routes already built when the horses could not manage them. When wagons and cannons sank into mudholes to their wheel hubs and beyond, a navy unit pulled them out with block and tackle.11

  Braddock’s Road and Forbes’s Road in white; the black line traces the route of Washington’s Virginians to join Forbes in 1758.

  Map by Hal Jespersen

  On the frontier, where no human might be seen for days, Braddock’s army could hardly be concealed from enemy scouts. In addition to using flankers to guard against ambush, Braddock issued standing orders covering the pitching of camp at day’s end. Half the men were to form a defensive circle around the campsite, arms at the ready, while the remainder raised their tents. Then they changed places.12

  But written orders did not magically translate into action. When the column of men and wagons encountered difficult going, it could stretch out for four miles, beyond the shelter of flankers. If the column “had been attacked either in front, center or rear,” Washington fretted, it would be “cut off or totally routed.”13

  Braddock issued no special instructions for repelling an attack, which meant that the soldiers would respond as they had been trained: Assemble in formations several lines deep to concentrate musket fire against an enemy in a similar formation. Braddock and his soldiers would soon learn how those tactics worked against Indians in the forest.

  In the third week of June, the impatient commander adopted a recommendation from Washington to speed the advance by dividing his force.14 Braddock moved ahead with his twelve hundred best troops, carrying only light baggage on packhorses, plus three wagonloads of tools. The lead column still had to halt for two days on June 20 to wait for road gangs to finish a mountainside track and fill in swamps. On June 24, the army used rope-and-tackle to lower gun carriages down a steep hill.

  Though the progress felt glacial, enemy resistance told the British that they were nearing Fort Duquesne. On June 25, Indian raiders shot and scalped three British soldiers who strayed from camp. The same thing happened on July 6, less than twenty miles from the French fort. Scouts reported that the French were low on supplies. The tension built. The fighting would come soon. If Braddock could train his heavy guns on the fort, the odds were heavily in his favor. The British grew eager.15

  With the final test in sight, Washington writhed in an agony of illness. For nine days, he was “seized with violent fevers and pains in my head which continued without intermission.” The doctor warned that if Washington stayed on duty, he would die. Braddock ordered Washington into confinement, and gave the Virginian his Dr. James’s Fever Powder, a favored nostrum.16

  Washington sputtered with frustration to his brother Jack. “Instead of pushing on with vigor, without regarding a little rough road,” he wrote, “they were halting to level every mol[e] hill, and to erect bridges over every brook.” Sick as he was, Washington lusted for battle. Braddock promised to summon him to the column’s front before reaching Fort Duquesne.17

  On the night of July 8, Washington rode into the advance camp, less than ten miles from the French.18 The next day would bring battle.

  * * *

  On that final morning, Washington, weak from sickness, placed cushions on his saddle so he could ride with Braddock. He probably had the bloody flux.19

  The British chose a route that risked ambush at two crossings of the northward-flowing Monongahela. The second crossing was tricky, the far bank looming almost twelve feet over the water. The advance guard had to regrade the slope so horses, wagons, and cannon could lumber up to the forest level above.20

  Once it was across, the army’s mood lightened. The forest was open; evidently Indians had cleared the undergrowth to facilitate hunting. “The ground was extraordinary good when compared to the rest of the country,” one soldier recalled. “The trees were high very open and little or no underwood.” The threat of ambush seemed remote.21

  Captain Adam Stephen, commanding Virginians in the rear, remembered a jaunty attitude. “The British gentlemen were confident they never would be attacked,” he recalled, “until they came before the fort.” Some thought the French would demolish the fort rather than yield it. “There never was an army in the world in more spirits than we were,” a survivor wrote. That ebullience, according to Stephen, “lull[ed] them into a fatal security.”22

  Thomas Gage commanded the advance guard. Then came an independent company guarding a working party. Two light cannon and their crews were next, then tool wagons and five hundred regulars plus thirty cavalry. Two hundred men flanked either side, alert for ambush. Washerwomen, cattle, packhorses, and wagons came last, with Virginia units. Braddock and Washington rode with the main body.23

  Six weeks earlier, the high hopes of the British officers would have been rewarded. Then the French were too few to resist a British assault. But reinforcements had swelled the fort’s defenders to six hundred, plus several hundred Indians. They decided to attack before British cannons could knock down the fort’s walls. A French attack might fail, but it would delay the advance, creating time for the British to make a mistake and also allowing France’s Indian allies to win booty and prisoners.24 Hoping to surprise the British, Captain Daniel Liénard de Beaujeu led more than eight hundred fighters out of Fort Duquesne: About three-quarters were Indians from at least six different tribes.25

  The two forces collided in the woods. After scattered musket fire, Gage’s advance guard snapped into formation and loosed a withering volley. The two forward cannons fired. The French force wavered. Captain de Beaujeu fell dead. The battle might be decided in the next minutes.

  With heart-stopping whoops, the Indians filtered through the woods on both sides of the British column, sheltering behind trees, downed logs, and in swales. They began to shoot. Their most effective weapon may have been their screams, which a Frenchman said “echoed through the forest, struck terror into the hearts of the entire enemy.” A British officer agreed. “The yell of the Indians is fresh on my ear,” he wrote, “and the terrific sound will haunt me till the hour of my dissolution.” As Braddock’s aide, Washington on horseback carried the commander’s orders back and forth along the British column, constantly exposed to enemy bullets.26

  The crucial British mistake came early. At the sound of shooting, the middle and rear of the column rushed forward. The advance guard pulled back. The flankers hurried in to support the main body. But the passage was only twelve feet wide, too narrow for hundreds of soldiers crowding into an area perhaps 150 yards long. In “irretrievable disorder,” in Washington’s words, the British crashed together.27

  The redcoats stood between twelve and thirty ranks deep. As one officer remembered, “he thought himself securest who was in the center.” But there was no safety. The concealed enemy fired into the huddle. Aiming was unnecessary.28 Gunfire and savage shrieks mingled with the moans and cries of wounded and dying men, the smell of powder, the sight of spattering blood and oozing gore. Indians scalped those who fell.

  Facing fire from elevated positions, according to Braddock’s senior aide, “the men could never be persuaded to form regularly . . . no order could ever be restored.” Washington agreed. As the British dropped, “a general panic took place among the troops from which no exertions of the officers could recover them.” Another officer wrote that the men became “stupid and insensible and would not obey their officers.”29

  The mob of British soldiers mounted no serious challenge. If one shot at an attacker, a British officer recalled, the others fired in that direction “though they saw nothing but trees.” The French and Indians “kept on their bellies in the bushes, and be
hind the trees.” Survivors swore they never saw more than four of the enemy at a time. Captain Stephen scorned the British, who “were thunderstruck to feel the effects of a heavy fire, [but] see no enemy. They threw away their fire in the most indiscreet manner.” The enemy shot the crews of the two cannons at the front. The other cannons never fired.30

  The attackers concentrated on officers. In one regiment, twenty of twenty-five officers were killed or wounded. Lacking leaders, a survivor wrote, British soldiers “were seized with so strong a panic, that nothing could recover them.” Another remembered that after “the greatest part of the officers were either killed or wounded . . . the soldiers [were] deaf to the commands of those few that were left alive.”31

  Withering fire came from a slope on the British right. Braddock called for an assault there, but the effort sputtered. Washington, who commanded no troops, led a second assault. Other Virginians attempted a third. All failed. When British troops on the slope huddled behind trees, their countrymen mistook them for the enemy and shot them down. British survivors agreed that their soldiers often shot one another. Washington estimated that two-thirds of the British losses came from “friendly fire.” Another reported after the battle: “It’s the general opinion more were killed by our own troops than by the enemy.”32

  A British doctor confirmed those impressions. The attackers’ guns fired smaller bullets than the British used. The bullets extracted from the British were mostly of the larger caliber, and “were chiefly on the back parts of the body.” The physician concluded that “many more of our men were killed by their own part than by the enemy.”33

  On a day of failure, the Virginians in Adam Stephen’s company performed well. Like the attackers, they fought from cover. Stephen reported that half of the twelve Virginia officers were killed. Washington, who saw the entire fight as he galloped to and fro, took pride in the Virginians’ performance, writing that they “showed a good deal of bravery, and were near all killed; for I believe out of 3 companies that were there, there is scarce 30 Men left alive.” Even an Englishman said of the Virginians, “I believe they did the most execution of any” on the British side.34

  On that day of slaughter, perhaps the most remarkable feature was how long the British held out. They fought for an hour, ignoring their officers, gradually giving ground. Then they fought for another hour, terrified, killing more of themselves than the enemy. They gave more ground, but they did not run. They were in a peculiar form of panic: frantic enough to fight stupidly, yet not frightened enough to flee.

  Braddock’s column finally crumbled when the battle reached, or even passed, its third hour. Ammunition was low. Most officers were dead or out of action. The soldiers feared being surrounded. The chaos and butchery had stretched on and on. One soldier thought the British perseverance grew from the Indians’ reputation for savagery. “If it was not for their [the Indians’] barbarous usage [with] which we knew they would treat us, we should never have fought them as long as we did, but having only death before us made the men fight almost longer than they was able.”35 The battle’s length also reflected how inaccurate the attackers’ muskets were.36

  A retreat began in earnest when Braddock fell. Whatever the general’s failings, survivors credited him with bravery, though not the wisdom to break off the one-sided fight.37 Conspicuous throughout, shouting orders that few followed, Braddock had four horses shot out from under him before he took a ball in the side. With the ball lodged in his chest and the day lost, he ordered a retreat. Fittingly, the retreat was a bungle.

  Wagoners unhitched their horses and trotted away, stranding many wounded. Survivors “left the field and crossed the river with great precipitation, abandoning the artillery, ammunition, provision, and baggage to the enemy . . . many of them threw away their arms.” Speed seemed essential with Indians pursuing, “butchering as they came.” Some “tomahawk[ed] some of our women and wounded people.”38 On the far riverbank, British officers attempted to organize the withdrawal. They failed. The men fled through the forest for forty miles to Colonel Thomas Dunbar’s baggage train.39

  With the senior officers killed or wounded, Washington loaded Braddock on a cart, assembled a guard, and crossed the river. At that point, Braddock ordered the Virginian to ride to Dunbar with orders to cover the retreat.40

  Though he had been confined to a sickbed for ten days, Washington rode all night through a landscape of terrors worthy of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. He later recalled:

  shocking scenes which presented themselves in this Night’s march . . . The dead—the dying—the groans—lamentation—and cries along the road of the wounded for help . . . were enough to pierce a heart of adamant. The gloom & horror . . . was not a little increased by the impervious darkness occasioned by the close shade of thick woods.

  On the battlefield, a Frenchman saw “the bodies of slain men in great numbers . . . mingled with the bodies of dead horses along a road for more than half a league.”41

  * * *

  The blaming started quickly. Washington denounced the British soldiers, writing that they “behaved with more cowardice than it is possible to conceive.” He railed against “the dastardly behavior of thos[e] they call regulars,” which “exposed all others that were inclined to do their duty to almost certain death; and at last, in despite of all the efforts of the officers to the contrary, they broke, and run as sheep pursued by dogs.”42

  Press accounts echoed the theme, carrying the statement by Braddock’s chief aide that the “officers were absolutely sacrificed by their unparalleled good behavior.” British accounts added the snide reminder that ten years before, the two regiments at the Monongahela “ran away so shamefully at Preston[p]ans.”43

  Washington defended Braddock, loyal to a general who had been generous toward him. Others did not. One survivor suggested that the soldiers’ misconduct was “exaggerated, in order to palliate the blunders made by those in the direction.” The British had mounted no effective counterattack, having not trained their soldiers to fight in the forest. As Adam Stephen observed, “His Excellency found to his woeful experience, what had been frequently told him, that formal attacks and platoon firing would never answer against the savages and Canadians.” At the very least, the officers let their guard down after crossing the Monongahela, were surprised by an unsurprising attack, were flanked, then crushed.44

  There were other blunders. When Braddock alienated the tribes, he denied himself the most effective forest fighters. By bringing too much equipment and insisting on a single supply line, he slowed the advance and allowed French reinforcements to arrive.

  Though never blaming Braddock for the loss, thirty years later Washington provided a clear-eyed judgment of his former chief.

  He was brave even to a fault. . . . His attachments were warm, his enmities were strong, and having no disguise about him, both appeared in full force. He was generous and disinterested, but plain and blunt in his manner even to rudeness.

  One trait Washington omitted was arrogance. On this point, the judgment of another American resonates: The British “were too confident of their own strength, and despised their enemy.”45

  The lesson was clear to Virginians. In Washington’s convoluted words: “The folly and consequence of opposing compact bodies to the sparse manner of Indian fighting in the woods . . . was now so clearly verified that from hence forward another mode obtained.” Stephen made the point more pungently: “It ought to be laid down as a maxim to attack them first, to fight them in their own way, and go against them light and naked, as they come against us.” He added, “You might as well send a cow in pursuit of a hare, as an English soldier loaded in their way, with a coat, jacket, etc., after Canadians in their shirts, who can shoot and run well, or naked Indians accustomed to the woods.” The years would test how much the British learned.46

  Governor Dinwiddie was incredulous at the outcome, writing to his London masters tha
t the defeat “appears to me as a dream.” Washington, usually a realist, also struggled to accept the dimensions of the defeat:

  Contrary to all expectation and human probability, and even to the common course of things, we were totally defeated . . . had I not been witness to the fact, on that fatal day, I should scarce have given credit to it even now.47

  Colonel Dunbar decided to march the broken remains of the army to Philadelphia to enter “winter quarters” in July. His soldiers had no fight in them. As an officer wrote, “Our affairs are as bad here as bad can make them.” Most of the continent either sniggered or fumed at the spectacle of nearly 2,000 British soldiers skulking into winter quarters in midsummer.48

  Washington wrote to Governor Dinwiddie for the first time in months. He described the battle bitterly, insisting that two-thirds of the casualties were caused by “our own cowardly regulars, who gathered themselves into a body contrary to orders 10 or 12 deep, and would then level, fire, and shoot down the men before them.” Dunbar’s withdrawal, he added, would leave the frontier naked but for “the shattered remains of the Virginia troops.” He predicted that frontier families would flee eastward.49

  His letter carried two messages. The explicit message was that Virginia must protect its frontier. Implicit was Washington’s wish to patch things up with the governor.

  Dinwiddie angrily implored Dunbar to use the next four months of warm weather “to retrieve the dishonor done to the British arms” against an enemy who was short on supplies and men. Dinwiddie made those points to Washington; then, notably, he asked for Washington’s opinion.50 With Braddock’s failure, the two men were reaching to each other to revive the war effort.