XXIII
The governor was now fully decided to resist the French aggressions, and convened the House of Burgesses after much delay. I was offered full command of a force of three hundred men in six companies, forming a regiment. I consulted his lordship and my half-brother Augustine as to this, and not feeling secure of my fitness for so great a position, and they agreeing, I chose rather to serve as second under Colonel Frye. This being settled, I went about the business of recruiting as lieutenant-colonel.
In considering the new duty to which I was called and what it led me to do, I have asked myself whether I could have done it better, considering the want of supplies and of sufficiency of men.
Mr. John Langdon at one time wrote to me, when commenting on the character of General A——, that what he had been as a very young man he continued to be ever after, and that, although education and opportunity might give a man of strong character the tools for his purposes, they would not seriously alter his nature; he would only be more and more that which he had been.
As I sit in judgment upon the particulars which occasioned the affair at Great Meadows, and later my disaster at Fort Necessity, I am inclined to believe that I could have done no better at fifty than I did at twenty-two. I perceive also that the conditions which at that time surrounded and embarrassed me were on a lesser scale the same as those with which I had to struggle in the later and more important days, which made me old before my time. Such comparisons as these do not readily occur to me, as I am inclined to dwell most upon the needs of the present and upon the possibilities which the future may have in store.
On one occasion, during the march to Yorktown, when bivouacked at the head of the Elk, Colonel Scammel and Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh Wynne, both at that time of my military family, led me into expressing myself as to these earlier events, and one of them, Lieutenant-Colonel Wynne, I think, remarked that I had then to encounter the same kind of obstacles as those which had perplexed me at the Valley Forge and Morristown, and indeed throughout the War of Independency. I did not encourage such further discussion by these young officers as might readily lead on to the impropriety of criticisms upon Congress. But now, recalling what was then said, I am led to see how remarkably alike were the conditions I had to meet at two periods of my life. Nor can I fail to observe that what General Hamilton liked very often to call “the education of events” was valuable in teaching me moderation and such control of temper as I was to need on a larger field.
While I went about my military preparations, the governor and the House wrangled over the ten thousand pounds he asked for the fitting out of troops. I have observed that men engaged in agriculture as the masters of slaves acquire a great independence of thought and are hard to move to a common agreement even when, as at that time, there is an immediate need for united action.
There was also much distrust of Governor Dinwiddie, and indeed we rarely submitted with entire good will to any of the royal governors. He got his grant at last, but a committee was to confer with him as to how it was to be used—a measure not altogether unwise, but which made him swear we were getting to be too republican and, he feared, would be more and more difficult to be brought to order.
As to my recruiting, the better men were indisposed to join, and I got chiefly a vagabond crew of shoeless, half-dressed fellows, but most of them hunters and good shots. I did better when the governor offered a bounty in land, which as yet we had not, for it was to be about the fine bottoms at the Forks of the Ohio, which were in the hands of the French and the Indians.
I made Van Braam a captain, and thereafter obtained more men and better, for the old warrior promised, I fear, an easy time and all manner of agreeable rewards, with such accounts of the lands they were to have as much delighted the hard-working farmers’ sons.