Washington [36]
How could this profound misunderstanding have arisen? The night of the negotiation was dark and rainy, and when Van Braam brought back the terms of surrender, Washington and the other officers strained to read the blurry words in a dim light. “We could scarcely keep the candlelight to read them,” recalled one officer. “They were wrote in a bad hand, on wet and blotted paper, so that no person could read them but Van Braam, who had heard them from the mouth of the French officer.” 36 Not expert in English, Van Braam might have used death or loss interchangeably with assassination, yet it’s hard to imagine that he botched the translation deliberately. What is clear is that Washington was adamant that he never consented to the loaded word assassination. “That we were willfully, or ignorantly, deceived by our interpreter in regard to the word assassination, I do aver and will to my dying moment,” Washington insisted.37
In other respects, the French treated Washington and his men more honorably. They wanted to characterize their military confrontation as an act of reprisal instead of war and to show due mercy to the vanquished after they had “confessed.” Instead of being taken prisoner, the British soldiers would be allowed to retreat with the full honors of war, “our drums beating and our colors flying,” as Washington phrased it.38 Nevertheless, the next morning one hundred Indian allies of the French ransacked the British baggage, completing their humiliation. On the road back to Wills Creek, the Indians taunted and harassed Washington’s men. The Virginia Regiment began to crumble from wholesale desertions, and the hapless Washington felt powerless to stop it.
In the rifled baggage, the French stumbled upon the diary that Washington had kept, and it was duly passed along to Governor Duquesne, who devoured its contents. “There is nothing more unworthy and lower and even blacker than the sentiments and the way of thinking of this Washington,” Duquesne gloated after perusing the diary.39 To Washington’s mortification, it was published in Paris two years later to a jeering public. The French had a field day with the articles of capitulation, brandishing them as proof that Washington had murdered Jumonville, a man on a peaceful mission. In this manner, they cast the British as the first belligerents in the French and Indian War. The sudden celebrity that Washington had attained in Virginia turned to instant notoriety abroad. One English writer, in high dudgeon, lambasted the articles of surrender as “the most infamous a British subject ever put his hand to.”40
The Fort Necessity debacle pointed up Washington’s inexperience. Historians have rightly faulted him for advancing when he should have retreated; for fighting without awaiting sufficient reinforcements; for picking an indefensible spot; for the slapdash construction of the fort; for alienating his Indian allies; and for shocking hubris in thinking that he could defeat an imposing French force. Yet the major blame must lie with Governor Dinwiddie and the Virginia legislators, who had failed to fund the campaign properly