On the evening of May 24, Washington received disconcerting news that a French detachment had crossed the Youghiogeny River eighteen miles away. He decided to establish a defensive position at a place called the Great Meadows (near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, today), a remote, grassy area that was to figure prominently in the Washington saga. With little premonition of the disaster ahead, Washington told Dinwiddie of his plans and struck a note of juvenile bravado: “We have with nature’s assistance made a good entrenchment and by clearing the bushes out of these meadows prepared a charming field for an encounter.”
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At the same time, Washington alluded to a disturbing episode: his sentries had heard rustling noises at night in the camp and didn’t know whether it was French interlopers or six of their own deserters. The men had fired at this unseen menace, prompting Washington to keep his men by their guns until daybreak. This episode coincided with reports from Christopher Gist that fifty boisterous French soldiers had invaded his nearby wilderness cabin, vowing to kill his cow and smash “everything in the house.”
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Gist also told of suspicious tracks that presumably belonged to this shadowy band. The Half King confirmed that the French had set up camp about seven miles away.
At this jittery moment, Washington switched into a more aggressive mode and decided to hunt down the French contingent. Afterward he would evoke a nightmarish march in which he and forty men trudged through sheets of rain, “in a night as dark as pitch,” along a path so narrow they had to travel single file. On this moonless night, they kept stumbling against each other in the black void, and seven soldiers went astray in the woods. This harrowing atmosphere is important in understanding Washington’s hair-trigger response to the upcoming situation.
On the morning of May 28, Washington and the Half King decided to pounce on the French intruders. Washington was convinced of their hostile intentions by the stealthy way they had moved about. As he afterward explained, the French “came secretly and sought after the most hidden retreats … and remained hid for whole days together and that no more than five miles from us. From thence they sent spies to reconnoiter our camp.”
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Washington’s sense of the situation, however faulty, likely predisposed him to launch a preemptive attack.
Early that morning the Half King led him to a “low obscure place” where thirty-five Frenchmen lay encamped in a secluded glen, surrounded by rocks. For Washington, this “skulking place” underscored the clandestine nature of the French mission. He marched bravely at the head of his column, placing himself in the most vulnerable position as they approached the sheltered hollow. With Washington’s men in front of them and the Indians slipping behind them to block their escape, the French were encircled. According to Washington’s version of events, the French soldiers, when they spied the British, instantly scurried for their arms and unleashed a brisk fire. Washington gave orders to fire in return, and his men ripped off two quick volleys. Trapped on low ground, the ambushed French soon threw down their arms and surrendered. The casualty count showed a lopsided contest in which ten French were killed and another twenty-one were captured, compared with only one dead and two or three wounded on Washington’s side. Clearly, Washington and his men overpowered the French before they had a chance to respond, making it seem unlikely that the latter had fired first. The whole bloody affair was wrapped up in fifteen minutes.
What converted this local skirmish into a worldwide incident was the identity of one victim: Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville, thirty-five, who bore an important diplomatic message to the British, demanding their evacuation from the Ohio Country. According to one account, as Jumonville read this ultimatum, the Half King stepped forward, split open his head with a hatchet, then dipped his hands into the skull, rinsed them with the victim’s brains, and scalped him. What is beyond dispute is that Washington abruptly found himself presiding over atrocities, as his Indian allies swooped down on the remaining Frenchmen “to knock the poor, unhappy wounded on the head and bereave them of their scalps,” as he wrote.
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This was a curiously ironic way to describe a bloodbath, as if Washington wished to distance himself from the horror or pretend it was merely routine. The Indians’ behavior placed him in an excruciating predicament, for he didn’t wish to repudiate them after their victory or threaten their alliance. We don’t know how many Frenchmen were murdered by Indian hatchets rather than British muskets.
In their radically different version of events, the French claimed that they awoke that morning to find themselves hemmed in by Indians and Englishmen, with the latter firing first. Through an interpreter, Monsieur de Jumonville beseeched the English to cease firing, and when they did, he read aloud his ultimatum. The French claimed that, while reading this message, Jumonville was shot through the head by a musket and that the remaining French would have been annihilated had not the Indians rushed between them and the English, averting further bloodshed.
Washington may have exaggerated the British role in killing the Frenchmen to establish his own military credentials. Whatever the exact sequence of events, he overstated his certainty that the French were spying on him and stalking his movements; his letter to Dinwiddie had admitted to doubts about the nocturnal spying incident. Afterward, when the French prisoners insisted that they had come only to deliver a warning, Washington scoffed at the claim. “
They informed me that they had been sent with a summons to order me to depart
. A plausible pretense to discover our camp and to obtain the knowledge of our forces and our situation!”
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A genuine diplomat, he maintained, would have traveled straight to him and presented his message in a forthright manner. Washington was convinced that French espionage was merely the prelude to a murderous assault on his men. Still, the French party was so small that, whatever its true intent, it hardly seemed to constitute a dire threat to the British.
The French version likewise lacks plausibility in several particulars. It is hard to believe that Washington would have allowed a diplomatic messenger to be shot in cold blood, as the French insisted. After all, the previous fall he himself had been in an analogous situation, delivering a stiffly worded warning to the French. He was too cautious to jeopardize his career by murdering an ambassador. On the other hand, the French had already seized the Forks of the Ohio, and Washington may have felt the French and British empires were now at war in all but name. It also strains credulity that the Indians heroically thrust themselves between the French and the British. The Half King had recommended harsh measures against the French detachment, and in letters to Dinwiddie, Washington disclosed that the Indian chief circulated French scalps among friendly tribes as war trophies. The French version seems like a patent attempt to curry political favor with the Indians by exonerating them of blame for the savagery.
On May 29 Washington sat down in his camp at the Great Meadows to explain the apparent massacre to Governor Dinwiddie. Instead of turning straight to this fateful confrontation, he bizarrely devoted the first eight paragraphs to fresh complaints about colonial pay, which, he said, “debarred” him from “the pleasure of good living.”
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He informed Dinwiddie that he had told Colonel Fairfax that he intended to resign over the issue, but Fairfax had dissuaded him. Once again Washington feigned indifference to money and volunteered to serve without pay rather than accept meager compensation. When he finally got around to the Jumonville episode, he insisted that the French had flitted about likes spies and assassins. They had “sought one of the most secret retirements, fitter for a deserter than an ambassador to encamp in—stayed there two or 3 days [and] sent spies to reconnoiter our camp, as we are told, though they deny it.”
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For the next few weeks, Washington passed along to Dinwiddie every scrap of intelligence gleaned from French deserters that might strengthen his case.
To his younger brother Jack, Washington sent an account that showcased his leadership style in battle. Instead of hanging back in the rear, Washington had led by example and exposed himself unflinchingly to enormous risk. “I fortunately escaped without a wound, though the right wing where I stood was exposed to and received all the enemy’s fire and was the part where the man was killed and the rest wounded.” He also engaged in some youthful boasting. “I can with truth assure you, I heard bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.”
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Instead of being traumatized by battle, he wanted to illustrate his coolness under fire. When King George II encountered Washington’s blithe comments about the “charming” sound of bullets in a London periodical, he detected a false note of swagger. “He would not say so if he had been used to hear many,” the king said acerbically.
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Aware that the large French army at the Forks would soon get wind of the massacre and retaliate swiftly in overwhelming numbers, Washington vowed not to “give up one inch of what we have gained.”
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He hastily ordered his men at the Great Meadows to dig trenches, drive in pointed stakes, and build a crude, circular, palisade-style stockade that he dubbed Fort Necessity. While the troops busily braced for an attack, Colonel Joshua Fry tumbled from his horse and died on May 31. Thus, at age twenty-two, George Washington took full command of the Virginia Regiment, in yet another case of his being promoted to higher things by events beyond his control.
Surely Washington must have wondered whether Governor Dinwiddie would applaud his encounter with the French or condemn it as violating his instructions. On June 1 Dinwiddie sent him a letter that removed any lingering doubt: he construed the clash as a famous victory. Warmly congratulating Washington for “the very agreeable account” of the episode, he labeled it a success on which “I heartily congratulate you, as it may give a testimony to the Ind[ian]s that the French are not invincible w[he]n fairly engaged with the English.”
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In the next letter, Dinwiddie heaped further praise on Washington’s “prudent measures” and said he was sending four thousand black and four thousand white strings of wampum, fortified by three barrels of rum, for Indian diplomacy. At heart, however, Dinwiddie knew that Washington had acted rashly and exceeded instructions, for when he wrote to the Board of Trade in London, he converted Washington and his men into minor partners of their Indian allies. As he wrote, “This little skirmish was by the Half King and their Indians. We were as auxiliaries to them, as my orders to the Commander of our Forces [were] to be on the defensive.”
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While the folks at home embraced him as an improbable hero, Washington was denigrated in England as a reckless young warrior and in France as an outright assassin. He would have been crestfallen to know that, for some high-ranking folks in London, his behavior only confirmed that provincial officers couldn’t be trusted. “
Washington
and many
such
may have courage and resolution,” Lord Albemarle wrote to the Duke of Newcastle, “but they have no knowledge or experience in our [military] profession; consequently there can be no dependence on them!”
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Destiny had now conferred upon Washington a pivotal place in colonial, and even global, affairs, for the Jumonville incident was recognized as the opening shot that precipitated the French and Indian War, known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War. In the words of Sir Horace Walpole in London, “The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.”
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AS HE STEELED HIMSELF at Fort Necessity for the enraged French onslaught, Washington squabbled with Dinwiddie over the unequal treatment of provincial officers. Despite his good fortune, he brooded on the penalties he suffered as a colonial. He had no quarrel, he told Dinwiddie, with the appointment of Colonel James Innes, a veteran Scottish officer leading a North Carolina regiment, as the new commander in chief to replace Joshua Fry. And he enjoyed cordial relations with Major George Muse, who brought two hundred men to Fort Necessity and deferred to Washington as leader of the Virginia Regiment. What nettled Washington was the imminent arrival of South Carolina Independents under James Mackay, a senior officer who held his captaincy by royal commission. Mackay’s company was composed mostly of colonial soldiers, but it was part of the regular British Army. This renewed the thorny issue of whether a regular captain could lord it over Washington, who held a superior provincial rank. Washington assured Dinwiddie that he would “endeavor to make all my officers show Captain Mackay all the respect due to his rank and merit, but [I] should have been particularly obliged if your Honor had declared whether he was under my command or independent of it.”
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When Captain Mackay arrived with one hundred men on June 14, he quickly asserted his prerogatives over Colonel Washington and staked out a separate camp-site. When Washington sent over the parole and countersign to be used, Mackay made it crystal clear that he wasn’t bound by orders from a lowly colonial colonel. He also wouldn’t allow his South Carolinians to join the Virginians in an important road-building operation, since Washington could pay only inferior colonial wages. This high-handed behavior dealt a stinging rebuke to Washington, who was fighting to protect a British Empire that insisted on consigning him to inferior status. Increasingly, he found himself fighting one war against the French and an equally acrimonious one behind the lines with his British brethren.
As it happened, Washington had much graver problems than his minor interpersonal drama with Captain Mackay. On June 18 he huddled with the Half King and other chieftains for three days to plot strategy against the French. In the end, the Indians concluded that Washington and his flimsy fortress couldn’t shield them against the huge French force gathering at Fort Duquesne. This ended their short-lived alliance and threw young Washington back on his own resources. In his diary, he inveighed against the faithless Indians as “treacherous devils who had been sent by the French as spies” and could turn against his men at any time. The Half King, for his part, painted a portrait of Washington as a “good-natured” but naively inept young commander who “took upon him to command the Indians as his slaves” and refused to “take advice from Indians.”
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He derided Fort Necessity as “that little thing upon the meadow.”
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