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beyond anything Washington could have envisioned. In late January, Dinwiddie alerted the Board of Trade in London to the prospect of a major French encroachment in the spring: the French would marshal fifteen hundred French soldiers and countless Indian warriors and commence a program to build more forts in the Ohio Country. To substantiate his case, Dinwiddie sent along Washington’s report, which was published in London in pamphlet form as The Journal of Major George Washington, giving the obscure young man instant renown in the British Empire. The slim volume helped kindle a spark that eventually led to the conflagration of the French and Indian War. Washington had expected money as well as fame for his trouble and was not assuaged when the assembly voted him a measly fifty-pound reward. As he grumbled to his brother Augustine, “I was employed to go a journey in the winter . . . and what did I get by it? My expenses borne!”38 It was Washington’s first bitter lesson in politics.

Washington parlayed the governor’s approval of his work into a central role in the colony’s upcoming military campaign in the Ohio Country. Within a week of arriving in Williamsburg, he was authorized, as adjutant of the Northern Neck District, to raise and train one hundred militia. Joined by another hundred troops, they were to march to the Forks of the Ohio and construct a fort. On January 28 Washington contacted another Virginia official, Richard Corbin, and lobbied him for a promotion. Once again his style was both assertive and self-effacing: he tugged the forelock and pushed himself forward at once, as if he knew he was being boorish but couldn’t contain himself. He started out by conceding that the “command of the whole forces” of Virginia would be “a charge too great for my youth and inexperience.” Then he continued: “But if I could entertain hopes that you thought me worthy of the post of lieutenant colonel and would favour me so far as to mention it at the appointment of officers, I could not but entertain a true sense of the kindness.” This dogged young man cited “my own application and diligent study of my duty,” rather than his ability, as the best reason for his promotion.39 As it turned out, Washington did not overstate his worth, and Dinwiddie presented him with a commission as a lieutenant colonel. Almost twenty-two, Washington was emerging as a wunderkind to be reckoned with in the world of Virginia politics.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bloodbath

FROM HIS HEADQUARTERS IN ALEXANDRIA, Lieutenant Colonel George Washington attempted to inject discipline into a group of raw recruits he had enlisted for the impending march. Scarcely the spit-and-polish outfit of his dreams, they were marginal figures who inhabited the fringes of colonial society, and his attitude toward these rank amateurs mingled sympathy with vague distaste. As he bemoaned to Dinwiddie, most of these soldiers were “loose, idle persons that are quite destitute of house and home and I may truly say many of them of clothes.”1 Throughout his career, Washington complained of his charges being too rambunctious; they never seemed mannerly enough for his tastes. These scruffy, underfunded troops lacked shoes, stockings, shirts, and coats, as well as cutlasses, halberds, pikes, and drums. Their tattered clothing was especially upsetting for Washington, who lobbied Dinwiddie for red uniforms, advancing the novel sartorial theory that among the Indians red “is compared to blood and is looked upon as the distinguishing marks of warriors and great men.”2 He went so far as to opine that the Indians ridiculed the French soldiers’ shabby appearance, “and I really believe [that] is the chief motive why they hate and despise them as they do.”3

To head the expedition, Dinwiddie named Joshua Fry, a former mathematics professor at the College of William and Mary; the English-born and Oxford-educated Fry was given command of the Virginia Regiment with the rank of colonel. Since Fry was already in his midfifties, Washington was stuck below a lumbering old man, as he likely perceived him. Most