American Rifle - Alexander Rose [18]
Turning his attention first to the officers, Washington insisted that in the Virginia Regiment a meritocratic (if not democratic) ethos would be the rule. Men, he believed, will follow only leaders they respect. In this sense, the Indian practice of electing their commanders was the example Washington intended to follow (within limits). “Remember,” he told his subordinates on January 8, 1756, “that it is the actions, and not the commission, that make the officer and that there is more to be expected from him than the title.” (Washington meant what he said: he exiled an ensign from the regiment that day for dishonoring himself by cheating at cards.)124 Officers would gain respect through the display of personal competence and fairness to all ranks: henceforth enlisted soldiers would be paid, fed, and equipped on time and according to what they were promised at their recruitment. Skimming the men’s pay for personal gain, showing favoritism, and lying about the men’s conditions of service—time-honored practices in European armies—would no longer be tolerated.
Virginia volunteers had duties as well as rights. In return for decent treatment, command by sound officers, and fair justice, they would submit to drill and ceremonial regulations conceived by Washington “even in the most minute punctilios.”125 The deal included also accepting his exertion of discipline. When he discovered that his men had been deserting, Washington tempestuously ordered a “gallows near forty foot high erected” and sentenced fourteen deserters to death, five more to fifteen hundred lashes, and two others to a thousand. (Governor Robert Dinwiddie, a longtime ally, helpfully provided sixteen blank death warrants.) As time went on, however, Washington’s ardor for capital punishment dissipated, and he ended up pardoning all but two—one an incorrigible deserter and the other “one of the greatest villains upon the continent.” His mercifulness did not extend to the guilty’s method of execution: once benoosed on the gallows, they were to be raised slowly so as to be strangled, rather than dropped so that their necks broke instantly. Dinwiddie would, Washington hoped, excuse him the decision, for the method “conveyed much more terror to others; and it was for example sake we did it.”126
The colonel’s efforts paid off when two of his companies were sent to South Carolina in 1757. Though Washington stayed at home, one of his most promising captains and a fellow veteran of Braddock’s lost army, George Mercer, proudly boasted to his chief that “we have been told here by the [British] officers that nothing ever gave them such surprise as our appearance.” They had been “expecting to see a parcel of . . . disorderly fellows headed by officers of their own stamp (like the rest of the Provincials they had seen).” But “behold they saw men properly disposed who made a good and soldierlike appearance and performed in every particular as well as could be expected from any troops.”127
There remained, nonetheless, distinct differences between the Virginia Regiment and the British infantry, not least of which was Washington’s emphasis on marksmanship. In selecting soldiers for his elite Virginians, Washington insisted that “great care should be observed in choosing active marksmen; the manifest inferiority of inactive persons, unused to arms, in this kind of service to lively persons who have practised hunting, is inconceivable. The chance against them is more than two to one.”128 To get the best shots, he beat up for many more recruits than he needed and put them through their paces at the target range to find the naturals and the exceptionals.129 The men were to be trained to hit targets on the bull’s-eye at a variety of distances because Washington had imbibed the lesson that the Indian way of warfare, developed and honed over innumerable generations, paid lavish dividends.130
He was certainly keen to put principle into practice. The New-York Mercury reported in the spring of 1756 that French-backed Indians “have drove in all the inhabitants on the frontiers