JUMONVILLE, Pa. — As you head east, winding up the original national road and reach the peak of the Summit Mountain along the imposing Chestnut Ridge, if you are not paying close enough attention, you could easily miss the sign pointing left towards the national park that preserves one of the most important battles in early American history.
It was here that a young Lt. Col. George Washington, who was leading a company of colonial militia for the Crown — along with a handful of Mingo warriors and their chief, Tanacharison, known by local frontiersmen as the Half King — took by surprise a force of 35 French Canadians commanded by Joseph de Villiers de Jumonville.
The short-lived skirmish ultimately led to Jumonville’ s death, the circumstances of which are still unclear. Some accounts detail the Half King impulsively crushing Jumonville’s skull with a tomahawk after he had already surrendered. Other accounts say he died during the swift battle.
Jumonville’s death outraged his half-brother who was at the backwoods outpost fort in Pittsburgh. Swearing retaliation, he organized his troops and within a couple of weeks attacked Washington and the young Virginians’ swiftly and poorly constructed garrison at Fort Necessity.
And on another July 4, 22 years before the Declaration of Independence was signed, Washington, badly outnumbered, his troops either injured, dead, or drunk, surrendered for the first and only time in his storied military career. Making matters worse, Washington signed a document, written in French, a language he did not know, admitting Jumonville was assassinated.
A deeply embarrassing mistake, Washington was ridiculed, resulting in the British statesman Horace Walpole referring to the entire moment as “a volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America that set the world on fire.” Horace Walpole was right.
The battle would also mark the beginning of the French and Indian War, a seven-year war that ultimately led to the American Revolution when the Crown, heavily in debt after the world war, taxed the colonists to pay it down.
That tax also led to the very treasonous actions of a group of statesmen, revolutionaries, and intellectuals to put their signature on a document on a very different July 4.
In truth the document was signed on July 2, a day John Adams mistakenly believed would be “the most memorable epoch in the history of America” when he wrote to his wife Abigail that it “will be celebrated, by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary festival. … It ought to be solemnized with pomp and Parade, with games, sports, guns, bells, bonfire and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.”
Since Congress didn’t ratify until July 4, that instead became the official mark of our independence — yet certainly not the mark of the end of our struggle. In fact, it was only beginning.
All across the country today in small towns, like nearby Hopwood and Uniontown and Addison, flags will drape telephone poles, parades will line streets, and picnics and barbecues will be filled with families, friends, and neighbors all coming together to celebrate that moment.
Hopefully in those careless moments of summer revelry they will also pause and reflect on the boldness, courage, and fear all of those men who signed that document felt, as well as the hope they shared that it would eventually lead 13 colonies to the freedoms and liberties they believed were sent from God to all men and women.
They understood the values and virtues of freedom and liberty, they understood it was something they would have to fight for, not to be given to them. They also understood the burden and weight that it takes to sustain those liberties and freedoms. They took up those burdens willingly, and I suspect they hoped each generation after them would as well bear those same burdens, to assure that liberty would survive and thrive.
Washington was in Manhattan on July 4, 1776, when word arrived that the Continental Congress had formally ratified the Declaration of Independence, his challenges were not behind him, but ahead. He had no idea the next nine years of his life would mostly be spent on battlefields, away from his beloved Mount Vernon, with his men often volleying between desertion and starvation and uncertain about his leadership qualities. Nobody in those years knew if the country they wanted to form out of 13 very different colonies with very different needs would ever exist.
Would their villages and towns be pillaged? Would they hang from the gallows? Would their fortunes be erased?
Washington took to his diary saying the time is now at hand which will determine the new country’s fate, “Our own Country’s Honor, all call upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion, and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world.
“Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world, that a Freeman contending for Liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.”
Perhaps Thomas Jefferson said it best when writing to James Madison from Paris in June of 1785 of his homeland that he missed dearly, “I sincerely wish you may find it convenient to come here. The pleasure of the trip will be less than you expect, but the utility greater. It will make you adore your own country, its soil, its climate, its equality, liberty, laws, people & manners.
“My god! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy? I confess I had no idea of it myself. While we shall see multiplied instances of Europeans going to live in America, I will venture to say no man now living will ever see an instance of an American removing to settle in Europe & continuing there.”
Something we should all consider every day.
