A History of the British Army, Vol. 2 / First Part—to the Close of the Seven Years' War

by Sir J. W. Fortescue

1753.
Dec. 11.

Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia no sooner heard of this movement on the part of the French than he sent a summons to the commanders of the forts to withdraw forthwith from the King of England's territory. The bearer of the message was the Adjutant-General of the Virginian militia, a young man of twenty-one with a great destiny before him, George Washington. There were two British trading stations on the Ohio, Venango, at the junction of French Creek and the Alleghany, and Logstown, some miles below the site of Pittsburg. On arriving at Venango, Washington found it converted into a French military station, the officers of which received him hospitably, but told him that they had orders to take possession of the Ohio, and that "by God they would do it." Making his way from thence to Fort le Bœuf, Washington delivered Dinwiddie's letter, and returned with the reply that it should be forwarded to Montreal, but that the garrisons had no intention of moving until orders should arrive from thence. Dinwiddie meanwhile had again appealed to the Virginian Assembly to vote money to build forts on the Ohio. He could show a letter from the Board of Ordnance in England approving of the project and offering arms and ammunition, as well as a letter from the King authorising the execution of the work at the colony's expense and the repelling of force by force; but the Assembly, though alive to the danger, would not vote a sixpence.

1754.
February.

Such obstinacy was enough to drive a Governor to despair, but Dinwiddie was blessed with considerable tenacity of purpose. A renewal of his appeal in the ensuing session was more successful, and the Assembly grudgingly voted a small and insufficient sum, with which the Governor was forced to be content. Urgent applications to the neighbouring colonies for aid met with little response. The remoter provinces thought themselves in no way concerned; those nearer at hand refused help chiefly because their governors asked for it. It was in fact a principle with the Provincial Assemblies to thwart their governor, whether he were right or wrong, on every possible occasion; they being, as is so common in representative bodies, more anxious to assert their power and independence than their utility and good sense. North Carolina alone granted money enough for three or four hundred men. However, the British Government had sanctioned the employment of the regular companies at New York and in Carolina, and Dinwiddie having raised three hundred men in Virginia, ordered them to the Ohio Company's station at Will's Creek, which was to be the base of operations. Meanwhile he despatched a party of backwoodsmen forthwith to the forks of the Ohio, there to build, on a site selected by Washington, the fort for which he had pleaded so long. Forty men were actually at work upon it when, on the 17th of April, a flotilla of small craft came pouring down on the Alleghany with a party of five hundred French on board. The troops landed, trained cannon on the unfinished stockade, and summoned the British to surrender. Resistance was hopeless. The backwoodsmen perforce yielded; and the French having demolished their works erected a much larger and better fort on the same site, and called it Fort Duquêsne. The name before long was to be altered to Pittsburg, but the change was as yet hidden behind the veil of years. For the present the French had stolen a march on the British, and Dinwiddie was chagrined to the heart. "If the Assembly had voted the money in November which they did in February," he wrote, "the fort would have been built and garrisoned before the French approached."

The Governor, however, was by no means disposed meekly to accept this defeat. The French had expelled a British party from British territory by force of arms, and both he and Washington treated the incident as equivalent to a declaration of war. Washington, though but half of his troops had yet joined him, presently advanced over the Alleghanies to the Youghiogany, a tributary of the Monongahela; and there on the 27th of May he came upon a small party of French and fired the shots which began the war. A few weeks later he with his little force, something less than four hundred men, was surrounded by twice that number of Frenchmen, and after a fight of nine hours and the loss of a fourth of his men, was compelled to capitulate.

Dinwiddie was vexed beyond measure by this second reverse, and by the delay in the arrival of the reinforcements which had caused it. The two companies of regular troops from New York came crawling up to the scene of action in a disgraceful state. Their ranks were thin, for their muster-rolls had been falsified by means of "faggots"; they were undisciplined; they had neither tents, blankets, knapsacks, nor ammunition with them, nothing, in fact, but their arms and thirty women and children.[251] The troops from North Carolina were still worse than these in the matter of discipline, so much so that they mutinied and dispersed to their homes while yet on the march to the rendezvous. The peril was great; yet the colonies remained supine. The Assembly of Virginia only after a bitter struggle granted Dinwiddie a competent sum; that of Pennsylvania, being composed chiefly of Quakers and of German settlers, who were anxious only to live in peace and to cultivate their farms, refused practically to contribute a farthing. New York was unable to understand, until Washington had been actually defeated, that there had been any French encroachment on British territory; Maryland produced a contribution only after long delay; and New Jersey, safely ensconced behind the shelter of her neighbours, flatly declined to give any aid whatever. New England alone, led as usual by Massachusetts, showed not only willingness but alacrity to drive back the detested French. United action was as yet inconceivable by the colonists or, as the English more correctly called them, the Provincials. It was only in deference to representations from the British Government that New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the four colonies of New England met in congress to concert for joint action in securing the unstable affections of the Indians. A project for colonial union broached by Benjamin Franklin at this same congress was wrecked by the jealousy of Crown and Colonies as to mutual concession of power.

September.

In such circumstances the only hope lay in assistance from the mother country; and Dinwiddie accordingly sent repeated entreaties to England for stores, ammunition, and two regiments of regular infantry. The Ministry at home was not of a kind to cope with a great crisis. Henry Pelham was dead; and the ridiculous Newcastle as Prime Minister had succeeded in finding a fool still greater than himself, Sir T. Robinson, to be Secretary of State in charge of the colonies. Nevertheless, in July ten thousand pounds in specie and two thousand stand of arms were shipped for the service of the colonies,[252] and on the 30th of September orders were issued for the Forty-fourth and Forty-eighth regiments, both of them on the Irish Establishment, to be embarked at Cork. Each of these regiments was appointed to consist of three hundred and forty men only, and to take with it seven hundred stand of arms, so as to make up its numbers with American recruits.[253] But the nucleus of British soldiers was presently increased to five hundred men, the augmentation being effected, as usual, by drafts from other regiments; not, however, without difficulty, for the service was unpopular, and there was consequently much desertion. The next step was to appoint a commander; and the choice fell upon General Edward Braddock, sometime of the Coldstream Guards. He was a man of the same stamp as Hawley, and therefore after the Duke of Cumberland's own heart,—an officer of forty-five years' service, rough, brutal,[254] and insolent, a martinet of the narrowest type, but wanting neither spirit nor ability, and brave as a lion. His instructions were sufficiently wide, comprehending operations against the French in four different quarters. The French were to be driven from the Ohio, and a garrison was to be left to hold the country when captured; the like was to be done at Niagara, at Crown Point, and at Fort Beauséjour, a work erected by the French on the isthmus that joins Nova Scotia to the Continent. This plan had been suggested by Governor Shirley of Massachusetts; and in furtherance thereof the British Government had ordered two regiments, each one thousand strong, to be raised in America under the colonelcy of the veterans Shirley and Pepperrell, and to be taken into the pay of Great Britain.[255] There might well be doubt whether the means provided would suffice for the execution of the scheme.

1755.
April.

It was January 1755 before the Forty-fourth and Forty-eighth were embarked at Cork, and past the middle of March before the whole of the transports arrived in Hampton Roads. Good care seems to have been taken of the troops on the voyage, for Braddock was able to report that there was not a sick man among them.[256] The transports were ordered to ascend the Potomac to Alexandria, where a camp was to be formed; and there on the 14th of April several of the governors met Braddock in council to decide as to the distribution of the work that lay before them. All was soon settled. Braddock with the two newly arrived regiments was to advance on Fort Duquêsne; Shirley with his own and Pepperrell's regiments was to attack Niagara; William Johnson, on account of his influence with the Indians, was chosen to lead a body of Provincial troops from New England, New Jersey, and New York against Crown Point; and to Lieutenant-Colonel Monckton, an officer of whom we shall hear more, was entrusted the task of overpowering Fort Beauséjour. The first and second of these operations were designed to cut the chain of French posts between the St. Lawrence and the Ohio, and may be described as purely offensive. Why, however, it should have been thought necessary to sever this chain at two points when one point would have sufficed, and why therefore the whole strength of the blow was not aimed at Niagara, are questions not easily to be answered. The capture of Crown Point would serve alike to bar a French advance southward at Lake Champlain and to further a British advance on Montreal, and hence combined objects both offensive and defensive. The reduction of Fort Beauséjour having no other purpose than the security of Acadia, was a measure wholly defensive.