was so routine in North America that even full-scale battles and reductions of opposing forts, involving the deaths of hundreds of men on both sides, did not provoke declarations of war. Until 1756, wars could be generated only by European matters. By the early 1750s, the race was on between the French, pushing down from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River and then to and down the Mississippi, and the English (Americans in practice but constantly seeking British military reinforcement when challenged), settling and exploring ever westward, for control of the Ohio country and the vast hinterland of North America. Alert American landowners, including young George Washington, 21 in 1753, were large land acquirers west of the Alleghenies. The French, who had an entirely developed rival claim, constructed a series of forts connecting Quebec to their traders in Illinois. These forts were at Presque Isle on the south shore of Lake Erie, another on a tributary of the Allegheny River, a third on the Allegheny itself, and the fourth at the meeting of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers to form the Ohio, the site of the modern city of Pittsburgh (whose name gives a hint of the outcome of the Anglo-French rivalry).
The French fort at the forks of the Ohio was called Fort Duquesne, after the builder, a French naval officer who was entrusted with the Canadian military command, and mobilized 11,000 Canadians, trained them thoroughly by colonial standards, and pressed south with them organized into 165 companies, supported by thousands of Indians whom the French had enticed with generous offers of trading rights. The Indians tended to take the promises of the French more seriously than those of the English, because the French seemed much less inclined to people the New World themselves with immigration, rather than just taking what the fur trade and other commerce would yield. The British had planned a fort on the same site and the rivalry, in the names of Duquesne and Pitt, and over the same geography, presaged future conflicts over many colonial places claimed as a matter of right by different nationalities. Duquesne expended the lives of over 400 of his men and spent over four million livres, erecting his forts and developing trails between them, but the effort did wonders to galvanize American colonial opinion, especially in the unison of the chorus it raised up to London to repel the French interloper.
In the autumn of 1753 an enterprising 21-year-old Adjutant George Washington volunteered to carry a letter to the French at the forks of the Ohio, asking them to “desist” and withdraw. The governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, sent 200 men with Washington for this mission. Before Washington got clear of the Allegheny Mountains, one of Duquesne’s officers had repulsed the British contingent that tried to occupy the coveted site, majestic to this day, where the Ohio River begins. Undaunted and showing a boldness, indeed impetuosity, a trait for which he would not be well-known at the height of his career, Washington chose to advance against the French, who greatly outnumbered him. Washington fell upon a 35-man French and Indian scouting party and killed the commander of the French unit, a M. Jumonville, and nine others. Accounts differ and Washington’s own is a truncated and rather self-serving description of a provoked and measured response, rather than, as is claimed by the French and some of the colonial militiamen, a massacre begun by an Indian ally of the Americans who sank his hatchet into Jumonville’s skull, preparatory to relieving him of his scalp. The young Adjutant Washington, after the astonishing precocity of carrying out an act of war of one Great Power on another, on the instructions of Dinwiddie, who had no authority to order anything of the kind, then sagely retreated to a hastily constructed stockade, christened—in a divine service where Washington, not a demonstrably religious man, presided—Fort Necessity.
It was a modest affair and was soon invested by 700 French and Canadians and 100 of their Indian allies. The French rained down musket-fire on the garrison, which Dinwiddie had bulked up to 400, and at sunset of the first day of the siege, Washington’s force panicked and broke into the rum issue. The French mercifully offered the Americans, retirement from Fort Necessity provided they returned French prisoners, promised not to return to the Ohio Valley within a year, left two hostages behind as an earnest, and admitted the “assassination” of Jumonville. Washington accepted all this, having taken 30 dead and 70 wounded, compared with three French dead and a handful of wounded. He retired, with most of his men carrying the wounded and the corpses of their fallen comrades. Most of his force deserted and scattered at the first opportunity. He rightly counted himself lucky, but had effectively accepted responsibility for starting one of the most important wars of modern times, and with an uncivilized act at that. Washington has presented posterity a rather bowdlerized version of this fiasco and his subsequent renown has somewhat obscured the facts, though it must be said that he was personally brave and collected, and swiftly seized the prospect of honorable deliverance when it appeared.
Even the placatory British prime minister, Newcastle, was outraged and worried when he learned of this debacle. He relied on what he portentously described as his continental “system” of alliances with the Spanish, Austrian Empire, Danes, Hanover, and some other German states to contain France, while he launched a counter-blow in America. With George II’s favored son, the Duke of Cumberland, Newcastle concerted a plan for sending two Irish regiments out to America under the command of Major General Edward Braddock, a spit-and-polish professional with no experience or knowledge at all of American warfare, to uproot the French fort system that Duquesne had built. Cumberland blew any security with public announcements about the new armed mission, which came to the attention of the French ambassador in London as to any informed person in the British capital. The French rushed to send reinforcements to Canada, though they suffered from the ice-shortened season for dispatching forces up the St. Lawrence.
3. THE OUTBREAK OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR
The English position in those colonies was not much strengthened by the arrival of Braddock and his Irishmen in February 1755. The colonists resented Braddock’s high-handed manner and the British army’s rules, which were that any British officer, even a lieutenant, could order about like pirates any colonial officer, even Washington and his few peers, and that the colonial militias were subject to British military discipline. This was heavy going for these rough and ready frontiersmen, who were unaccustomed to taking orders, other than at the approach of and during outright exchanges of live fire. Nor were they much enamored of submitting themselves to a regimen that was unsparing in meting out floggings and even drum-head executions.
From May to July 1754 in Albany, New York, there was what was called the Albany Congress, to pursue unity of the colonies. The leading figure at the Congress was the ambitious Philadelphia inventor, scientist, printer, postmaster, and diplomat Benjamin Franklin. Behind his jaunty humor there lurked a sophisticated political operator who would prove himself more than able to master the sternest and most tortuous challenges that could be posed in the chancelleries of Europe. He was already the principal public figure among the colonists, and Washington was a rising young officer and landowner, the one an amiable intellectual and sly maneuverer, the other a physically imposing and capable officer, though personally stiff and somewhat limited by being a plantation inheritor and, beyond elemental education, an autodidact. But both were investors in and advocates of trans-Allegheny development, and both had a vision of a rapidly expanding America that would brook no interference from the French, and whose attachment to the British was essentially much less a reflexive submission to the Crown than a tactical association with the presumed facilitator of their local ambitions.
Franklin had already done a stint as Pennsylvania’s representative in London. However flickering might be their imperial enthusiasm, the colonists had no ability at this point to replace the British with any locally generated or spontaneous cohesion. The Albany Congress broke up in disharmony, and the Quaker majority in the Pennsylvania Assembly, dominated by and servile to the Penn family, roundly deserted Franklin and repudiated any notion of colonial union for the unholy purpose of armed combat, especially for the purpose of enriching the less pious of their number in extra-territorial speculation.
Braddock started off with a fantastically ambitious plan for blotting the French out of the continent, which Cumberland and his entourage had devised in complete ignorance of North American conditions or of the likely correlation of forces, and in defiance of Newcastle’s chimerical hopes of avoiding war with France. Admiral Edward Boscawen was to blockade
