Washington [34]
AS HE STEELED HIMSELF at Fort Necessity for the enraged French onslaught, Washington squabbled with Dinwiddie over the unequal treatment of provincial officers. Despite his good fortune, he brooded on the penalties he suffered as a colonial. He had no quarrel, he told Dinwiddie, with the appointment of Colonel James Innes, a veteran Scottish officer leading a North Carolina regiment, as the new commander in chief to replace Joshua Fry. And he enjoyed cordial relations with Major George Muse, who brought two hundred men to Fort Necessity and deferred to Washington as leader of the Virginia Regiment. What nettled Washington was the imminent arrival of South Carolina Independents under James Mackay, a senior officer who held his captaincy by royal commission. Mackay’s company was composed mostly of colonial soldiers, but it was part of the regular British Army. This renewed the thorny issue of whether a regular captain could lord it over Washington, who held a superior provincial rank. Washington assured Dinwiddie that he would “endeavor to make all my officers show Captain Mackay all the respect due to his rank and merit, but [I] should have been particularly obliged if your Honor had declared whether he was under my command or independent of it.”25
When Captain Mackay arrived with one hundred men on June 14, he quickly asserted his prerogatives over Colonel Washington and staked out a separate camp-site. When Washington sent over the parole and countersign to be used, Mackay made it crystal clear that he wasn’t bound by orders from a lowly colonial colonel. He also wouldn’t allow his South Carolinians to join the Virginians in an important road-building operation, since Washington could pay only inferior colonial wages. This high-handed behavior dealt a stinging rebuke to Washington, who was fighting to protect a British Empire that insisted on consigning him to inferior status. Increasingly, he found himself fighting one war against the French and an equally acrimonious one behind the lines with his British brethren.
As it happened, Washington had much graver problems than his minor interpersonal drama with Captain Mackay. On June 18 he huddled with the Half King and other chieftains for three days to plot strategy against the French. In the end, the Indians concluded that Washington and his flimsy fortress couldn’t shield them against the huge French force gathering at Fort Duquesne. This ended their short-lived alliance and threw young Washington back on his own resources. In his diary, he inveighed against the faithless Indians as “treacherous devils who had been sent by the French as spies” and could turn against his men at any time. The Half King, for his part, painted a portrait of Washington as a “good-natured” but naively inept young commander who “took upon him to command the Indians as his slaves” and refused to “take advice from Indians.”26 He derided Fort Necessity as “that little thing upon the meadow.”27
On June 28 Washington ordered his exhausted men, who had been dispersed building roads, to retreat within the flimsy confines of Fort Necessity. At a war council that day, the outlook seemed pretty bleak. Intelligence reports, only slightly exaggerated, warned that the French would attack with eight hundred French soldiers and four hundred Indians,