About this time, Col. Fry died at Wills's Creek, where he had lain ill
of a fever for several weeks; and Washington, as the next in rank, was
obliged to take command of the regiment. Although this change brought
with it an increase of pay and honors, yet it caused him the sincerest
regret; for even then, young as he was, he had the good of his country
more earnestly at heart than his own private advantage. He said, and
with unfeigned modesty, that he feared he was scarcely equal to the
discharge of such high and responsible duties, without the aid and
counsel of some older and more experienced officer.
Capt. de Villiers was now commander of the French at Fort Duquesne.
When tidings of the late encounter reached this officer through the
swift-footed Canadian, he swore a deep oath that he would chastise the
audacious young Virginian for what he chose to call this barbarous
outrage, and avenge the death of De Jumonville, whose brother-in-law,
as ill luck would have it, he chanced to be. Foreseeing his danger,
and to defend himself against the superior force he knew would be
brought against him, Col. Washington set about forthwith to strengthen
his works. He dug the ditches deeper, raised the breastworks higher,
and surrounded the whole with a row of palisades, firmly planted in
the ground, and set so close together as scarcely to allow of a
gun-barrel passing between them.
Owing to the shameful neglect of those whose duty it was to send up
supplies, he and his men suffered much from the want of food,--many
days at a stretch sometimes passing by without their tasting bread. To
aggravate this new distress, the Half King and many of his warriors,
with their wives and children, now sought refuge in the fort from the
vengeance of the French and their savage allies; which added nothing
to their strength, and only increased the number of hungry mouths to
be fed. To this place, then, where gaunt famine pinched them from
within and watchful enemies beset them from without, Washington gave
the fitting name of Fort Necessity. Luckily for them, while in this
pitiable plight, days and days passed by, and still no avenging De
Villiers showed himself, though alarms were frequent.
Col. Washington now ordered Major Muse to bring up the rest of the
troops that had been waiting all this while at Wills's Creek, with the
heavy stores and cannon. To reward the friendly Indians for their
services and fidelity, Major Muse brought with him presents of
hatchets and knives, guns, powder and lead, tin cups, needles and
pins, beads, and dry-goods of every gaudy hue, and it may be, although
we can only guess it, a ruffled shirt or two. In addition to these,
there came a number of silver medals for the chief sachems, sent by
Gov. Dinwiddie at the suggestion of Col. Washington, who well knew how
much these simple people prize little compliments of this kind. Major
Muse handed out the presents, while Washington hung the medals about
the necks of the sachems, which yielded them far more delight, you
will be sorry to hear, than their good old missionary's catechism.
This was done with all that show and parade so dear to an Indian's
heart; and, to give a still finer edge to the present occasion, they
christened each other all over again: that is to say, the red men gave
the white men Indian names, and the white men gave the red men English
names. Thus, for example, Washington gave the Half King the name of
Dinwiddie, which pleased him greatly; while he, in his turn, bestowed
on his young white brother a long, high-sounding Indian name, that you
could pronounce as readily spelt backwards as forwards. Fairfax was
the name given a young sachem, the son of Queen Aliquippa, whose
eternal friendship to the English, it must be borne in mind, had been
secured by Washington, the previous winter, by the present of an old
coat and a bottle of rum.
By the advice of his old and much-esteemed friend, Col. William
Fairfax, Washington had divine worship in the fort daily, in which he
led; and, thanks to the early teachings of his pious mother, he could
do this, and sin not. Solemn indeed, my dear children, and beautiful
to behold, must have been that picture,--that little fort, so far away
in the heart of the lonely wilderness, with its motley throng of
painted Indians and leather-clad backwoodsmen gathered round their
young commander, as, morning and evening, he kneeled in prayer before
the Giver of all good, beseeching aid and protection, and giving
thanks.
As if to put his manhood and patience to a still severer test, there
came to the fort about this time an independent company of one hundred
North Carolinians, headed by one Capt. Mackay, who refused to serve
under him as his superior officer. As his reason for this conduct,
Mackay argued that he held a royal commission (that is to say, had
been made a captain by the King of England), which made him equal in
rank, if not superior, to Washington, who held only a provincial
commission, or had been made a colonel by the Governor of Virginia.
This, in part, was but too true; and it had been a source of
dissatisfaction to Washington, that the rank and services of colonial
officers should be held at a cheaper rate than the same were valued at
in the royal army. It wounded his honest, manly pride, and offended
his high sense of justice; and he had already resolved in his own mind
to quit such inglorious service, as soon as he could do so without
injury to the present campaign, or loss of honor to himself. To most
men, the lofty airs and pretensions of Capt. Mackay and his
Independents would have been unbearable; but he kept his temper
unruffled, and, with a prudence beyond his years, forbore to do or say
any thing that would lead to an angry outbreak between them; and as
they chose to encamp outside the fort, and have separate guards, he
deemed it wisest not to trouble himself about them, only so far as
might concern their common safety.
Days, and even weeks, had now passed away, and still no enemy had come
to offer him battle. His men were becoming restless from inaction; and
the example of the troublesome Independents had already begun to stir
up discontent among them, which threatened, if not checked in season,
to end in downright insubordination. As the surest remedy for these
evils, Washington resolved to push forward with the road in the
direction of Fort Duquesne, and carry the war into the enemy's own
country. Requesting Capt. Mackay to guard the fort during his absence,
he set out with his entire force of three hundred men, and again began
the toilsome work of cutting a road through the wilderness. The
difficulties they had now to overcome were even greater than those
which beset them at the outset of their pioneering. The mountains
were higher, the swamps deeper, the rocks more massive, the trees
taller and more numerous, the torrents more rapid, the days more hot
and sultry, and the men and horses more enfeebled by poor and scanty
food. You will not wonder, then, that they were nearly two weeks in
reaching Mr. Gist's plantation on the Monongahela, a distance of but
fifteen miles.
But hardly had they pitched their tents, and thrown themselves on the
grass to snatch a little rest, when there came the disheartening
intelligence, brought in by their Indian spies, that Capt. de Villiers
had been seen to sally from Fort Duquesne but a few hours before, at
the head of a force of five hundred French and four hundred Indians,
and must by that time be within a few miles of the Virginia camp. For
three hundred weary and hungry men to wait and give battle to a force
three times their number, fresh and well fed, was a thing too absurd
to be thought of for a single moment. Washington, therefore, as their
only chance of safety, ordered a hasty retreat, hoping that they might
be able to reach the settlements on Wills's Creek before the enemy
could overtake him. The retreat, however, was any thing but a hasty
one; for the poor half-famished horses were at last no longer able to
drag the heavy cannon and carry the heavy baggage. Moved with pity for
the lean and tottering beasts, Washington dismounted from his fine
charger, and gave him for a pack-horse; which humane example was
promptly followed by his officers. Yet even this was not enough: so,
while some of the jaded men loaded their backs with the baggage, the
rest, as jaded, dragged the artillery along the stony roads with
ropes, rather than that it should be left behind to fall into the
hands of the enemy. For this good service, rendered so willingly in
that hour of sore distress, they went not unrewarded by their generous
young commander.
Capt. Mackay and his company of Independents had, at Washington's
request, come up a little while before, and now joined in the retreat.
But they joined in nothing else; for, pluming themselves upon their
greater respectability as soldiers of his Britannic majesty, they lent
not a helping hand in this hour of pressing need, although the danger
that lurked behind threatened all alike. They marched along, these
coxcombs, daintily picking their way over the smoothest roads, and too
genteel to be burdened with any thing but their clean muskets and tidy
knapsacks. This ill-timed and insolent behavior served only to
aggravate the trials of the other poor fellows all the more; and when,
at last, they had managed to drag the cannon and the wagons and
themselves to Fort Necessity, they were so overcome with fatigue and
hunger, and so moved with indignation at the conduct of the
Independents, that they threw down their ropes and packs, and flatly
refused to be marched further. Seeing their pitiful plight, and that
it would be impossible to reach the settlements, Col. Washington, as
their last chance of safety, turned aside, and once more took shelter
in his little fort.
As Capt. Mackay and his company of gentlemen fighters had done nothing
towards strengthening the works during his absence, Washington ordered
a few trees to be felled in the woods hard by, as a still further
barrier to the approach of the enemy. Just as the last tree went
crashing down, the French and their Indian allies, nine hundred
strong, came in sight, and opened a scattering fire upon the fort, but
from so great a distance as made it little more than an idle waste of
powder and lead. Suspecting this to be but a feint of the crafty foe
to decoy them into an ambuscade, Washington ordered his men to keep
within the shelter of the fort, there to lie close, and only to shoot
when they could plainly see where their bullets were to be sent.
A light skirmishing was kept up all day, and until a late hour in the
night; the Indians keeping the while within the shelter of the woods,
which at no point came within sixty yards of the palisades. Whenever
an Indian scalp-lock or a French cap showed itself from among the
trees or bushes, it that instant became the mark of a dozen
sharpshooters watching at the rifle-holes of the fort. All that day,
and all the night too, the rain poured down from one black cloud, as
only a summer ruin can pour, till the ditches were filled with water,
and the breastworks nothing but a bank of miry clay; till the men were
drenched to the skin, and the guns of many so dampened as to be unfit
for use.
About nine o'clock that night, the firing ceased; and shortly after a
voice was heard, a little distance beyond the palisades, calling upon
the garrison, in the name of Capt. de Villiers, to surrender.
Suspecting this to be but a pretext for getting a spy into the fort,
Col. Washington refused to admit the bearer of the summons. Capt. de
Villiers then requested that an officer be sent to his quarters to
parley; giving his word of honor that no mischief should befall him,
or unfair advantage be taken of it. Whereupon, Capt. Van Braam, the
old Dutch fencing-master, being the only French interpreter
conveniently at hand, was employed to go and bring in the terms of
surrender. He soon came back; but the terms were too dishonorable for
any true soldier to think of accepting. He was sent again, but with no
better result. The third time, Capt. de Villiers sent written articles
of capitulation; which, being in his own language, must needs be first
translated before an answer could be returned. By the flickering light
of one poor candle, which could hardly be kept burning for the pouring
rain, the Dutch captain read the terms he had brought, while the rest
stood round him, gathering what sense they could from the confused
jumbling of bad French, and worse English he was pleased to call a
translation. After this, there followed a little more parleying
between the hostile leaders; when it was at last settled that the
prisoners taken in the Jumonville affair should be set at liberty;
that the English should build no forts upon the disputed territories
within a twelvemonth to come; and that the garrison, after destroying
the artillery and military stores, should be allowed to march out with
all the honors of war, and pursue their way to the settlements,
unmolested either by the French or their Indian allies. When we take
into account the more than double strength of the enemy, the starving
condition of the garrison (still further weakened as it was by the
loss of twelve men killed and forty-three wounded), and the slender
hope of speedy succor from the settlements, these terms must be
regarded as highly honorable to Col. Washington; and still more so
when we add to this the fact, that the Half King and his other Indian
allies had deserted him at the first approach of danger, under the
pretext of finding some safer retreat for their wives and children.
Whether they failed from choice, or hinderance to return, and take
part in the action, can never now be known with certainty.
Thus the dreary night wore away; and, when the dreary morning dawned,
they destroyed the artillery and the military stores, preparatory to
their setting forth on their retreat. As all the horses had been
killed or lost the day before, they had no means of removing their
heavy baggage: they therefore secured it as best they might, hoping to
be able to send back for it from the settlements. Still in possession
of their small-arms, they then marched out of the fort with all the
honors of war,--fifes playing, drums beating, and colors flying. They
had gone but a few yards from the fort, when a large body of Indians
pounced with plundering hands upon the baggage. Seeing that the French
could not or would not keep them back, Washington, to disappoint them
of their booty, ordered his men to set fire to it, and destroy all
they could not bring away upon their backs.
This done, they once more took up their line of march; and a
melancholy march it was. Between them and the nearest settlements,
there lay seventy miles of steep and rugged mountain-roads, over which
they must drag their weary and aching limbs before they could hope to
find a little rest. Washington did all that a kind and thoughtful
commander could to keep up the flagging spirits of his men; sharing
with them their every toil and privation, and all the while
maintaining a firm and cheerful demeanor. Reaching Wills's Creek, he
there left them to enjoy the full abundance which they found awaiting
them at that place; and, in company with Capt. Mackay, repaired at
once to Williamsburg to report the result of the campaign to Gov.
Dinwiddie.
A short time after, the terms of surrender were laid before the
Virginia House of Burgesses, and received the entire approval of that
wise body; who, although the expedition had ended in defeat and
failure, most cheerfully gave Col. Washington and his men a vote of
thanks, in testimony of their having done their whole duty as good and
brave and faithful soldiers.