O n Memorial Day weekend, we recall the long train of sacrifices, dating back to the 17th century and continuing to this day, that laid the foundation upon which American society rests. It hasn’t always been glory and victory. Tuesday marks the 270th anniversary of a blunder that set the stage for a humiliating defeat — with vast consequences nobody could have foreseen on May 28, 1754, at what came to be known as Jumonville Glen. Those consequences ultimately included a global war, the American and French Revolutions, and the career of the young Virginian who led the ill-starred expedition: George Washington.
The Unstable Periphery
What became the six-decade cascade of wars from 1754 to 1815 started modestly. Nobody was looking to remake the world, or thought they had it in their power to do so.
England and France had been at each other’s throats on and off since 1066. Their rivalry entered a more intensely continuous phase after 1688–89, when the English “Glorious Revolution” put a final end to French efforts to control the English throne. The Anglo–French wars of 1689–1748 were ultimately inconclusive, but as often happens when the balance of power seems static, it is the periphery that strikes the match. In 1754, that periphery was the Ohio country, the territory west of the Appalachian mountains that begins in the Allegheny River valley, near present-day Pittsburgh.
In 1754, armies, explorers, and traders could travel no faster than the horse on land or the wind in a sail by sea. Information could move no faster than people. Nothing moved by wire, motor, rail, or air. Light came only from sun and fire. These things had all stayed constant since prehistoric man. That affected both politics and war.
Europeans by then had been colonizing the Western Hemisphere for 262 years. The brief skirmish that took place in May 1754 was therefore almost as distant from the voyage of Christopher Columbus as it is from our own day. Yet, the Americas remained a backwater. European power ran only so far. The Europeans had secured their own continent from external invasion after a thousand years of incursions from the Islamic world, and they had proven that no native polity in Africa or the Americas could stand against them. But the imperial world of the 19th century was still far in the future. China and Japan still dealt haughtily with Westerners, who posed no threat as yet there or to the interiors of India, Africa, or the Ottoman Empire.
To a large extent, the same was true of the interior of North America between the Alleghenies and the Rockies. The Ohio country was informally controlled by the Iroquois Confederacy, which itself acted through weaker local tribes. It therefore served as a strategic buffer between the French presence in the Mississippi Valley and the British colonies on the Eastern Seaboard, in much the same way that the smaller German states of the day formed a buffer between France and the Austrian empire. If the French could control the Ohio country, they could move a step closer to encircling the British colonies along the coast; if the British gained control, they could threaten the line of communications between French Canada and the Illinois country along the river. A French encirclement, in turn, could divert naval strength that the British needed for further wars in Europe.
What followed was a mix of slow transatlantic communications, limited European grasp of North American maps and treaties, vague orders, inexperienced and financially conflicted frontline leadership, and volatile native allies.
In the fall of 1753, the British cabinet in London, which may not have been entirely clear on the scope of British claims in the Ohio country, authorized the lieutenant governor of Virginia to raise a military expedition to resist French encroachment, but only to act “within the undoubted limits of his majesty’s province.” What undoubted limits? Virginia lieutenant governor Robert Dinwiddie — effectively the chief executive of the colony, with the royal governor a figurehead — was heavily invested in the Ohio Company’s land speculation and thus had every incentive to take the broadest view of whatever London authorized.
Yet, without more clarity about the exact boundaries at issue and without good intelligence as to French intentions or capabilities, King George II had signed an order telling the Virginians that if they found the French building forts and refused to leave when asked, “we . . . strictly charge and command you to drive them off by force of arms.” They were to do this without a professional standing army. Virginians hadn’t raised their own military expedition in more than half a century.
The French colonial leaders, like their British counterparts, exploited geographic distance from the throne to push an aggressive view of French claims. French Canadian governor the Marquis de Duquesne was building a chain of forts from Lake Erie to the Mississippi. As would often be the case in 18th- and 19th-century conflicts far from London and Paris, the men on the spot made decisions that committed their nations.
The Men on the Spot
The man on the spot for the English was Washington. He was 21 years old in 1753, turning 22 in February 1754. Trained as a surveyor and not yet the master of Mount Vernon, he decided to take up soldiering for the first time in imitation of his older brother Lawrence, after Lawrence died of tuberculosis in July 1752. In early 1753, with no military training or background, family connections and Washington’s persistence got him appointed a major overseeing one of Virginia’s four militia districts. When he heard of the expedition Dinwiddie was charged to assemble, Washington rode quickly to the capital in Williamsburg, getting the job by being large, eager, fearless, and a master horseman. His surveying experience may have recommended him to Dinwiddie as well, because the man who could control the making of maps could control what London knew and how Ohio Company land claims could be legally enforced.
Nobody seems to have given much thought to the fact that Washington knew nothing of war or diplomacy and spoke neither French nor the Native American languages. But then, nobody else on the spot was much better qualified. There wasn’t a real professional soldier for a thousand miles. In classic American fashion, a brave citizen would have to do.
Washington made it out to the French position, delivered his ultimatum, and collected extensive intelligence along the way about the location of French forts, the scale of French military presence, and the hostile intent of the French to encircle the British colonies by connecting all the French outposts from Canada to Louisiana. He returned to Williamsburg in January carrying a sealed missive to Dinwiddie in which the French refused to budge.
Washington’s initial expedition had been too small to even contemplate fighting. But after his report on French intentions was printed as a pamphlet in London as The Journal of Major George Washington, Dinwiddie promoted him to lieutenant colonel and authorized him to raise a regiment of 200 men. Washington was to be second in command to Colonel Joshua Fry, a middle-aged, English-born, and Oxford-educated surveyor, schoolmaster, and former business partner of Thomas Jefferson’s father.
On this expedition and his next, however, Washington also had to depend upon an ally he couldn’t control: Tanaghrisson (sometimes rendered as Tanacharison). A born member of the Catawba tribe then in his mid-fifties, Tanaghrisson had risen to a prominent but unstable position among the Seneca, one of the Iroquois Six Nations, into which he had been kidnapped as a youth. The British treated him as a “Half-King,” the Iroquois equivalent of a diplomatic minister. Operating far from the headquarters of any of the Six Nations, however, he was also a man on the spot, and like the British and French colonials he may have bluffed his way into more authority than he really had. In 1752, he had cut a deal with Ohio Company representatives, one of them Washington’s companion the following year. Combined with a possibly sincere (and incorrect) belief that the French posed a greater threat than the British to erect permanent settlements in the Ohio country, Tanaghrisson already had a strong incentive to bring British force to bear against the French.
Moreover, Tanaghrisson had his own internal politics to attend to. With no Iroquois force of his own — the Six Nations then being badly overextended — he needed to maintain his authority with other local tribes (the Mingo, Shawnee, and Delaware) among whom he lived. He reassured the tribes that the British were strong allies, and in February 1754, the British began building a fort that Tanaghrisson represented would justify an anti-French alliance; he even laid the first log himself. But the 40-man British party evacuated in the face of a thousand Frenchmen, leaving Tanaghrisson to lose face and, potentially, authority. The small size of the band that followed him after this setback suggests that his position was deteriorating. What he needed was a polarizing conflict that would encourage the British to back him in power as a necessary ally.
Washington was already en route with 160 men, the vanguard of the Virginia Regiment. The men, recruited with promises of land in the Ohio country, were poorly paid, equipped, and trained, but Washington held them together by force of personality. He was no happier than they were: He bristled at being subordinated to Fry and felt underpaid for his labors, offering to work for free rather than accept the indignity of wages less than those paid to British officers. Washington also pried some reinforcements from Maryland and Pennsylvania by urging their leaders to rouse “the heroic spirit of every free-born Englishman to assert the rights and privileges of our king.” Bluffing, he told Tanaghrisson that Fry was following with a more substantial force, although it was only about a hundred men.
With rumors that the French were nearby, Washington’s men fired blindly into the dark at night. On more reliable reports from Tanaghrisson, Washington decided on May 27 to strike out with a 40-man scouting party, plus Tanaghrisson and a dozen or so of his warriors. They marched all night through a driving rain in such darkness that men kept getting lost or colliding, and arrived exhausted and even more jittery. None had known war. On the morning of May 28, they surrounded a slightly smaller French force commanded by Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville. Jumonville, knowing that he actually had superior numbers at his back, had no intention of fighting but was to deliver to any British forces he encountered an ultimatum similar to the one Washington had carried.
Volleys of gunfire erupted, and there would be extensive debate on who fired first and what followed. Washington himself originally offered a terse description, and — always sensitive about his honor — was never really honest about what occurred. The French produced their own propaganda version, in which Washington had ordered Jumonville to be gunned down while surrendering. But most historians today, fortified by multiple accounts and forensic examination of the site, agree on the general outlines. While it is possible that an individual Frenchman may have fired a stray shot, Washington’s men fired the first volley, on his orders, and wounded a number of the French. Jumonville then had his men set down their arms to surrender, while their commander attempted to deliver the ultimatum.
Tanaghrisson, who knew French, was not about to let this expedition devolve into another round of European note exchanges. While Washington was preparing to review the ultimatum, Tanaghrisson charged forward with his men, split Jumonville’s head open with a hatchet, and ritually washed his hands in Jumonville’s brains while his men butchered the French wounded. Washington, unaccustomed to battle and probably focused initially on the ultimatum, appears to have been too shocked to stop Tanaghrisson before it was too late. His ally had made a war for which he would be blamed, and which would cover half the globe.
In Washington’s report home, he famously wrote that “I heard bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.” George II quipped, “He would not say so if he had been used to hear many.” He soon enough would.
Necessity
Tanaghrisson’s gambit proved disastrous for all involved. To Washington’s misfortune, the French force sent out to retaliate was led by Jumonville’s incensed brother. Washington, who had assumed full command after Fry died from a May 31 fall from his horse, received 200 reinforcements and decided to go on the offensive, but he lacked good intelligence on the size of the French opposition. His Native American allies (even Tanaghrisson) ended up bailing out on him; some of the tribes even switched to the French side. Tanaghrisson would die of a fever in October, his power play having failed badly.
Surrounded in a makeshift stockade mordantly dubbed Fort Necessity, Washington lost a third of his men and ended up agreeing to a humiliating surrender on July 4, of all days. Worse, the French presented him in the process with a document that amounted to a confession to war crimes in killing Jumonville. Washington, reviewing the rain-soaked confession by candlelight, in a language he couldn’t read, with his interpreter wounded and his men dropping like flies, decided that he had to sign what amounted to a blank check of his personal honor and dignity in order to prevent the remainder of his men from being massacred. The confession was interpreted in Paris as proof of British provocation; in London, it was treated as an unacceptably extortionate affront to British dignity. Each side had its own facts. War would follow.
The Long Fuse
Under different circumstances, Washington’s expedition might have resulted in a limited colonial war between Britain and France, which is how things proceeded for the next two years. Instead, news of renewed Anglo–French war fell into a dry tinderbox of Central European rivalry for control of Germany. The core conflict of the 1740s revolved around the rising ambitions of Prussia and the unprecedented succession of a woman, Maria Theresa, to the Austrian throne. Both crowned in their twenties in 1740, Maria Theresa and Frederick II (the Great) of Prussia could not have been more opposite personalities, and this came to be reflected in the posture of their states. Their mutual loathing and bitter rivalry over nearly four decades would polarize Central Europe every bit as much as the Anglo–French rivalry did to Western Europe. The contest between Austria and Prussia would not be resolved until 1866.
The two German states switched sides in 1756, with Austria abandoning its long-standing British ally to side with France, and Prussia abandoning France to side with Britain. Frederick, never one to dither, peremptorily invaded Saxony without even consulting his allies in London. The resulting Seven Years’ War (known here as the French and Indian War, and by other names in other corners of the globe) ran until 1763 across Europe from Portugal to Sweden, with major conflicts in North America and India and minor ones in South America and Africa. It is sometimes regarded as the first world war. It ended French possessions in North America. It had major ripples in India, where the British victory at Plassey in 1757 marked a fundamental shift in Britain’s rise to hegemony, while the rival French presence on the subcontinent began to wither.
The fiscal and territorial outcomes of the Seven Years’ War paved the path to the American Revolution. The American colonists, freed of the French threat, chafed against British efforts to pay for the war and resented British attempts to prevent settlement in the Ohio country even by men promised land there in exchange for military service. The fiscal strain on the French Bourbon monarchy of the French intervention in the American Revolution, together with the ideas unleashed in America, paved the path to the French Revolution. War opens door after door to hallways nobody can foresee at the time.
The Longer Lessons
Washington landed on his feet. Dinwiddie and the authorities in London preferred to tout him as the first American war hero. He took away hard and valuable lessons about imprudence, troublemaking allies, untrained troops, and British snobbery toward its colonials. Unpaid land claims in the Ohio country would be a major grievance for Washington against the British. But he bore no ill will toward either the French or the Native American tribes, with whom he would deal as allies or respected neighbors in the future. He lived to fight another day. But many of the men who marched west with him did not. So it ever is with our wars.