As a schoolboy, I remember leafing through the pictures of a history text and being captivated by an engraving of General Edward Braddock and his army marching in file along a newly cut path through the American wilderness. Behind every tree and rock crouched Indians and French troops waiting to annihilate his army.
What we call the French and Indian War is known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War (1754-63). Winston Churchill referred to it as the “first world war” because it was fought throughout Europe and extended to North and South America and to both Indies. It started when the lieutenant governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, sent a 21-year-old militia major named George Washington with a message for the French to clear out of the disputed Ohio Valley. “The Ohio Valley,” says David Preston, “represented the confluence not only of three rivers but of three peoples—Indian, French Canadian, and British.” But Washington was pulled into a skirmish which sparked the larger war: “I heard the bullets whistle,” he wrote, “and believe me there is something charming in the sound.” Upon reading this, King George II quipped: “He would not say so if he had been used to hear many.”
The French sought to secure the Ohio territory by erecting Fort Duquesne at the convergence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. Britain responded by appointing General Braddock commander in chief of all British and colonial forces, with orders to take Fort Duquesne and drive the French from the Ohio Valley. Parliament expected the colonies to contribute to a common fund and work together in defeating the French and Indians.
Arriving in Virginia in February 1755, Braddock soon found out the sad state of disorder in the American colonies. Food and stores, horses and wagons had been ordered months before Braddock’s arrival, but little was ready when he appeared, and it looked as if the expedition was at an end. But Braddock was able, resourceful, and good on the ground. The expedition was saved by the intervention of Benjamin Franklin, the great exemplar of the American genius for settling problems of immediate necessity: He procured 150 wagons and 1,500 horses as supplies, enabling the campaign to proceed. Braddock declared Franklin “almost the first Instance of Integrity, Address and
Ability, that I have seen in all these Provinces.”
General Braddock sought to conquer the French the old Roman way, by building a road across the wilderness, over the Alleghenies and into western Pennsylvania. Certainly, he had to do so in order to transport the heavy cannon necessary for besieging the French fort. Three hundred axe men preceded his army, hacking and hewing a road for 1,500 soldiers including militia from New York, Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas. Among them was Washington, who served as an aide to Braddock.
In Montcalm and Wolfe (1884), Francis Parkman described the road this way:
It was a good day when the army traveled 10 miles on their grueling journey of over 115 miles—an enormous drudgery through heat, humidity, drenching rain, and every manner of biting and blood-sucking insects. In a country where rapid, stealthy movement brought success, George Washington bristled at halting, “to level every mole hill and to erect bridges over every brook.”
David Preston’s excellent new book presents a fresh look at Edward Braddock, challenging “the conventional notion that [his] arrogance or blunders were chiefly responsible for . . . [this] defeat. This has depreciated the victory that Indian and French forces won by their superior discipline, tactical decisions and leadership.”
The Battle of Monongahela was essentially a race to see which side would get to Fort Duquesne first. The French rushed (successfully) to get reinforcements to the fort while Braddock sought to take it before this could occur. Braddock also anticipated a siege. But on July 9, 1755, the reinforced French left the fort to attack Braddock. His convoy marched in columns through an old forest; instead of breaking the column and letting the men take cover behind trees, as Washington and the colonial troops urged, Braddock tried to keep his men in the discipline of columns. Were it not for Washington and others, Braddock’s army would have been destroyed. But Washington fondly remembered Edward Braddock: His sash, along with a pair of pistols the dying general gave him, are still on display at Mount Vernon. Washington always believed that Braddock was “too severely treated. He was one of the honestest and best men of the British officers with whom I was acquainted.”
Napoleon used to ask before appointing a general, “Is he lucky?” Edward Braddock was not lucky. Yet Braddock’s victory, writes Preston, was “the military road that he had constructed across the mountains, which was instrumental in securing future British control over the region.” In 1758, Fort Duquesne fell to the British, and France went on to lose all its possessions in North America. The fort was renamed Fort Pitt for the victorious British prime minister, William Pitt; over the site now stands downtown Pittsburgh.
Patrick J. Walsh is a writer in Quincy, Massachusetts.
