By the death of Braddock Shirley became the ranking officer on the continent, and we must turn to see how the tidings of his new responsibilities found him.
The Massachusetts governor was at Albany when the bad news reached him, and Johnson being taken into the secret, the two leaders tried to keep it from the army. Shirley immediately pushed on the force destined for Fort Niagara, at the other end of Lake Ontario; while Johnson as speedily turned the faces of his men towards Lake George. Shirley’s army found the path to Oswego, much of the way through swamp and forest; and the young provincials sorrowfully begrimed their regulation bedizenments, assumed under the king’s orders, as with the Jersey Blues they struggled along the trail and tugged through the watercourses. It was easier to get the men to their destination than to transport the supplies, and many stores that were on the way were abandoned at the portages when the wagoners heard the fearful details from the Monongahela. Short rations and discouragements harried the men sorely. The axe and spade were put in requisition, and additional forts were planned and constructed as the army pursued its way. Across the lake at Fort Frontenac the enemy held a force ready to be sent against Oswego if Shirley went on, for the capture of Braddock’s papers had revealed all the English plans. Shirley put on a brave face, with all his bereavement, for the death of his son, with Braddock, was a heavy blow. A council of war, on the 18th of September, determined him to take to the lake with his bateaux as soon as provisions arrived. He had now got word of Dieskau’s defeat,[1137] and he tried to use it to inspirit the braves at his camp. It seemed to another council, on the 27th, that the attempt to trust their river bateaux on the lake was foolhardy, and so the purpose of the campaign was abandoned. At the end of October he left the garrison to strengthen the forts, and returned to Albany. He did not get much comfort there. Johnson showed no signs of following up the victory of Lake George, and as late as November Shirley was still at Albany, where he had received his new commission, advising a movement on Crown Point for the winter;[1138] and in December he was exciting the indignant jealousy of Johnson[1139] by daring to instruct him about his Indian management, for Johnson had now been made Indian superintendent.[1140] Shirley had despatched these orders from New York, where he was laying before a congress of governors his schemes for a new campaign.
We need now to see how Dieskau’s defeat had been the result of the third of the expeditions of the campaign just brought to a close.
Before the arrival of Braddock, Shirley had begun (January, 1755) arrangements for an attack on Crown Point,—a project confirmed, as we have seen, by the council at Alexandria, where William Johnson, whom Shirley had already named, was approved as the commander. Johnson, as a young Irishman of no military experience, had been sent over twenty years before by his uncle, Sir Peter Warren, the admiral, to look after some lands of his in the Mohawk Valley. Settling here and building a house, about ten years earlier than this, he had called it first Mount Johnson, though when it was fortified, at a later day, it was usually called Fort Johnson.[1141] It was the seat of numerous conferences with the Indians, over whom Johnson gained an ascendency, which he constantly turned to the advantage of the English.
The provincials who assembled, first at Albany and then at the carrying place between the Hudson and Lake George, were mostly New Englanders, and a Connecticut man, General Phineas Lyman, was placed second in command. The French were not without intelligence of their enemy’s purpose, derived, as already said, from the captured papers of Braddock. So Dieskau, who had come over, as we have seen, with reinforcements, was ordered to Lake Champlain instead of Oswego, as had been the original intention.
SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON.
From a plate in the London Mag., Sept., 1756; which is also the original of prints in the Doc. Hist. N. Y., ii. 545, and in Hough’s Pouchot, i. 181. Cf. also Stone’s Life of Johnson; Simms’s Trappers of N. Y.; Perry’s Amer. Episc. Church, i. 331; Entick’s General Hist. of the Late War (London, 1765); J. C. Smith’s Brit. Mezzotint Portraits, iii. 1342 (by Adams, engraved by Spooner).