When Young George Washington Started a War

[viper37]

It is a long, but interesting read, despite most of this being known already.

Link

On the night of May 27, 1754, Lt. Col. George Washington led a party of Virginia soldiers out of an encampment in the Ohio Valley. The conditions were horrid—a night "as black as pitch," as the young commander recorded in his journal. An unceasing rain made the dark woods even more impervious to the soldiers and warriors.  Washington was only 22 years old, his mouth still full of teeth. The uniform he wore was likely a woolen officer's coat showing his allegiance to the British empire—he was a loyal subject of King George II. He and his Virginia Regiment of a little over 100 effective soldiers were the tip of His Majesty's spear in North America. Their assignment: to finish building a fort that would anchor Britain's control over the Ohio Valley.
But as Washington and his men marched westward over the Appalachian Mountains, they received stunning news: The French had already captured their intended destination, known as Trent's Fort. Hundreds of French troops had aimed over a dozen cannons at the British soldiers stationed there and forced their surrender.
By May 24, Washington had encamped at the Great Meadows, one of the few open clearings amid the dark Appalachian woods. There he received word from a man named Tanaghrisson, an Ohio Iroquois, that an army of French soldiers was coming to attack his men. French tracks were spotted only five miles from the camp, and Washington sent out 75 of his best soldiers to search for the French party. Then his Indian allies found the spot where the French were camping, hidden in a glen near the crest of a mountain ridge.
On May 27, the men who remained with Washington—a small party of 40 British soldiers and perhaps seven or eight Ohio Iroquois allies—marched five miles and climbed 700 feet up the steep eastern face of Chestnut Ridge. Seven soldiers got lost as they stumbled in the rain over the ridgeline's many rocks, spurs and draws. By the time the remaining 33 men crested the ridge, they were exhausted and soaked.
As the sun began to rise, the soldiers struggled to operate their muskets amid the lingering dampness. It was around 7 a.m. on May 28 when the Virginians, advancing in single file, came to the rocky precipice overlooking the French camp. Washington was at the head of the column and the first to spot the French who, he later reported, scrambled for their muskets.
The battle lasted only 15 minutes. At least ten French soldiers fell, most of them killed by Washington's Indian allies. One of those dead Frenchmen was the party's commander, Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville. The mountain glen was a macabre scene of unburied and scalped French corpses, with a Frenchman's decapitated head stuck upon a pole.
Historians have long identified this skirmish in the woods as the spark that ignited the French and Indian War. But there's an untold dimension to this story, as I discovered several years ago, digging through colonial papers in the British National Archives. This evidence, previously unreported, suggests that the man who would become America's first president might have been more complicated a leader—and more culpable for starting a seven-year-long global war—than history has led us to believe.

[Habbaku]

I definitely recommend reading Crucible of War if you're interested in reading further:

[grumbler]

I have always found it interesting that some historians, who should know better, try to blame Washington for starting a war after the French had already attacked the British at Fort St George and Ft Hangar.  It's like blaming Lt George Welch for getting the US involved in WW2 by shooting down Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor on Dec 7 1941.

[Habbaku]

I can find no references to a "Ft. Hangar."

[Oexmelin]

I definitely recommend reading Crucible of War if you're interested in reading further:

It is unfortunate that Fred Anderson reads no French, nor really did a good job on French historiography of the conflict. David Preston (the author of this short piece) does better with his Braddock's defeat- of course, the scale is quite different.

[Habbaku]

Oex, could you recommend an English-language author to read from that draws from French sources for the conflict?

[viper37]

I definitely recommend reading Crucible of War if you're interested in reading further:

I've read it.  That's why I say it isn't nothing really new, but it offers a more centered perspective on Washington in this case.

[Berkut]

I have always found it interesting that some historians, who should know better, try to blame Washington for starting a war after the French had already attacked the British at Fort St George and Ft Hangar.  It's like blaming Lt George Welch for getting the US involved in WW2 by shooting down Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor on Dec 7 1941.

Did Welch fire on the planes before or after they fired first?

Maybe they were just a recon partrol, and the entire Pearl Harbor fiasco was just a mistake.

[Oexmelin]

Oex, could you recommend an English-language author to read from that draws from French sources for the conflict?

I wish I could. As I said, Dave Preston, on the battle of the Monongahela, is perhaps the most recent, and he does a relatively good job - but it really is only on that battle. Otherwise, the French perspective is scattered, and usually dependent upon national historiography. Otherwise, there are a few specific studies that are coming out here and there (like Christian Crouch's Nobility Lost), but these are not accounts of the whole war. There are a few more recent synthesis in French, but the focus is much less North America - and they are not translated, although there are talks to translate Edmond Dziembowski's Seven Years War. Jonathan Dull is a historian of the French Navy, and he has consulted the archives, but he lives up to his name. 

This is a fundamental problem for the study of the Seven Years War: for American and British historians, it's an important prelude to something else - to Empire, for the case of the British, which suggests a global perspective for the conflict; to Independence, for the Americans, which suggests a North American-centric approach. Because it is important, it has produced a lot of scholarship, which means that for academic and non-academic historians, there often seems to be no need to turn to anything more. Anderson uses things that exist in translation. Which means he misses quite a bit of the scattered historiography, like Dziembowski on French patriotism, or Louise Dechêne on Canadian militarism. And because his focus is British, he even missed what was, at the time, some of the more recent reevaluation of Louis XV's policies that were available in English.

I do admire Anderson for the sheer amount of stuff he consulted, and for the crazy attempt at producing a synthesis of the conflict. I just wish he had sought to compensate for his limitations with the source material in some way. 

[Admiral Yi]

So write it your own damn self Ucks.

[Oexmelin]

It's not a half bad idea.

[Habbaku]

So write it your own damn self Ucks.

Yeah, what the hell!

Thanks for the perspective, though, Oex.

[viper37]

I have always found it interesting that some historians, who should know better, try to blame Washington for starting a war after the French had already attacked the British at Fort St George and Ft Hangar.  It's like blaming Lt George Welch for getting the US involved in WW2 by shooting down Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor on Dec 7 1941.

hmm, I'm not aware of a Battle at fort St-George in this war?  Neither fort Hangar?  You sure you ain't mixing you wars?

In the summer of 1753, the French started acting more brazenly. They sent 2,600 soldiers into the region, building a fort on the shore of Lake Erie and another at the headwaters of nearby Le-Boeuf Creek. Both the British officials in Virginia and their Indian allies in Ohio were alarmed.

That's when Washington walked onto the stage of history. At the end of 1753, Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie asked him to lead a diplomatic expedition to warn the French to leave their forts. Washington had been in the militia less than a year, but he'd worked as a surveyor starting at the age of 16, and the governor knew this experience would help him navigate the frontier as he led the 500-mile trek from Williamsburg, Virginia, to Fort LeBoeuf.

The group reached Fort Le-Boeuf on December 11, 1753, accompanied by Tanaghrisson and other Ohio Indians. The French commandant received the party with great civility, even sent them home with supplies, but he rebuffed Governor Dinwiddie's demands. Still, Washington's journey had allowed him to gather valuable intelligence: He'd learned that the French were assembling a flotilla of small boats to carry them to the Forks of the Ohio, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers met to form the Ohio River, and where the British planned to build a small but strategic fort.

[Oexmelin]

Thanks for the perspective, though, Oex.

Depending on your interest in the topic, you can also pick up Hofstra, Cultures in Conflict, a collection of essays which includes American, British, and Canadian scholars. For a Spanish story, Schneider's The Occupation of Havana - Schneider's Spanish is native. A remarkable scholar with considerable command of French, and Spanish (and English) is William & Mary's Paul Mapp, who is more interested in diplomatic negotiations and empire than in a narrative of the conflict. If that interests you, you can look up his The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763

[The Minsky Moment]

What's the Dziembowski book like?  Worth getting?