Braddock's Road and Three Relative Papers

by Archer Butler Hulbert

To haul the wagons and cannon over this worst road ever trod Braddock had the poorest horses available. All the weak, spavined, wind-broken, and crippled beasts in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia were palmed off on Braddock by unscrupulous contractors. And horses, dead or dying, were always left with the demolished wagons. “There has been vile management in regard to horses,” wrote Washington; before the army had covered one third of its journey there were not enough to draw all the wagons, the strongest being sent back each day to bring up the wagons left behind the morning before. The continuous diet of salt meat brought an epidemic of bloody flux on the army; some died, many were sick. Washington’s strong system was in the grasp of a fever before Little Crossings was reached.

The situation now was desperate and would have appalled a less stubborn man than Edward Braddock. Acting on Washington’s advice he here divided his army, preparing to push on to Fort Duquesne with a flying column of fourteen hundred men. Washington found the first western river almost dry and reasoned that Riviere aux Bœufs would be too dry to transport southward the reinforcements that were hurrying from Canada.

On the nineteenth, Braddock advanced with Colonel Halket and Lieutenant Colonels Burton and Gage and Major Sparks, leaving Colonel Dunbar and Major Chapman—to their disgust—to hobble on with the sick and dying men and horses, the sorry line of wagons creaking under their heavy loads. The young Virginian Colonel was left at the very first camp in a raging fever. Though unable to push on further with the column that would capture Duquesne, yet Braddock considerately satisfied the ambition of Washington by promising that he should be brought up before the attack was made. Washington wrote home that he would not miss the capture of Duquesne “for five hundred pounds!”

With the flying column were taken the Indians that were with the army but which numbered less than a dozen. Braddock has been severely blamed for his neglect of the Indians, but any earnest study of this campaign will assure the student that the commanding general was no more at fault here than for the failure of the contractors and the indifference of the colonies. He had been promised Indians as freely as stores and horses and wagons. The Indian question seems to have been handled most wretchedly since Washington’s late campaign. Through the negligence of the busy-body Dinwiddie (so eager for so many unimportant matters) even the majority of the Indians who served Washington faithfully and had followed his retreating army back to Virginia were allowed to drift back to the French through sheer neglect. As none of Dinwiddie’s promises were fulfilled in this respect Braddock turned in despair to Morris for such Ohio Indians as were living in Pennsylvania. There had been at least three hundred Indians of the Six Nations living in that province, but in April the Pennsylvania Assembly had resolved to “do nothing more for them”; accordingly they went westward and most of them joined the French. Morris, however, urged George Croghan to send word to the Delawares, Shawanese, Wyandots, etc., bidding them come and join Braddock’s army. But Croghan brought less than fifty and Braddock was not destined to keep all of these, for Colonel Innes, commanding at Fort Cumberland, not desiring the Indian families on his hands during the absence of the fathers, persuaded Braddock that there were not enough to add to the fighting strength of the army and that a few would be as serviceable for spies as many. Nor was this bad reasoning: Braddock would have been no better off with thirty than with ten. The fact is, he was in nothing deceived more by false promises and assurances than in the matter of Indian coöperation. And was he more at fault for the lack of frontiersmen? True, he refused the services of Captain Jack and his company, but only because the latter refused to be governed by the discipline to which the rest of the army was subject; Braddock could not agree to such an arrangement and it is doubtful if Washington would have acted differently under similar circumstances. At least the Virginian had nothing to do with Captain Jack’s renowned company the year before. To other border fighters Braddock gave a warm reception; Gist and Croghan, the two best known men on the frontier, held important offices in the army. It is as easy as common to lay at the door of a defeated and dead commander all the misfortunes of a campaign; whatever Braddock’s errors, the fact remains that the colonies failed absolutely to make the least move to provide an Indian army for Braddock’s use. Nothing could have more surely promised defeat and disgrace.

The flying column flew like a partridge with a broken wing. “We set out,” wrote Washington who started with it but was compelled to stop, “with less than thirty carriages, including those that transported the ammunition for the howitzers, and six-pounders, and all of them strongly horsed; which was a prospect that conveyed infinite delight to my mind, though I was excessively ill at the time. But this prospect was soon clouded, and my hopes brought very low indeed, when I found, that, instead of pushing on with vigor, without regarding a little rough road, they were halting to level every mole-hill, and to erect bridges over every brook, by which means we were four days in getting twelve miles.”

On the third of July the flying column had passed the Youghiogheny and were encamped ten miles north of it, forty miles from Fort Duquesne. It had not averaged three miles a day since leaving Little Crossings! Here a Council of War was held to decide whether to push on alone or await the coming of Dunbar and the wagons. Could the Grenadiers and their officers have seen through that narrow path to their destination, how quickly would their decision have been made, how eagerly would they have hurried on to the Ohio! Contrecœur at Fort Duquesne was in a miserable plight; every returning red-skin told of the advance of the great British army in the face of Governor Duquesne’s proud boast to Vaudreuil that it was impossible for the English to cross the Alleghenies in sufficient force to cause uneasiness! Braddock, despite the utter lack of proper support from the colonies, was accomplishing the eighth wonder of the world. It was desperate work. But a Bull-dog was creeping nearer each day.

Throughout the winter the British ministry and the Court of Versailles had been exchanging the most ridiculous pretenses of peace while secretly preparing for war with dispatch. For every ill-recruited regiment King George sent to Virginia, King Louis sent two famous regiments to Canada, and they arrived there despite Boscawen, the English admiral, who captured two unimportant ships. Yet that was enough to precipitate the struggle and save more fables from the respective ambassadors; “I will not pardon the piracies of that insolent nation,” exclaimed Louis—and open war was inevitable.

At his landing at Quebec Vaudreuil found not less than twelve thousand soldiers in Canada to defend the claims of his King. But that was a long frontier to man, from Quebec to New Orleans, and in April only about one thousand men were forwarded to defend the Ohio river. Of these Contrecœur had not more than three hundred, probably less. The summer before he had two thousand defenders, but Duquesne, blindly trusting to the ephemeral league he had made with the Alleghenies, had not been liberal again. In vain Contrecœur sent messages northward to Venango and Presque Isle. Riviere aux Bœufs was as dry as the Youghiogheny. Inevitable surrender or capitulation stared the French commander in the face. Even the crowds of Indians within hail were not to be reckoned on; they were terrified at the proportions of Braddock’s army.

Accordingly, Contrecœur made his arrangements for a capitulation, as Washington had done one year ago. Braddock had accomplished the impossible; the Indians were demoralized and took to “cooking and counciling”; Fort Duquesne was as good as captured.

On the seventh Braddock reached Brush Fork of Turtle Creek, but the country immediately between him and the Ohio was so rough that the army turned westward and pitched its nineteenth encampment in Long Run valley two miles from the Monongahela. Here Washington came up with the army in a covered wagon, still weak but ready to move with the army in the morning and sleep in Duquesne that night. The whole army was infused with this hope as the ninth of July dawned.