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Next to Louisbourg, this was the heaviest blow that the French had yet received. Their command of Lake Ontario was gone. New France was cut in two; and unless the severed parts could speedily reunite, all the posts of the interior would be in imminent jeopardy. If Bradstreet had been followed by another body of men to reoccupy and rebuild Oswego, thus recovering a harbor on Lake Ontario, all the captured French vessels could have been brought thither, and the command of this inland sea assured at once. Even as it was, the advantages were immense. A host of savage warriors, thus far inclined to France or wavering between the two belligerents, stood henceforth neutral, or gave themselves to England; while Fort Duquesne, deprived of the supplies on which it depended, could make but faint resistance to its advancing enemy.
Amherst, with five regiments from Louisbourg, came, early in October, to join Abercromby at Lake George, and the two commanders discussed the question of again attacking Ticonderoga. Both thought the season too late. A fortnight after, a deserter brought news that Montcalm was breaking up his camp. Abercromby followed his example. The opposing armies filed off each to its winter quarters, and only a few scouting parties kept alive the embers of war on the waters and mountains of Lake George.
Meanwhile Brigadier Forbes was climbing the Alleghanies, hewing his way through the forests of western Pennsylvania, and toiling inch by inch towards his goal of Fort Duquesne.647
CHAPTER XXII.
1758
FORT DUQUESNE
Dinwiddie and Washington • Brigadier Forbes • His Army • Conflicting Views • Difficulties • Illness of Forbes • His Sufferings • His Fortitude • His Difference with Washington • Sir John Sinclair • Troublesome Allies • Scouting Parties • Boasts of Vaudreuil • Forbes and the Indians • Mission of Christian Frederic Post • Council of Peace • Second Mission of Post • Defeat of Grant • Distress of Forbes • Dark Prospects • Advance of the Army • Capture of the French Fort • The Slain of Braddock's Field • Death of Forbes.
During the last year Loudon, filled with vain schemes against Louisbourg, had left the French scalping-parties to their work of havoc on the western borders. In Virginia Washington still toiled at his hopeless task of defending with a single regiment a forest frontier of more than three hundred miles; and in Pennsylvania the Assembly thought more of quarrelling with their governor than of protecting the tormented settlers. Fort Duquesne, the source of all the evil, was left undisturbed. In vain Washington urged the futility of defensive war, and the necessity of attacking the enemy in his stronghold. His position, trying at the best, was made more so by the behavior of Dinwiddie. That crusty Scotchman had conceived a dislike to him, and sometimes treated him in a manner that must have been unspeakably galling to the proud and passionate young man, who nevertheless, unconquerable in his sense of public duty, curbed himself to patience, or the semblance of it.
Dinwiddie was now gone, and a new governor had taken his place. The conduct of the war, too, had changed, and in the plans of Pitt the capture of Fort Duquesne held an important place. Brigadier John Forbes was charged with it. He was a Scotch veteran, forty-eight years of age, who had begun life as a student of medicine, and who ended it as an able and faithful soldier. Though a well-bred man of the world, his tastes were simple; he detested ceremony, and dealt frankly and plainly with the colonists, who both respected and liked him. In April he was in Philadelphia waiting for his army, which as yet had no existence; for the provincials were not enlisted, and an expected battalion of Highlanders had not arrived. It was the end of June before they were all on the march; and meanwhile the General was attacked with a painful and dangerous malady, which would have totally disabled a less resolute man.
His force consisted of provincials from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, with twelve hundred Highlanders of Montgomery's regiment and a detachment of Royal Americans, amounting in all, with wagoners and camp followers, to between six and seven thousand men. The Royal American regiment was a new corps raised, in the colonies, largely from among the Germans of Pennsylvania. Its officers were from Europe; and conspicuous among them was Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Bouquet, a brave and accomplished Swiss, who commanded one of the four battalions of which the regiment was composed. Early in July he was encamped with the advance-guard at the hamlet of Raystown, now the town of Bedford, among the eastern heights of the Alleghanies. Here his tents were pitched in an opening of the forest by the banks of a small stream; and Virginians in hunting-shirts, Highlanders in kilt and plaid, and Royal Americans in regulation scarlet, labored at throwing up intrenchments and palisades, while around stood the silent mountains in their mantles of green.
Now rose the question whether the army should proceed in a direct course to Fort Duquesne, hewing a new road through the forest, or march thirty-four miles to Fort Cumberland, and thence follow the road made by Braddock. It was the interest of Pennsylvania that Forbes should choose the former route, and of Virginia that he should choose the latter. The Old Dominion did not wish to see a highway cut for her rival to those rich lands of the Ohio which she called her own. Washington, who was then at Fort Cumberland with a part of his regiment, was earnest for the old road; and in an interview with Bouquet midway between that place and Raystown, he spared no effort to bring him to the same opinion. But the quartermaster-general, Sir John Sinclair, who was supposed to know the country, had advised the Pennsylvania route; and both Bouquet and Forbes were resolved to take it. It was shorter, and when once made would furnish readier and more abundant supplies of food and forage; but to make it would consume a vast amount of time and labor. Washington foretold the ruin of the expedition unless it took Braddock's road. Ardent Virginian as he was, there is no cause to believe that his decision was based on any but military reasons; but Forbes thought otherwise, and found great fault with him. Bouquet did him more justice. "Colonel Washington," he writes to the General, "is filled with a sincere zeal to aid the expedition, and is ready to march with equal activity by whatever way you choose."
The fate of Braddock had impressed itself on all the army, and inspired a caution that was but too much needed; since, except Washington's men and a few others among the provincials, the whole, from general to drummer-boy, were total strangers to that insidious warfare of the forest in which their enemies, red and white, had no rival. Instead of marching, like Braddock, at one stretch for Fort Duquesne, burdened with a long and cumbrous baggage-train, it was the plan of Forbes to push on by slow stages, establishing fortified magazines as he went, and at last, when within easy distance of the fort, to advance upon it with all his force, as little impeded as possible with wagons and pack-horses. He bore no likeness to his predecessor, except in determined resolution, and he did not hesitate to embrace military heresies which would have driven Braddock to fury. To Bouquet, in whom he placed a well-merited trust, he wrote, "I have been long in your opinion of equipping numbers of our men like the savages, and I fancy Colonel Burd, of Virginia, has most of his best people equipped in that manner. In this country we must learn the art of war from enemy Indians, or anybody else who has seen it carried on here."
His provincials displeased him, not without reason; for the greater part were but the crudest material for an army, unruly, and recalcitrant to discipline. Some of them came to the rendezvous at Carlisle with old province muskets, the locks tied on with a string; others brought fowling-pieces of their own, and others carried nothing but walking-sticks; while many had never fired a gun in their lives.648 Forbes reported to Pitt that their officers, except a few in the higher ranks, were "an extremely bad collection of broken inn-keepers, horse-jockeys, and Indian traders;" nor is he more flattering towards the men, though as to some of them he afterwards changed his mind.649
While Bouquet was with the advance at Raystown, Forbes was still in Philadelphia, trying to bring the army into shape, and collecting provisions, horses, and wagons; much vexed meantime by the Assembly, whose tedious disputes about taxing the proprietaries greatly obstructed the service. "No sergeant or quartermaster of a regiment," he says, "is obliged to look into more details than I am; and if I did not see to everything myself, we should never get out of this town." July had begun before he could reach the frontier village of Carlisle, where he found everything in confusion. After restoring some order, he wrote to Bouquet: "I have been and still am but poorly, with a cursed flux, but shall move day after to-morrow." He was doomed to disappointment; and it was not till the ninth of August that he sent another letter from the same place to the same military friend. "I am now able to write after three weeks of a most violent and tormenting distemper, which, thank God, seems now much abated as to pain, but has left me as weak as a new-born infant. However, I hope to have strength enough to set out from this place on Friday next." The disease was an inflammation of the stomach and other vital organs; and when he should have been in bed, with complete repose of body and mind, he was racked continually with the toils and worries of a most arduous campaign.
He left Carlisle on the eleventh, carried on a kind of litter made of a hurdle slung between two horses; and two days later he wrote from Shippensburg: "My journey here from Carlisle raised my disorder and pains to so intolerable a degree that I was obliged to stop, and may not get away for a day or two." Again, on the eighteenth: "I am better, and partly free from the excruciating pain I suffered; but still so weak that I can scarce bear motion." He lay helpless at Shippensburg till September was well advanced. On the second he says: "I really cannot describe how I have suffered both in body and mind of late, and the relapses have been worse as the disappointment was greater;" and on the fourth, still writing to Bouquet, who in the camp at Raystown was struggling with many tribulations: "I am sorry you have met with so many cross accidents to vex you, and have such a parcel of scoundrels as the provincials to work with; mais le vin est tiré, and you must drop a little of the gentleman and treat them as they deserve. Seal and send off the enclosed despatch to Sir John by some sure hand. He is a very odd man, and I am sorry it has been my fate to have any concern with him. I am afraid our army will not admit of division, lest one half meet with a check; therefore I would consult Colonel Washington, though perhaps not follow his advice, as his behavior about the roads was noways like a soldier. I thank my good cousin for his letter, and have only to say that I have all my life been subject to err; but I now reform, as I go to bed at eight at night, if able to sit up so late."
Nobody can read the letters of Washington at this time without feeling that the imputations of Forbes were unjust, and that here, as elsewhere, his ruling motive was the public good.650 Forbes himself, seeing the rugged and difficult nature of the country, began to doubt whether after all he had not better have chosen the old road of Braddock. He soon had an interview with its chief advocates, the two Virginia colonels, Washington and Burd, and reported the result to Bouquet, adding: "I told them that, whatever they thought, I had acted on the best information to be had, and could safely say for myself, and believed I might answer for you, that the good of the service was all we had at heart, not valuing provincial interests, jealousies, or suspicions one single twopence." It must be owned that, considering the slow and sure mode of advance which he had wisely adopted, the old soldier was probably right in his choice; since before the army could reach Fort Duquesne, the autumnal floods would have made the Youghiogany and the Monongahela impassable.
The Sir John mentioned by Forbes was the quartermaster-general, Sir John Sinclair, who had gone forward with Virginians and other troops from the camp of Bouquet to make the road over the main range of the Alleghanies, whence he sent back the following memorandum of his requirements: "Pickaxes, crows, and shovels; likewise more whiskey. Send me the newspapers, and tell my black to send me a candlestick and half a loaf of sugar." He was extremely inefficient; and Forbes, out of all patience with him, wrote confidentially to Bouquet that his only talent was for throwing everything into confusion. Yet he found fault with everybody else, and would discharge volleys of oaths at all who met his disapproval. From this cause or some other, Lieutenant-Colonel Stephen, of the Virginians, told him that he would break his sword rather than be longer under his orders. "As I had not sufficient strength," says Sinclair, "to take him by the neck from among his own men, I was obliged to let him have his own way, that I might not be the occasion of bloodshed." He succeeded at last in arresting him, and Major Lewis, of the same regiment, took his place.
The aid of Indians as scouts and skirmishers was of the last importance to an army so weak in the arts of woodcraft, and efforts were made to engage the services of the friendly Cherokees and Catawbas, many of whom came to the camp, where their caprice, insolence, and rapacity tried to the utmost the patience of the commanders. That of Sir John Sinclair had already been overcome by his dealings with the provincial authorities; and he wrote in good French, at the tail of a letter to the Swiss colonel: "Adieu, my dear Bouquet. The greatest curse that our Lord can pronounce against the worst of sinners is to give them business to do with provincial commissioners and friendly Indians." A band of sixty warriors told Colonel Burd that they would join the army on condition that it went by Braddock's road. "This," wrote Forbes, on hearing of the proposal, "is a new system of military discipline truly, and shows that my good friend Burd is either made a cat's-foot of himself, or little knows me if he imagines that sixty scoundrels are to direct me in my measures."651 Bouquet, with a pliant tact rarely seen in the born Briton, took great pains to please these troublesome allies, and went so far as to adopt one of them as his son.652 A considerable number joined the army; but they nearly all went off when the stock of presents provided for them was exhausted.
Forbes was in total ignorance of the strength and movements of the enemy. The Indians reported their numbers to be at least equal to his own; but nothing could be learned from them with certainty, by reason of their inveterate habit of lying. Several scouting-parties of whites were therefore sent forward, of which the most successful was that of a young Virginian officer, accompanied by a sergeant and five Indians. At a little distance from the French fort, the Indians stopped to paint themselves and practise incantations. The chief warrior of the party then took certain charms from an otter-skin bag and tied them about the necks of the other Indians. On that of the officer he hung the otter-skin itself; while to the sergeant he gave a small packet of paint from the same mystic receptacle. "He told us," reports the officer, "that none of us could be shot, for those things would turn the balls from us; and then shook hands with us, and told us to go and fight like men." Thus armed against fate, they mounted the high ground afterwards called Grant's Hill, where, covered by trees and bushes, they had a good view of the fort, and saw plainly that the reports of the French force were greatly exaggerated.653
Meanwhile Bouquet's men pushed on the heavy work of road-making up the main range of the Alleghanies, and, what proved far worse, the parallel mountain ridge of Laurel Hill, hewing, digging, blasting, laying fascines and gabions to support the track along the sides of steep declivities, or worming their way like moles through the jungle of swamp and forest. Forbes described the country to Pitt as an "immense uninhabited wilderness, overgrown everywhere with trees and brushwood, so that nowhere can one see twenty yards." In truth, as far as eye or mind could reach, a prodigious forest vegetation spread its impervious canopy over hill, valley, and plain, and wrapped the stern and awful waste in the shadows of the tomb.
Having secured his magazines at Raystown, and built a fort there named Fort Bedford, Bouquet made a forward movement of some forty miles, crossed the main Alleghany and Laurel Hill, and, taking post on a stream called Loyalhannon Creek, began another depot of supplies as a base for the final advance on Fort Duquesne, which was scarcely fifty miles distant.
Vaudreuil had learned from prisoners the march of Forbes, and, with his usual egotism, announced to the Colonial Minister what he had done in consequence. "I have provided for the safety for Fort Duquesne." "I have sent reinforcements to M. de Ligneris, who commands there." "I have done the impossible to supply him with provisions, and I am now sending them in abundance, in order that the troops I may perhaps have occasion to send to drive off the English may not be delayed." "A stronger fort is needed on the Ohio; but I cannot build one till after the peace; then I will take care to build such a one as will thenceforth keep the English out of that country." Some weeks later he was less confident, and very anxious for news from Ligneris. He says that he has sent him all the succors he could, and ordered troops to go to his aid from Niagara, Detroit, and Illinois, as well as the militia of Detroit, with the Indians there and elsewhere in the West,—Hurons, Ottawas, Pottawattamies, Miamis, and other tribes. What he fears is that the English will not attack the fort till all these Indians have grown tired of waiting, and have gone home again.654 This was precisely the intention of Forbes, and the chief object of his long delays.
He had another good reason for making no haste. There was hope that the Delawares and Shawanoes, who lived within easy reach of Fort Duquesne, and who for the past three years had spread havoc throughout the English border, might now be won over from the French alliance. Forbes wrote to Bouquet from Shippensburg: "After many intrigues with Quakers, the Provincial Commissioners, the Governor, etc., and by the downright bullying of Sir William Johnson, I hope I have now brought about a general convention of the Indians."655 The convention was to include the Five Nations, the Delawares, the Shawanoes, and other tribes, who had accepted wampum belts of invitation, and promised to meet the Governor and Commissioners of the various provinces at the town of Easton, before the middle of September. This seeming miracle was wrought by several causes. The Indians in the French interest, always greedy for presents, had not of late got enough to satisfy them. Many of those destined for them had been taken on the way from France by British cruisers, and the rest had passed through the hands of official knaves, who sold the greater part for their own profit. Again, the goods supplied by French fur-traders were few and dear; and the Indians remembered with regret the abundance and comparative cheapness of those they had from the English before the war. At the same time it was reported among them that a British army was marching to the Ohio strong enough to drive out the French from all that country; and the Delawares and Shawanoes of the West began to waver in their attachment to the falling cause. The eastern Delawares, living at Wyoming and elsewhere on the upper Susquehanna, had made their peace with the English in the summer before; and their great chief, Teedyuscung, thinking it for his interest that the tribes of the Ohio should follow his example, sent them wampum belts, inviting them to lay down the hatchet. The Five Nations, with Johnson at one end of the Confederacy and Joncaire at the other,—the one cajoling them in behalf of England, and the other in behalf of France,—were still divided in counsel; but even among the Senecas, the tribe most under Joncaire's influence, there was a party so far inclined to England that, like the Delaware chief, they sent wampum to the Ohio, inviting peace. But the influence most potent in reclaiming the warriors of the West was of a different kind. Christian Frederic Post, a member of the Moravian brotherhood, had been sent at the instance of Forbes as an envoy to the hostile tribes from the Governor and Council of Pennsylvania. He spoke the Delaware language, knew the Indians well, had lived among them, had married a converted squaw, and, by his simplicity of character, directness, and perfect honesty, gained their full confidence. He now accepted his terrible mission, and calmly prepared to place himself in the clutches of the tiger. He was a plain German, upheld by a sense of duty and a single-hearted trust in God; alone, with no great disciplined organization to impel and support him, and no visions and illusions such as kindled and sustained the splendid heroism of the early Jesuit martyrs. Yet his errand was no whit less perilous. And here we may notice the contrast between the mission settlements of the Moravians in Pennsylvania and those which the later Jesuits and the Sulpitians had established at Caughnawaga, St. Francis, La Présentation, and other places. The Moravians were apostles of peace, and they succeeded to a surprising degree in weaning their converts from their ferocious instincts and warlike habits; while the Mission Indians of Canada retained all their native fierceness, and were systematically impelled to use their tomahawks against the enemies of the Church. Their wigwams were hung with scalps, male and female, adult and infant; and these so-called missions were but nests of baptized savages, who wore the crucifix instead of the medicine-bag, and were encouraged by the Government for purposes of war.656
The Moravian envoy made his way to the Delaware town of Kushkushkee, on Beaver Creek, northwest of Fort Duquesne, where the three chiefs known as King Beaver, Shingas, and Delaware George received him kindly, and conducted him to another town on the same stream. Here his reception was different. A crowd of warriors, their faces distorted with rage, surrounded him, brandishing knives and threatening to kill him; but others took his part, and, order being at last restored, he read them his message from the Governor, which seemed to please them. They insisted, however, that he should go with them to Fort Duquesne, in order that the Indians assembled there might hear it also. Against this dangerous proposal he protested in vain. On arriving near the fort, the French demanded that he should be given up to them, and, being refused, offered a great reward for his scalp; on which his friends advised him to keep close by the camp-fire, as parties were out with intent to kill him. "Accordingly," says Post, "I stuck to the fire as if I had been chained there. On the next day the Indians, with a great many French officers, came out to hear what I had to say. The officers brought with them a table, pens, ink, and paper. I spoke in the midst of them with a free conscience, and perceived by their looks that they were not pleased with what I said." The substance of his message was an invitation to the Indians to renew the old chain of friendship, joined with a warning that an English army was on its way to drive off the French, and that they would do well to stand neutral.
He addressed an audience filled with an inordinate sense of their own power and importance, believing themselves greater and braver than either of the European nations, and yet deeply jealous of both. "We have heard," they said, "that the French and English mean to kill all the Indians and divide the land among themselves." And on this string they harped continually. If they had known their true interest, they would have made no peace with the English, but would have united as one man to form a barrier of fire against their farther progress; for the West in English hands meant farms, villages, cities, the ruin of the forest, the extermination of the game, and the expulsion of those who lived on it; while the West in French hands meant but scattered posts of war and trade, with the native tribes cherished as indispensable allies.
After waiting some days, the three tribes of the Delawares met in council, and made their answer to the message brought by Post. It was worthy of a proud and warlike race, and was to the effect that since their brothers of Pennsylvania wished to renew the old peace-chain, they on their part were willing to do so, provided that the wampum belt should be sent them in the name, not of Pennsylvania alone, but of the rest of the provinces also.
Having now accomplished his errand, Post wished to return home; but the Indians were seized with an access of distrust, and would not let him go. This jealousy redoubled when they saw him writing in his notebook. "It is a troublesome cross and heavy yoke to draw this people," he says; "they can punish and squeeze a body's heart to the utmost. There came some together and examined me about what I had wrote yesterday. I told them I writ what was my duty. 'Brothers, I tell you I am not afraid of you. I have a good conscience before God and man. I tell you, brothers, there is a bad spirit in your hearts, which breeds jealousy, and will keep you ever in fear.'" At last they let him go; and, eluding a party that lay in wait for his scalp, he journeyed twelve days through the forest, and reached Fort Augusta with the report of his mission.657
As the result of it, a great convention of white men and red was held at Easton in October. The neighboring provinces had been asked to send their delegates, and some of them did so; while belts of invitation were sent to the Indians far and near. Sir William Johnson, for reasons best known to himself, at first opposed the plan; but was afterwards led to favor it and to induce tribes under his influence to join in the grand pacification. The Five Nations, with the smaller tribes lately admitted into their confederacy, the Delawares of the Susquehanna, the Mohegans, and several kindred bands, all had their representatives at the meeting. The conferences lasted nineteen days, with the inevitable formalities of such occasions, and the weary repetition of conventional metaphors and long-winded speeches. At length, every difficulty being settled, the Governor of Pennsylvania, in behalf of all the English, rose with a wampum belt in his hand, and addressed the tawny congregation thus: "By this belt we heal your wounds; we remove your grief; we take the hatchet out of your heads; we make a hole in the earth, and bury it so deep that nobody can dig it up again." Then, laying the first belt before them, he took another, very large, made of white wampum beads, in token of peace: "By this belt we renew all our treaties; we brighten the chain of friendship; we put fresh earth to the roots of the tree of peace, that it may bear up against every storm, and live and flourish while the sun shines and the rivers run." And he gave them the belt with the request that they would send it to their friends and allies, and invite them to take hold also of the chain of friendship. Accordingly all present agreed on a joint message of peace to the tribes of the Ohio.658
Frederic Post, with several white and Indian companions, was chosen to bear it. A small escort of soldiers that attended him as far as the Alleghany was cut to pieces on its return by a band of the very warriors to whom he was carrying his offers of friendship; and other tenants of the grim and frowning wilderness met the invaders of their domain with inhospitable greetings. "The wolves made a terrible music this night," he writes at his first bivouac after leaving Loyalhannon. When he reached the Delaware towns his reception was ominous. The young warriors said: "Anybody can see with half an eye that the English only mean to cheat us. Let us knock the messengers in the head." Some of them had attacked an English outpost, and had been repulsed; hence, in the words of Post, "They were possessed with a murdering spirit, and with bloody vengeance were thirsty and drunk. I said: 'As God has stopped the mouths of the lions that they could not devour Daniel, so he will preserve us from their fury.'" The chiefs and elders were of a different mind from their fierce and capricious young men. They met during the evening in the log-house where Post and his party lodged; and here a French officer presently arrived with a string of wampum from the commandant, inviting them to help him drive back the army of Forbes. The string was scornfully rejected. "They kicked it from one to another as if it were a snake. Captain Peter took a stick, and with it flung the string from one end of the room to the other, and said: 'Give it to the French captain; he boasted of his fighting, now let us see him fight. We have often ventured our lives for him, and got hardly a loaf of bread in return; and now he thinks we shall jump to serve him.' Then we saw the French captain mortified to the uttermost. He looked as pale as death. The Indians discoursed and joked till midnight, and the French captain sent messengers at midnight to Fort Duquesne."
