Montcalm and Wolfe: The Riveting Story of the Heroes of the French & Indian War (18 page)

Washington reports that twelve of the Virginians were killed on the spot, and forty-three wounded, while of the casualties in Mackay’s company no returns appear. Villiers reports his own loss at only twenty in all.
³
The numbers engaged are uncertain. The six companies of the Virginia regiment counted three hundred and five men and officers, and Mackay’s company one hundred; but many were on the sick list, and some had deserted. About three hundred and fifty may have taken part in the fight. On the side of the French, Villiers says that the detachment as originally formed consisted of five hundred white men. These were increased after his arrival at Fort Duquesne, and one of the party reports that seven hundred marched on the expedition.
¹
The number of Indians joining them is not given; but as nine tribes and communities contributed to it, and as two barrels of wine were required to give the warriors a parting feast, it must have been considerable. White men and red, it seems clear that the French force was more than twice that of the English, while they were better posted and better sheltered, keeping all day under cover, and never showing themselves on the open meadow. There were no Indians with Washington. Even the Half-King held aloof; though, being of a caustic turn, he did not spare his comments on the fight, telling Conrad Weiser, the provincial interpreter, that the French behaved like cowards, and the English like fools.
²

In the early morning the fort was abandoned and the retreat began. The Indians had killed all the horses and cattle, and Washington’s men were so burdened with the sick and wounded, whom they were obliged to carry on their backs, that most of the baggage was perforce left behind. Even then they could march but a few miles, and then encamped to wait for wagons. The Indians increased the confusion by plundering, and threatening an attack. They knocked to pieces the medicine-chest, thus causing great distress to the wounded, two of whom they murdered and scalped. For a time there was danger of panic; but order was restored, and the wretched march began along the forest road that led over the Alleghanies, fifty-two miles to the station at Wills Creek. Whatever may have been the feelings of Washington, he has left no record of them. His immense fortitude was doomed to severer trials in the future; yet perhaps this miserable morning was the darkest of his life. He was deeply moved by sights of suffering; and all around him were wounded men borne along in torture, and weary men staggering under the living load. His pride was humbled, and his young ambition seemed blasted in the bud. It was the fourth of July. He could not foresee that he was to make that day forever glorious to a new-born nation hailing him as its father.

The defeat at Fort Necessity was doubly disastrous to the English, since it was a new step and a long one towards the ruin of their interest with the Indians; and when, in the next year, the smouldering war broke into flame, nearly all the western tribes drew their scalping-knives for France.

Villiers went back exultant to Fort Duquesne, burning on his way the buildings of Gist’s settlement and the storehouse at Redstone Creek. Not an English flag now waved beyond the Alleghanies.
¹

1
Pouchot,
Mémoires sur la dernière Guerre de l’Amérique Septentrionale,
I. 8.

2
Duquesne au Ministre,
2
Nov
. 1753; compare
Mémoire pour Michel-Jean Hugues Péan
.

1
Duquesne à Marin,
27
Août,
1753.

2
Mémoire ou Journal sommaire du Voyage de Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre
.

3
Rapports de Conseils avec les Sauvages à Montreal, Juillet,
1753.
Duquesne au Ministre,
31
Oct
. 1753. Letter of Dr. Shuckburgh in
N.Y. Col. Docs
., VI. 806.

4
Duquesne au Ministre,
29
Nov
. 1753. On this expedition, compare the letter of Duquesne in
N.Y. Col. Docs
., X. 255, and the deposition of Stephen Coffen,
Ibid
., VI. 835.

1
Journal of Major Washington. Journal of Mr. Christopher Gist.

2
Marin had sent sixty men in August to seize the house, which belonged to the trader Fraser.
Dépêches de Duquesne
. They carried off two men whom they found here. Letter of Fraser in
Colonial Records of Pa
., V. 659.

1
Journal of Washington,
as printed at Williamsburg, just after his return.

2
“La Distinction qui convient à votre Dignitté à sa Qualité et à son grand Mérite.” Copy of original letter sent by Dinwiddie to Governor Hamilton.

1
Journal of Mr. Christopher Gist,
in
Mass. Hist. Coll.,
3
rd Series,
V.

2
Instructions to Our Trusty and Well-beloved Robert Dinwiddie, Esq.,
28
Aug.
1753.

3
Address of Lieutenant-Governor Dinwiddie to the Council and Burgesses,
1
Nov
. 1753.

1
Dinwiddie Papers
.

2
Ibid. Instructions to Major George Washington, January,
1754.

3
Speech of Lieutenant-Governor Dinwiddie to the Council and Burgesses,
14
Feb
., 1754.

4
See the bill in Hening,
Statutes of Virginia,
VI. 417.

1
Dinwiddie to Hanbury,
12
March,
1754;
Ibid
., 10
May,
1754.

1
See the summons in
Précis des Faits,
101.

2
Dinwiddie to Hanbury,
10
May,
1754.

1
Journal of Washington
in
Précis des Faits,
109. This Journal, which is entirely distinct from that before cited, was found by the French among the baggage left on the field after the defeat of Braddock in 1755, and a translation of it was printed by them as above. The original has disappeared.

2
The summons and the instructions to Jumonville are in
Précis des Faits
.

3
Pouchot,
Mémoire sur la dernière Guerre
.

1
Poulin de Lumina,
Histoire de la Guerre contre les Anglois,
15.

2
Lévis,
Mémoire sur la Guerre du Canada
.

3
On this affair, Sparks,
Writings of Washington,
II. 25-48, 447.
Dinwiddie Papers. Letter of Contrecœur in Précis des Faits. Journal of Washington, Ibid. Washington to Dinwiddie,
3
June,
1754. Dussieux,
Le Canada sous la Domination Française,
118. Gaspé,
Anciens Canadiens,
appendix, 396. The assertion of Abbé de l’Isle-Dieu, that Jumonville showed a flag of truce, is unsupported. Adam Stephen, who was in the fight, says that the guns of the English were so wet that they had to trust mainly to the bayonet. The Half-King boasted that he killed Jumonville
with his tomahawk. Dinwiddie highly approved Washington’s conduct.
In 1755 the widow of Jumonville received a pension of one hundred and fifty francs. In 1775 his daughter, Charlotte Aimable, wishing to become a nun, was given by the King six hundred francs for her “trousseau” on entering the convent.
Dossier de Jumonville et de sa Veuve,
22
Mars,
1755.
Mémoire pour
Mlle.
de Jumonville,
10
Juillet,
1775.
Réponse du Garde des Sceaux,
25
Juillet,
1775.

1
Journal of Washington
in
Précis des Faits
.

1
Journal de Campagne de M. de Villiers depuis son Arrivée au Fort Duquesne jusqu’ à son Retour au dit Fort
. These and other passages are omitted in the Journal as printed in
Précis des Faits
. Before me is a copy from the original in the Archives de la Marine.

1
Journal de Villiers,
original. Omitted in the Journal as printed by the French Government. A short and very incorrect abstract of this Journal will be found in
N.Y. Col. Docs
., X.

2
See
Appendix C
. On the fight at Great Meadows, compare Sparks,
Writings of Washington,
II. 456-468; also a letter of Colonel Innes to Governor Hamilton, written a week after the event, in
Colonial Records of Pa
., VI. 50, and a letter of Adam Stephen in
Pennsylvania Gazette,
1754.

3
Dinwiddie writes to the Lords of Trade that thirty in all were killed, and seventy wounded, on the English side; and the commissary Varin writes to Bigot that the French lost seventy-two killed and wounded.

1
A Journal had from Thomas Forbes, lately a Private Soldier in the King of France’s Service
. (Public Record Office.) Forbes was one of Villiers’ soldiers. The commissary Varin puts the number of French at six hundred, besides Indians.

2
Journal of Conrad Weiser,
in
Colonial Records of Pa
., VI. 150. The Half-King also remarked that Washington “was a good-natured man, but had no experience, and would by no means take advice from the Indians, but was always driving them on to fight by his directions; that he lay at one place from one full moon to the other, and made no fortifications at all, except that little thing upon the meadow, where he thought the French would come up to him in open field.”

1
See
Appendix C
.

VI

1754, 1755

T
HE
S
IGNAL OF
B
ATTLE

Troubles of Dinwiddie · Gathering of the Burgesses · Virginian Society · Refractory Legislators · The Quaker Assembly · It refuses to resist the French · Apathy of New York · Shirley and the General Court of Massachusetts · Short-sighted Policy · Attitude of Royal Governors · Indian Allies waver · Convention at Albany · Scheme of Union · It fails · Dinwiddie and Glen · Dinwiddie calls on England for Help · The Duke of Newcastle · Weakness of the British Cabinet · Attitude of France · Mutual Dissimulation · Both Powers send Troops to America · Collision · Capture of the “Alcide” and the “Lis”

The defeat of Washington was a heavy blow to the Governor, and he angrily ascribed it to the delay of the expected reinforcements. The King’s companies from New York had reached Alexandria, and crawled towards the scene of action with thin ranks, bad discipline, thirty women and children, no tents, no blankets, no knapsacks, and for munitions one barrel of spoiled gunpowder.
¹
The case was still worse with the regiment from North Carolina. It was commanded by Colonel Innes, a countryman and friend of Dinwiddie, who wrote to him: “Dear James, I now wish that we had none from your colony but yourself, for I foresee nothing but confusion among them.” The men were, in fact, utterly unmanageable. They had been promised three shillings a day, while the Virginians had only eightpence; and when they heard on the march that their pay was to be reduced, they mutinied, disbanded, and went home.

“You may easily guess,” says Dinwiddie to a London correspondent, “the great fatigue and trouble I have had, which is more than I ever went through in my life.” He rested his hopes on the session of his Assembly, which was to take place in August; for he thought that the late disaster would move them to give him money for defending the colony. These meetings of the burgesses were the great social as well as political event of the Old Dominion, and gave a gathering signal to the Virginian gentry scattered far and wide on their lonely plantations. The capital of the province was Williamsburg, a village of about a thousand inhabitants, traversed by a straight and very wide street, and adorned with various public buildings, conspicuous among which was William and Mary College, a respectable structure, unjustly likened by Jefferson to a brick kiln with a roof. The capitol, at the other end of the town, had been burned some years before, and had just risen from its ashes. Not far distant was the so-called Governor’s Palace, where Dinwiddie with his wife and two daughters exercised such official hospitality as his moderate salary and Scottish thrift would permit.
¹

In these seasons of festivity the dull and quiet village was transfigured. The broad, sandy street, scorching under a southern sun, was thronged with coaches and chariots brought over from London at heavy cost in tobacco, though soon to be bedimmed by Virginia roads and negro care; racing and hard-drinking planters; clergymen of the Establishment, not much more ascetic than their boon companions of the laity; ladies, with manners a little rusted by long seclusion; black coachmen and footmen, proud of their masters and their liveries; young cavaliers, booted and spurred, sitting their thoroughbreds with the careless grace of men whose home was the saddle. It was a proud little provincial society, which might seem absurd in its lofty self-appreciation, had it not soon approved itself so prolific in ability and worth.
²

The burgesses met, and Dinwiddie made them an opening speech, inveighing against the aggressions of the French, their “contempt of treaties,” and “ambitious views for universal monarchy”; and he concluded: “I could expatiate very largely on these affairs, but my heart burns with resentment at their insolence. I think there is no room for many arguments to induce you to raise a considerable supply to enable me to defeat the designs of these troublesome people and enemies of mankind.” The burgesses in their turn expressed the “highest and most becoming resentment,” and promptly voted twenty thousand pounds; but on the third reading of the bill they added to it a rider which touched the old question of the pistole fee, and which, in the view of the Governor, was both unconstitutional and offensive. He remonstrated in vain; the stubborn republicans would not yield, nor would he; and again he prorogued them. This unexpected defeat depressed him greatly. “A governor,” he wrote, “is really to be pitied in the discharge of his duty to his king and country, in having to do with such obstinate, self-conceited people. . . . I cannot satisfy the burgesses unless I prostitute the rules of government. I have gone through monstrous fatigues. Such wrong-headed people, I thank God, I never had to do with before.”
³
A few weeks later he was comforted; for, having again called the burgesses, they gave him the money, without trying this time to humiliate him.
⁴

In straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel, aristocratic Virginia was far outdone by democratic Pennsylvania. Hamilton, her governor, had laid before the Assembly a circular letter from the Earl of Holdernesse directing him, in common with other governors, to call on his province for means to repel any invasion which might be made “within the undoubted limits of His Majesty’s dominion.”
¹
The Assembly of Pennsylvania was curiously unlike that of Virginia, as half and often more than half of its members were Quaker tradesmen in sober raiment and broad-brimmed hats; while of the rest, the greater part were Germans who cared little whether they lived under English rule or French, provided that they were left in peace upon their farms. The House replied to the Governor’s call: “It would be highly presumptuous in us to pretend to judge of the undoubted limits of His Majesty’s dominions”; and they added: “The Assemblies of this province are generally composed of a majority who are constitutionally principled against war, and represent a well-meaning, peaceable people.”
²
They then adjourned, telling the Governor that, “As those our limits have not been clearly ascertained to our satisfaction, we fear the precipitate call upon us as the province invaded cannot answer any good purpose at this time.”

In the next month they met again, and again Hamilton asked for means to defend the country. The question was put, Should the Assembly give money for the King’s use? and the vote was feebly affirmative. Should the sum be twenty thousand pounds? The vote was overwhelming in the negative. Fifteen thousand, ten thousand, and five thousand, were successively proposed, and the answer was always, No. The House would give nothing but five hundred pounds for a present to the Indians; after which they adjourned “to the sixth of the month called May.”
³
At their next meeting they voted to give the Governor ten thousand pounds; but under conditions which made them for some time independent of his veto, and which, in other respects, were contrary to his instructions from the King, as well as from the proprietaries of the province, to whom he had given bonds to secure his obedience. He therefore rejected the bill, and they adjourned. In August they passed a similar vote, with the same result. At their October meeting they evaded his call for supplies. In December they voted twenty thousand pounds, hampered with conditions which were sure to be refused, since Morris, the new governor, who had lately succeeded Hamilton, was under the same restrictions as his predecessor. They told him, however, that in the present case they felt themselves bound by no Act of Parliament, and added: “We hope the Governor, notwithstanding any penal bond he may have entered into, will on reflection think himself at liberty and find it consistent with his safety and honor to give his assent to this bill.” Morris, who had taken the highest legal advice on the subject in England, declined to compromise himself, saying: “Consider, gentlemen, in what light you will appear to
His Majesty while, instead of contributing towards your own defence, you are entering into an ill-timed controversy concerning the validity of royal instructions which may be delayed to a more convenient time without the least injury to the rights of the people.”
¹
They would not yield, and told him “that they had rather the French should conquer them than give up their privileges.”
²
“Truly,” remarks Dinwiddie, “I think they have given their senses a long holiday.”

New York was not much behind her sisters in contentious stubbornness. In answer to the Governor’s appeal, the Assembly replied: “It appears that the French have built a fort at a place called French Creek, at a considerable distance from the River Ohio, which may, but does not by any evidence or information appear to us to be an invasion of any of His Majesty’s colonies.”
³
So blind were they as yet to “manifest destiny”! Afterwards, however, on learning the defeat of Washington, they gave five thousand pounds to aid Virginia.
⁴
Maryland, after long delay, gave six thousand. New Jersey felt herself safe behind the other colonies, and would give nothing. New England, on the other hand, and especially Massachusetts, had suffered so much from French war-parties that they were always ready to fight. Shirley, the governor of Massachusetts, had returned from his bootless errand to settle the boundary question at Paris. His leanings were strongly monarchical; yet he believed in the New Englanders, and was more or less in sympathy with them. Both he and they were strenuous against the French, and they had mutually helped each other to reap laurels in the last war. Shirley was cautious of giving umbrage to his Assembly, and rarely quarrelled with it, except when the amount of his salary was in question. He was not averse to a war with France; for though bred a lawyer, and now past middle life, he flattered himself with hopes of a high military command. On the present occasion, making use of a rumor that the French were seizing the carrying-place between the Chaudière and the Kennebec, he drew from the Assembly a large grant of money, and induced them to call upon him to march in person to the scene of danger. He accordingly repaired to Falmouth (now Portland); and, though the rumor proved false, sent eight hundred men under Captain John Winslow to build two forts on the Kennebec as a measure of precaution.
⁵

While to these northern provinces Canada was an old and pestilent enemy, those towards the south scarcely knew her by name; and the idea of French aggression on their borders was so novel and strange that they admitted it with difficulty. Mind and heart were engrossed in strife with their governors: the universal struggle for virtual self-rule. But the war was often waged with a passionate stupidity. The colonist was not then an American; he was simply a
provincial, and a narrow one. The time was yet distant when these dissevered and jealous communities should weld themselves into one broad nationality, capable, at need, of the mightiest efforts to purge itself of disaffection and vindicate its commanding unity.

In the interest of that practical independence which they had so much at heart, two conditions were essential to the colonists. The one was a field for expansion, and the other was mutual help. Their first necessity was to rid themselves of the French, who, by shutting them between the Alleghanies and the sea, would cramp them into perpetual littleness. With France on their backs, growing while they had no room to grow, they must remain in helpless wardship, dependent on England, whose aid they would always need; but with the West open before them, their future was their own. King and Parliament would respect perforce the will of a people spread from the ocean to the Mississippi, and united in action as in aims. But in the middle of the last century the vision of the ordinary colonist rarely reached so far. The immediate victory over a governor, however slight the point at issue, was more precious in his eyes than the remote though decisive advantage which he saw but dimly.

The governors, representing the central power, saw the situation from the national point of view. Several of them, notably Dinwiddie and Shirley, were filled with wrath at the proceedings of the French; and the former was exasperated beyond measure at the supineness of the provinces. He had spared no effort to rouse them, and had failed. His instincts were on the side of authority; but, under the circumstances, it is hardly to be imputed to him as a very deep offence against human liberty that he advised the compelling of the colonies to raise men and money for their own defence, and proposed, in view of their “intolerable obstinacy and disobedience to his Majesty’s commands,” that Parliament should tax them half-a-crown a head. The approaching war offered to the party of authority temptations from which the colonies might have saved it by opening their purse-strings without waiting to be told.

The Home Government, on its part, was but half-hearted in the wish that they should unite in opposition to the common enemy. It was very willing that the several provinces should give money and men, but not that they should acquire military habits and a dangerous capacity of acting together. There was one kind of union, however, so obviously necessary, and at the same time so little to be dreaded, that the British Cabinet, instructed by the governors, not only assented to it, but urged it. This was joint action in making treaties with the Indians. The practice of separate treaties, made by each province in its own interest, had bred endless disorders. The adhesion of all the tribes had been so shaken, and the efforts of the French to alienate them were so vigorous and effective, that not a moment was to be lost. Joncaire had gained over most of the Senecas, Piquet was drawing the Onondagas more and more to his mission, and the Dutch of Albany were alienating their best friends, the Mohawks, by encroaching on their lands. Their chief, Hendrick, came to New York with a deputation of the tribe to complain of their wrongs; and finding no redress,
went off in anger, declaring that the covenant chain was broken.
¹
The authorities in alarm called William Johnson to their aid. He succeeded in soothing the exasperated chief, and then proceeded to the confederate council at Onondaga, where he found the assembled sachems full of anxieties and doubts. “We don’t know what you Christians, English and French, intend,” said one of their orators. “We are so hemmed in by you both that we have hardly a hunting-place left. In a little while, if we find a bear in a tree, there will immediately appear an owner of the land to claim the property and hinder us from killing it, by which we live. We are so perplexed between you that we hardly know what to say or think.”
²
No man had such power over the Five Nations as Johnson. His dealings with them were at once honest, downright, and sympathetic. They loved and trusted him as much as they detested the Indian commissioners at Albany, whom the province of New York had charged with their affairs, and who, being traders, grossly abused their office.