His Excellency: George Washington (6 page)

The raw material from which Washington recruited his regiment was raw indeed. He kept several rosters of the enlisted men, that reveal that most of his recruits were recently arrived immigrants, primarily from England, Ireland, or Scotland, or second-generation carpenters, bricklayers, and tanners from the Pennsylvania or Virginia backcountry. Washington duly recorded their names, age at enlistment, height, trade, place of origin, then a brief physical description: “Dark Complexion & Hair, lame in his right thigh by a wound”; “Fair Complexion, sandy Hair, well made”; “Red face, pitted with the small pox, Red Hair.” Though he maintained a proper social distance from the enlisted men, he knew most of them personally. And though most of them were older than he was, he cultivated the image of a caring but strict father toward his children.
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Discipline was harsh. Those found guilty of drunkenness or lewd behavior sometimes received up to a thousand lashes. Deserters, even those who returned voluntarily, faced death by hanging. A surge in desertions in the summer of 1757 produced a string of public executions. “I have a Gallows near 40 feet high erected,” Washington boasted to a British officer, “and I am determined . . . to hang two or three on it, as an example to others.” He suffered no sleepless nights after endorsing the executions, even when a condemned man made a special plea based on previous bravery in combat. There were clear lines in his mind, and if you crossed them, there was no forgiveness.
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He routinely contrasted the discipline of his own regiment with the undependable militia, whom he described as “those hooping, hallowing, Gentleman-Soldiers!” The ranks of most militia units were actually filled with yeomen farmers a notch above his own troops in the pecking order of Chesapeake society. But their short terms of enlistment and inveterate independence made them virtually worthless, as he saw it, in a war that put a premium on staying power. They were the wind. His Virginia Regiment was the wall. He described one scene in which a thirty-man militia unit refused to assist in the construction of a fort unless paid forty pounds of tobacco for each day of labor, this despite the fact that the fort was designed to protect their own families from annihilation. On another occasion, when reports of a large Canadian and Indian patrol arrived at his headquarters at Winchester, most of the militia assigned to his command declared their enlistments up and simply walked out. Washington resented that his Virginia Regiment was frequently mistaken for a mere militia unit. He did not believe you could trust in the principle of voluntarism, or the spontaneous expression of public virtue, to meet a wartime crisis. This was one youthful conviction that he never saw fit to abandon; indeed, it foreshadowed his low estimate of militia throughout the Revolutionary War.
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His abiding respect for civilian authority, most especially his insistence on strict obedience to the principle of civilian control over the military, eventually became one of his greatest legacies. But when he commanded the Virginia Regiment he violated the principle on several occasions, beginning with the whispering campaign he instigated against Dinwiddie when his requests for higher pay, more troops, and greater discretion in choosing the location of forts were routinely rejected. He opened a separate channel of communication with John Robinson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, blaming Dinwiddie for decisions that left the entire Shenandoah Valley, “the best land in Virginia,” vulnerable to Indian domination.
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Washington understood the open secret of Virginia politics, which was that the governor’s sovereign authority was more theoretical than real, because the legislature had managed to use its constitutional control over money bills as a weapon to limit gubernatorial power. So there were really two power sources to appease, and Washington’s covert communications with Robinson represented his realistic response to the bifurcated character of Virginia politics. For over a year he demonstrated considerable dexterity in negotiating a two-track approach without Dinwiddie’s knowledge.
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By 1757, however, the relationship with Dinwiddie had deteriorated badly, and the official correspondence became loaded with mutual accusations of deceit. Washington charged Dinwiddie with encouraging hostile gossip among the burgesses about his conduct of the war, which was precisely what he was doing to Dinwiddie. In fact, Dinwiddie had resolutely supported Washington in the backrooms of Williamsburg, despite gossipy criticisms from some burgesses that he was submitting inflated estimates of Indian strength in order to promote greater tax levies. Through it all, Washington maintained a posture of absolute probity: “But this know,” he wrote Dinwiddie, “that no man that ever was employed in a public capacity has endeavored to discharge the trust reposed in him with greater honesty, and more zeal for the country’s interest, than I have done.” There was truth in this claim, but not the whole truth, which would have included the behind-the-scenes machinations. Two features of the emerging Washington personality come into focus here: first, a thin-skinned aversion to criticism, especially when the criticism questioned his personal motives, which he insisted were beyond reproach; second, a capacity to play politics effectively while claiming total disinterest in the game.
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There was yet another political game he found himself playing, which operated by a wholly different set of rules and at a higher level in the imperial hierarchy. This was the aristocratic game of deference and patronage that he had played successfully with the Fairfax family and had hoped to play with Braddock. The eventual successor to Braddock as the commander of His Majesty’s forces in North America was John Campbell, the Earl of Loudoun, who turned out to be another ill-fated and short-lived emissary from London, brimming over with that wicked combination of confidence in his abilities and ignorance of his theater of operations. Upon his arrival in 1756, Washington wrote him in the properly deferential style: “We the officers of the Virginia Regiment beg leave to congratulate your Lordship on your safe arrival in America: And to express the deep Sense We have of his Majesty’s Wisdom and paternal Care for his Colonies in Sending your Lordship to their Protection at this critical Juncture.” He concluded his letter with a special plea based on the loyalty to Britain’s goals embodied in the Virginia Regiment, “as it in a more especial Manner entitles Us to Your Lordship’s Patronage.”
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Lord Loudoun represented the privileged and presumptive aristocratic culture that beckoned to Washington as the epitome of influence. In the Virginia Regiment, on the other hand, officers and rangers were promoted on the basis of their performance, and Washington often resisted efforts by Fairfax to have unqualified friends given commissions. But Britain, and to a great extent Virginia as well, still operated within a social matrix where power flowed within bloodlines and where coats-of-arms trumped merit. Loudoun would have been hard-pressed to distinguish the Alleghenies from the Alps, but by a combination of royal whim and family fortune he controlled British policy and therefore the fate of the Virginia Regiment and its commander. Washington’s attempt to solicit his attention and support for a regular commission was almost comical in its fumbling effort to affect the proper deferential style:

Although I have not the Honour to be known to Your Lordship: Yet your Lordship’s Name was familiar to my Ear, on account of the Important Services performed to His Majesty in other parts of the World—don’t think My Lord I am going to flatter. I have exalted Sentiments of your Lordship’s Character, and revere your Rank; yet, mean not this (could I believe it acceptable). My nature is honest, and Free from Guile.
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Loudoun not only ignored the request, but even decided temporarily to disband the Virginia Regiment in order to send several companies to fight in South Carolina. Still determined to make an impression, Washington named one of his forts after Loudoun, which then proved a lingering embarrassment when Loudoun’s failure to mount a successful campaign against Cape Breton caused London to recall and replace him. It seems safe to conclude that Washington understood the rules of the aristocratic game, felt obliged to play by its rules to further his career, but often came off as the provincial American incapable of mastering the deferential vocabulary.

For the truth was that he had come to feel superior to his superiors, just as he had come to regard his Virginia Regiment as perhaps the finest fighting unit in North America. He and his “blues” had learned the hard way how to fight this kind of war and what it would take to win it. Ultimately, the strategic key remained that fountainhead of French power at the forks of the Ohio. But another Braddock-style campaign would surely end up in the same heap of blood and sorrow. Washington believed that he, more than anyone else, knew how to mount a successful campaign against Fort Duquesne, and he expressed only disdain for the various schemes British officers proposed. When he received one such proposal in March 1758, he apprised his purported superior that the plan was “absurd,” and “A Romantick whim that may subsist in Theory, but must fail in practice.” He ended on a sarcastic note, speculating that perhaps the tactical genius who dreamed up the plan “intended to provide them first with Wings, to facilitate their Passage over so Mountainous & extensive a Country; else whence comes this flight?”
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Nevertheless, something big was obviously brewing, something designed to move the Virginia frontier off the back burner of British strategy and make the Ohio Country a major theater of operations once again. In April 1758, Washington learned that General John Forbes, a Scotsman with more than thirty years of experience in the British army, had been given the mission of capturing Fort Duquesne with a force over twice the size Braddock had commanded three years earlier. Washington immediately wrote Thomas Gage, a fellow survivor of the Monongahela massacre, requesting an introduction to Forbes. This time he dispensed with the awkwardly obsequious tone of the Loudoun letter and suggested he was not asking a favor so much as offering one himself:

I mean not, Sir, as one who has favors to ask of him—on the contrary, having entirely laid aside all hopes of preferment in the military line (and being induced at present to serve this campaign from abstract motives, purely laudable), I only wish to be distinguished in some measure from the general run of provincial Officers, as I understand there will be a motley herd of us. This, I flatter myself, can hardly be deemed an unreasonable request, when it is considered, that I have been much longer in the Service than any provincial officer in America.
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Forbes and his extremely capable second in command, Henry Bouquet, welcomed Washington’s advice, in part because they found it compelling, in part because the entire expedition moved beneath the shadow of the Braddock tragedy and needed to avoid his mistakes. First, they agreed to retain a large detachment of Cherokees as scouts, which Washington insisted were “the only Troops fit to Cope with Indians on such Ground.” Second, they adopted the ranger uniforms of enlisted men in the Virginia Regiment instead of the traditional redcoats of the British army. Forbes called it “Indian dress,” adding that “wee must comply and learn the Art of Warr, from Enemy Indians, or anything else who have seen the Country and Warr carried on in it.” In effect, Forbes was acknowledging that the Virginia Regiment was the professional model and the British regulars the rank amateurs in this kind of campaign. Third, Forbes and Bouquet agreed to train their lead units in the forest-fighting tactics Washington had developed. If ambushed, the troops should “in an Instant, be thrown into an Order of Battle in the Woods,” meaning they should advance in two groups to the tree line and flank the enemy on the left and right while the Indian scouts circled to the rear. Finally, the Virginia Regiment would be included in the vanguard, since, as Washington put it, “from long Intimacy, and scouting in these Woods, my Men are as well acquainted with all the Passes and difficulties as any Troops that will be employed.”
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In all respects save one, Washington got his way, but the one exception drove a wedge between him and Forbes that eventually caused him to display his bottled-up contempt for British superiors in a form that verged on gross insubordination. The contentious issue was the proper route to Fort Duquesne. Washington presumed the expedition would follow Braddock’s course across northern Virginia and southern Maryland, then northwest across Pennsylvania to the forks of the Ohio. Braddock’s Road seemed the obvious choice to Washington because it had already been cut. And it was vastly preferable to all Virginians because it linked the prospective bounty of the Ohio Country to the Old Dominion. The clinching argument, as Washington saw it, was that Braddock’s Road followed an old Indian path, so that the people who knew the region better than anyone else had identified it as the preferred route.
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The trouble was that Forbes’s main force was based at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and British engineers had proposed cutting a new road straight across that colony which would be about thirty miles shorter than Braddock’s Road and did not require an initial detour south to the Shenandoah Valley. (It follows much the same course as the modern-day Pennsylvania Turnpike.) Washington proposed a special meeting with Bouquet to protest this decision, which he believed had been unduly influenced by Pennsylvanians eager to make their colony the permanent gateway to the American interior. Bouquet agreed, presuming that, whatever the resolution, Washington would accept it as final. “I See with utmost Satisfaction,” wrote Bouquet, “that you are above all the influences of Prejudices and ready to go heartily where Reason and judgment Shall direct.” Bouquet listened to Washington’s case for Braddock’s Road, describing it as sensible and “deliverd with that openness and candor that becomes a Gentleman and a Soldier.” Four days later, after consulting with Forbes, Bouquet apprised Washington that his advice had been heard and rejected: “I cannot therefore entertain the least doubt that we shall all now go on hand in hand and that some zeal for the service that has hitherto been so distinguishing a part of your character will carry you . . . over the Alligeny Mountains to Fort Du Quesne.”
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