The French in the Heart of America

by John H. Finley

"I am here by Virtue of the Orders of my General; and I entreat you, Sir, not to doubt, one Moment, but that I am determined to conform myself to them with all the Exactness and Resolution which can be expected from the best Officer…. I don't know that in the Progress of this Campaign [of repossession] anything passed which can be reputed an Act of Hostility or is contrary to the Treaties which subsist between the two Crowns…. Had you been pleased, Sir, to have descended to particularize the Facts which occasioned your Complaints I should have had the Honor of answering you in the fullest, and, I am persuaded, most satisfactory Manner."

In the spring the two hundred canoes which Washington saw moored by the Rivière aux Boeufs carried the builders of Fort Duquesne and a garrison for it down La Belle Rivière, and a little later is heard the volley of the Virginia backwoodsmen up on the Laurel ridges a little way back from Duquesne, the volley which began the strife that armed the civilized world—the backwoodsmen commanded by the Virginia youth, George Washington.

It is in that lonely ravine up among the ridges which I have described in an earlier chapter that the union of the eastern and western waters began. And there should be a monument beside Jumonville's to keep succeeding generations mindful of the mighty consequence of what happened then.

This fray of the mountains was one of the most portentous of events in American history. It was not only the grappling of two European peoples and two systems of government out upon the edges of the civilized world— the stone-age men assisting on both sides—a fray in which Legardeur de St. Pierre, Coulon de Jumonville, and de Villiers, his avenging brother, were France, and Washington was England. It was the beginning of the making of a new nation, of which that tall youth, who found the whizzing of bullets a "charming sound," was to be the very cornerstone.

He was here having his first tuition of war. De Villiers let him march back from Fort Necessity unharmed, when he might, perhaps, have ended the career of this young major in the great meadows where they fought "through the gray veil of mists and rain." Washington was taught by France, in these years of border warfare—for he went four times over the mountains— he was spared by France in the end to help take from France the title of the west, or so it seemed when, in 1763, the war which his command had begun was ended in the surrender of that vast domain to England. But we know now that the struggle had other issue.

The steep path of the years when the colonies were taught their first lessons of federation by their common fear of the French and their allies, led by the tall young man who emerged from the woods back of Fort Le Boeuf and later assisted by the moral and pecuniary sympathy of France, by the presence of her ships along their menaced coasts, by the counsels of her admirals and generals, and by the marching and fighting of her soldiers side by side with theirs, you know. It is a path so marked by memorials as to need no spoken word. Only one vista in this trail of gloom with overhanging clouded sky need detain us a moment. It lets us see Benjamin Franklin rejoicing in Paris after the news of the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga in 1777. We see Beaumarchais rushing away from Franklin's lodgings in Passy to spread the good news, and in such mad haste that he upset his carriage and dislocated his arm. And when we next look out from the path we see the British soldiers passing in surrender between two lines drawn up at Yorktown, the American soldiers on one side with Washington at their head, and on the other the French soldiers under Count Rochambeau.

Washington and Legardeur de St. Pierre at Fort Le Boeuf, Washington and Rochambeau at Yorktown! You have been told again and again that except for the France of Rochambeau the War of Independence would probably have failed and that the colonies would have remained English colonies. But let us remember that except for the France of Legardeur de St. Pierre there would probably not have been, as Parkman says, a "revolution"; and by the France of Legardeur I mean the spirit of France that had illustration in his lonely, exiled watching of the regions won by her pioneers.

The French man-of-war Triumph brought to Philadelphia in May of 1783 the treaty of Paris. In the December following General Washington said farewell to his officers and returned to Mount Vernon, his estate on the Potomac. There he was busied through the next few months in putting his private affairs in order, in superintending the reparation of his plantation, and in receiving those who came to him for counsel or to express their gratitude. It was as a level bit of the mountain trail from which the traveller catches glimpses of a peaceful valley. And that is all that the traveller usually sees.

But there is a farther view. From that level path one can see over the Alleghanies the great valley so familiar to our eyes from other points of view, stretching toward the Mississippi.

In the autumn of 1784 (eight months after his farewell to the army) Washington leaves his home, as it appears, to visit some lands which he had acquired as one result of his earlier and martial trips out beyond the Laurel Hills. He had title to forty thousand acres beyond the mountains. He had even purchased the site of this first battle in the meadows, where he had built Fort Necessity and where he was himself captured by the French, but from which he was permitted to go back over the mountains with his flags flying and his drums beating. A "charming field of encounter" he called the place in his youthful exuberance before the battle in 1753. "Much Hay may be cut here When the ground is laid down in Grass; and the upland, East of the Meadow is good for grain," he wrote in his unsentimental diary, September 12, 1784. For over the mountains he went again on what was thought but a trip of personal business. But on the third day of the journey, September 3d, he writes, incidentally, as explaining his desire to talk with certain men: "one object of my journey being to obtain information of the nearest and best communication between the Eastern and Western Waters." And as he advances this becomes the possessing object.