The French claimed the valley of the Ohio as their territory; the English claimed it as theirs. The dispute was of long standing. The French claim was based on discovery; the English claim, on the sea-to-sea charters of Virginia and other colonies and on treaties with the Six Nations. The French refused to admit the right of the Six Nations to dispose of the territory. The English were inclined to maintain the validity of their treaties with the Indians. Especially was Virginia so inclined, for a large share of the Ohio lay within her chartered domain.
The quarrel had entered its acute phase in 1749, when both the rival claimants took action to assert their sovereignty. The Governor of Canada sent an envoy, Céloron de Blainville, with soldiers, to take formal possession of the Ohio for the King of France. In the same year the English organized in Virginia the Ohio Company for the colonization of the same country; and summoned Christopher Gist, explorer, trader, and guide, from his home on the Yadkin and dispatched him to survey the land.
Then appeared on the scene that extraordinary man, Robert Dinwiddie, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, erstwhile citizen of Glasgow. His correspondence from Virginia during his seven years' tenure of office (1751-58) depicts the man with a vividness surpassing paint. He was as honest as the day—as honest as he was fearless and fussy. But he had no patience; he wanted things done and done at once, and his way was the way to do them. People who did not think as he thought didn't think at all. On this drastic premise he went to work. There was of course continuous friction between him and the House of Burgesses. Dinwiddie had all a Scot's native talent for sarcasm. His letters, his addresses, perhaps in particular his addresses to the House, bristled with satirical thrusts at his opponents. If he had spelled out in full all the words he was so eager to write, he would have been obliged to lessen his output; so he used a shorthand system of his own, peculiar enough to be remarkable even though abbreviations were the rule in that day. Even the dignity of Kings he sacrificed to speed, and we find “His Majesty” abbreviated to “H M'y”; yet a smaller luminary known as “His Honor” fares better, losing only the last letter—“His Hono.” “Ho.” stands for “house” and “yt” for “that,” “what,” “it,” and “anything else,” as convenient. Many of his letters wind up with “I am ve'y much fatig'd.” We know that he must have been!
It was a formidable task that confronted Dinwiddie—to possess and defend the Ohio. Christopher Gist returned in 1751, having surveyed the valley for the Ohio Company as far as the Scioto and Miami rivers, and in the following year the survey was ratified by the Indians. The Company's men were busy blazing trails through the territory and building fortified posts. But the French dominated the territory. They had built and occupied with troops Fort Le Bœuf on French Creek, a stream flowing into the Allegheny. We may imagine Dinwiddie's rage at this violation of British soil by French soldiers and how he must have sputtered to the young George Washington, when he summoned that officer and made him the bearer of a letter to the French commander at Fort Le Bœuf, to demand that French troops be at once withdrawn from the Ohio.
Washington made the journey to Fort Le Bœuf in December, 1753, but the mission of course proved fruitless. Dinwiddie then wrote to London urging that a force be sent over to help the colonies maintain their rights and, under orders from the Crown, suggested by himself, he wrote to the governors of all the other colonies to join with Virginia in raising troops to settle the ownership of the disputed territory. From Governor Dobbs of North Carolina he received an immediate response. By means of logic, sarcasm, and the entire force of his prerogatives, Dinwiddie secured from his own balking Assembly £10,000 with which to raise troops. From Maryland he obtained nothing. There were three prominent Marylanders in the Ohio Company, but—or because of this—the Maryland Assembly voted down the measure for a military appropriation. On June 18, 1754, Dinwiddie wrote, with unusually full spelling for him:
I am perswaded had His Majesty's Com'ds to the other Colonies been duely obey'd, and the necessary Assistance given by them, the Fr. wou'd have long ago have been oblig'd entirely to have evacuated their usurp'd Possession of the King's Lands, instead of w'ch they are daily becoming more formidable, whilst every Gov't except No. Caro. has amus'd me with Expectations that have proved fruitless, and at length refuse to give any Supply, unless in such a manner as must render it ineffectual.
This saddened mood with its deliberate penmanship did not last long. Presently Dinwiddie was making a Round Robin of himself in another series of letters to Governors, Councilors, and Assemblymen, frantically beseeching them for “H. M'y's hono.” and their own, and, if not, for “post'r'ty,” to rise against the cruel French whose Indians were harrying the borders again and “Basely, like Virmin, stealing and carrying off the helpless infant”—as nice a simile, by the way, as any Sheridan ever put into the mouth of Mrs. Malaprop.
Dinwiddie saw his desires thwarted on every hand by the selfish spirit of localism and jealousy which was more rife in America in those days than it is today. Though the phrase “capitalistic war” had not yet been coined, the great issues of English civilization on this continent were befogged, for the majority in the colonies, by the trivial fact that the shareholders in the Ohio Company stood to win by a vigorous prosecution of the war and to lose if it were not prosecuted at all. The irascible Governor, however, proceeded with such men and means as he could obtain.
And now in the summer of 1754 came the “overt act” which precipitated the inevitable war. The key to the valley of the Ohio was the tongue of land at the Forks, where the Allegheny and the Monongahela join their waters in the Beautiful River. This site—today Pittsburgh—if occupied and held by either nation would give that nation the command of the Ohio. Occupied it was for a brief hour by a small party of Virginians, under Captain William Trent; but no sooner had they erected on the spot a crude fort than the French descended upon them. What happened then all the world knows: how the French built on the captured site their great Fort Duquesne; how George Washington with an armed force, sent by Dinwiddie to recapture the place, encountered French and Indians at Great Meadows and built Fort Necessity, which he was compelled to surrender; how in the next year (1755) General Braddock arrived from across the sea and set out to take Fort Duquesne, only to meet on the way the disaster called “Braddock's Defeat”; and how, before another year had passed, the Seven Years' War was raging in Europe, and England was allied with the enemies of France.
From the midst of the debacle of Braddock's defeat rises the figure of the young Washington. Twenty-three he was then, tall and spare and hardbodied from a life spent largely in the open. When Braddock fell, this Washington appeared. Reckless of the enemy's bullets, which spanged about him and pierced his clothes, he dashed up and down the lines in an effort to rally the panic-stricken redcoats. He was too late to save the day, but not to save a remnant of the army and bring out his own Virginians in good order. Whether among the stay-at-homes and voters of credits there were some who would have ascribed Washington's conduct on that day to the fact that his brothers were large shareholders in the Ohio Company and that Fort Duquesne was their personal property or "private interest," history does not say. We may suppose so.