The American Revolution

• Chapter One •

In Order to Be Free

May 1754–May 1775

From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen not to be extinguished. Without consuming, . . . it winds its progress from nation to nation, and conquers by a silent operation.

Man finds himself changed . . . and discovers . . . that the strength and powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it, and that, in order to be free, it is sufficient that he wills it.

—Thomas Paine

Rights of Man

It had been an awful night—moonless, pitch-black, with a steady, pelting rain that dripped through the bark lean-tos in which thirty-five French-Canadian soldiers had struggled to sleep. As the men emerged into the early-morning light on May 28, 1754, yawning, stretching their stiff limbs, struggling to get cook-fires going to prepare their regular ration of biscuits and split-pea soup, a third of them had only a few minutes to live.

They were camped in a rocky hollow in the heart of what the British called the Ohio Country, the vast territory along the Ohio River between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. It was claimed by both Protestant Britain and Catholic France—ancient enemies that had fought three wars just within the previous sixty-five years. Each of those conflicts—King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War, and King George’s War—had begun in Europe and only afterward spread to North America.

The new war that colonial officials in both London and Paris were already preparing for would reverse that process—beginning with a minor skirmish near the forks of the Ohio River but soon moving beyond the continent to engulf much of the world. Each imperial power was convinced that control of the Ohio Country was the key to controlling the heart of the continent. Both asserted their ownership of it. Robert Dinwiddie, the lieutenant governor of Virginia, proclaimed it “notoriously known to be the property of the Crown of Great Britain.” A French commander responded that it was “incontestably” the property of his king.

A host of Indian Nations made their homes in the Ohio Country, happy to trade with foreigners but wary of their permanent settlement and unwilling to give up their own independence. And so, when in 1753, the French sent canoes filled with troops from Canada to build and garrison a chain of forts meant to link Canada with Louisiana and keep the thirteen contiguous British colonies clinging to the Atlantic coast, some Indians were convinced that French settlers were sure to follow the forts and occupy their lands.

A Seneca spokesman named Tanaghrisson, whose people belonged to the powerful six-nation Haudenosaunee Confederacy, with close ties to the British, sent a message to Dinwiddie: “We do not want the French to come against us at all,” it said, “but very much want our good brothers the English to be with us.”

Dinwiddie owned shares in the Ohio Company, a group of speculators who had been promised a grant of 200,000 acres in the valley provided that they managed to construct a fort there to protect prospective settlers. In 1754, he sent a party of volunteers to disrupt French plans by building the promised fort at the strategic Forks of the River—the site of present-day Pittsburgh. Tanaghrisson was given the honor of putting the first log in place.

The lieutenant governor then dispatched militiamen to the Forks to provide protection for the construction crew. Their commander was Lieutenant Colonel George Washington, only twenty-two, also an investor in the Ohio Company and filled with what he himself called “the heroick spirit of every free-born Englishman to assert the rights and privileges of our king.” He was eager to show what he could do on the battlefield—and to make a fortune for himself speculating in Indian land once he had helped drive the French out. If they dared interfere, Washington was authorized to imprison “or kill & destroy them.”

But before his party could reach the Forks, Washington learned that French-Canadian troops had already seized the site and begun to build a much larger outpost of their own called Fort Duquesne. When its commander learned that Washington’s column was heading toward it, he sent a patrol to warn them off.

Washington had allied himself with Tanaghrisson, who had grown scornful of what he saw as British passivity in the face of French aggression. Both men were spoiling for a fight, and each misled the other to bring one about: Washington told Tanaghrisson falsely that the French were on their way with orders to kill him; Tanaghrisson claimed that the French had orders to attack the Virginians, though they did not.

When an Indian scout spotted the French encampment, Washington recalled, the two men “agreed to fall on them together.” And so, as the French-Canadians waited for their breakfast that morning, Virginians with muskets suddenly emerged from the forest onto the rocky ledge that overlooked their camp and fired two volleys. A few of the stunned troops managed to scramble for their weapons and fire back. One Virginian fell dead. But after ten minutes or so, the Canadians fled into the woods, where Tanaghrisson’s dozen warriors waited for them with their tomahawks.

Ten or twelve of the Canadians were wounded, among them their thirty-five-year-old commander, Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville. He handed a copy of his orders to Washington, trying to make the Virginian understand that he and his men had meant them no harm. As Washington tried to make sense of the document—he spoke no French—Tanaghrisson raised his tomahawk, said, “Thou are not yet dead, my father,” smashed the Frenchman’s skull, and then washed his hands in his brains. By doing so, he was declaring that the French “father” no longer had any claim to the Ohio Country.

Tanaghrisson’s warriors killed and scalped the rest of the wounded.

An Indian witness said Washington himself had been the first to pull the trigger that morning. If so, he fired the very first shot of a global conflict that Europeans would call the Seven Years’ War, and Americans remembered as the French and Indian War.

The French commander at Fort Duquesne happened to have been Jumonville’s older brother, and when he heard that his sibling had been murdered and that many of his men had been massacred, he and a large force set out for the Virginians’ base camp, bent on revenge.

Washington’s base was just a hastily assembled circle of upright logs in the middle of a big, swampy opening in the forest called the Great Meadows. Reinforcements had recently arrived from Virginia and his palisade had proved too small to hold all of them, so some men were forced to find what shelter they could in trenches, hastily dug outside its walls.

Washington boasted that “with his small, palisaded Fort . . . I shall not fear the attack of 500 men.” But the warriors Washington had hoped would join him never materialized. Even Tanaghrisson fled rather than be trapped in what he dismissed as “that little thing” in the meadow.

On July 3, five hundred French troops, French-Canadian militia, and some one hundred of their Indian allies opened fire on the palisade from the surrounding forest. Relentless rain that Washington remembered as “the most tremendous . . . that can be conceived” turned the trenches into wallows and rendered the men’s muskets useless. By the time the sun set, thirty Virginians lay dead, including Washington’s enslaved body servant, and more than sixty were wounded.

It seemed likely that the entire outpost would be wiped out when the sun rose again. Certain they were doomed, some of Washington’s men broke into the expedition’s supply of rum and got hopelessly drunk. But since France and England were not yet officially at war, the French commander offered Washington generous terms: if he surrendered and pledged not to return to the Ohio Country for at least a year, he could lead what was left of his force back across the mountains. Washington had no choice but to sign a document in French, in which he inadvertently confessed to the “assassination” of Jumonville. He and his men began limping back to Virginia the following morning. It was July 4.

The Virginia legislative assembly, called the House of Burgesses, formally thanked Washington for his courage, but his reputation was badly damaged when news of the aborted expedition reached Paris and London. A French poet would declare Jumonville’s murder “a monument of perfidy that ought to enrage eternity.” A London pamphleteer called the terms under which Washington capitulated “the most infamous a British subject ever put his hands to.” When The London Magazine published a letter Washington had written to one of his younger brothers, boasting that he had “heard bullets whistle, and . . . there was something charming in the sound,” King George II—who had himself led armies in battle—was reported to have muttered that the young man would not have found their sound so charming had he heard more of them. When Dinwiddie reorganized the Virginia militia, requiring Washington to accept the reduced rank of captain, Washington declared it “too degrading” and resigned.

In the face of the coming conflict with France, the London Board of Trade and Plantations—the body then charged with colonial affairs—urged the colonies to develop a common defense. They refused. Since Pennsylvania and Virginia both claimed the Ohio Valley, they saw nothing to be gained by cooperating with one another. New England colonies objected to providing funds or men to defend New York’s northern frontier. No colonial assembly was willing to give up even a fraction of its autonomy.

The colonies’ inability to act together and the debacle at Fort Necessity confirmed the conviction among British professional soldiers that untrained colonists would never be able to defeat the French. “Washington and many such may have courage and resolution, but they have no knowledge of experience in our profession,” General Lord Albemarle, a veteran of warfare in Europe, wrote to the British prime minister, Lord North. “Consequently, there can be no dependence on them! Officers, & good ones, must be sent to Discipline the Militia & to lead them on.”

The prime minister agreed and sent General Edward Braddock and two regiments of red-coated regulars to North America with orders to remove French “encroachments” from the Ohio Country.

In the late spring of 1755, when Braddock led some 2,200 men—red-coated British Army regulars and militia—back across the Appalachians to retake Fort Duquesne, George Washington rode at his side. He had volunteered to become an unpaid aide de camp to the British commander, hoping his familiarity with the territory and the Indians who lived there might help redeem his reputation and perhaps win him a commission in the British army. “As to any danger from the Enemy,” he had assured his brother, “I look upon it as trifling.”

It was not. On July 9, just ten miles from the French fort, Braddock’s army was surprised by a French and Indian force roughly half its size. Braddock was mortally wounded. His regulars panicked; Washington recalled that they “broke and ran like Sheep before the Hounds.” He found himself in command of the retreat. Two horses were shot from under him. Musket balls ripped through his hat and jacket. Almost one thousand men had been killed or wounded, but Washington managed to get the rest safely off the battlefield.

He learned two valuable lessons from the battle: British regulars were not invincible, and there was no shame in retreating if you could live to fight another day. He was hailed as a hero, given overall command of Virginia’s militia, and served on the frontier for three more years. But he was continually frustrated, both by the reluctance of the House of Burgesses to provide his forces with the men and provisions he thought they needed, and by the ill-concealed contempt some British commanders harbored for their colonial allies. After his appeal for a royal commission in the British army was rejected, he again retired from military service and returned to his home at Mount Vernon, filled with resentment at how the British had treated him. “We are defending the King’s Dominions,” he wrote, “and there can be no sufficient reason given why we, who spend our blood and treasure in defense of the country, are not entitled to equal preferment . . . We can’t conceive, that being Americans should deprive us of the benefits of British Subjects.”

Entirely British

Shortly after noon on Friday, September 29, 1760, a great cheer went up as Sir Francis Bernard, the royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, stepped out onto the balcony of the Boston Town House, the big redbrick building at the corner of King and Queen Streets that was the home of British Imperial authority in Massachusetts. The two brightly colored carvings flanking its roof—a lion and a unicorn, representing England and Scotland—together symbolized the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

A few days earlier, when news had reached the governor that after five years of fighting, British regulars and provincial troops had captured Montreal, and with it the last French army in North America, he had called for this to be a day of “general rejoicing for the entire reduction of CANADA.”

Now, Bernard gave a prearranged signal. All the church bells in town began to ring. Sixty-three cannon at the harbor fortress of Castle William fired salvos. Shore batteries and ships moored offshore fired, too. Then, horse guards, militia, and cadets escorted the governor and “the principal gentlemen of the town” to the second floor of Faneuil Hall, where a celebratory luncheon was served to 150 people.

The global war inadvertently begun by George Washington had gone badly for the British at first. The French captured their forts on Lake Ontario and Lake George. In the Ohio Valley, Delaware and Shawnee, siding with the French, raided British settlements in western Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, killing at least seven hundred and sending hundreds more scuttling back across the mountains. “What can [the British] do against these invisible enemies, who strike when they flee with the speed of lightning?” a French officer asked. “They are the exterminating angels.”

But in 1758, the tide of battle had begun to turn, thanks largely to the aggressive and free-spending policies of William Pitt the Elder, the member of Parliament newly placed in charge of the war effort. Determined to eliminate France as an imperial power, Pitt subsidized Britain’s German allies to keep French forces tied down in Europe, while dispatching British forces to rip away France’s colonial holdings wherever they could be found in North America.

There, he eventually fielded an army of forty-five thousand men, half regulars and half colonial troops—roughly five times the force the French could muster. The British Royal Navy commanded the Atlantic sea lanes and blocked the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River, choking off supplies and reinforcements for the French army and the arms and gunpowder with which they had supplied their Indian allies. The Delaware and Shawnee abandoned the French after the British vowed to bar settlement and pledged not to occupy any French forts they captured in the Ohio Country. The retreating French blew up Fort Duquesne rather than surrender it to the British—who promptly built a fortress on the site ten times as large and named it Fort Pitt, after the architect of the policy that had made it possible.