Washington [44]
By his reckoning, three hundred soldiers died on the British side, with another three hundred wounded (the true number likely approached one thousand casualties); at least two-thirds, he thought, had been victims of friendly fire. He fulminated against the British soldiers as “cowardly regulars” who had shot down the men ahead of them, even if they happened to be comrades, and was outraged that the British had been routed by an inferior enemy force of nine hundred men.32 “We have been most scandalously beaten by a trifling body of men,” he complained to brother Jack.33 In comparison, French and Indian casualties—twenty-three dead and sixteen wounded—were minuscule.
On the night of July 13, a shattered Braddock lay dying two miles from the Great Meadows, when he said memorably of his shocking defeat, “Who would have thought it?”34 He praised his officers even as he damned his men, saying that “nothing could equal the gallantry and good conduct of the officers nor the bad behavior of the men.”35 Braddock displayed high regard for Washington and recommended that his body servant, Thomas Bishop, find future employment with him. He also gave the young Virginian a red silk sash and a pair of pistols that the younger man always treasured. Washington oversaw Braddock’s burial, a task that fell to him by default as the only officer left standing to issue orders. After his men dug a trench in the road and lowered the blanket-wrapped body, Washington held an impromptu Anglican service by torchlight. Afraid that Indians might unearth the body and desecrate it, Washington had his wagons ride repeatedly over the grave to hide the freshly turned earth and “guard against a savage triumph . . . thus died a man whose good and bad qualities were intimately blended,” he wrote.36 This stratagem worked, and the French and Indians never located Braddock’s grave.
One suspects that Washington knew that his fond hope of a Royal Army commission had been buried along with the general. The following year Dinwiddie speculated that if Braddock had survived, “I believe he would have provided handsomely for [Washington] in the regulars.”37 Nonetheless Washington’s reputation grew in defeat. As he trotted homeward in late July, clutching his bullet-riddled hat as a battle souvenir, he knew that his well-publicized bravery had enhanced his image in the colonies. The governor of North Carolina congratulated the twenty-three-year-old “on your late escape and the immortal honor you have gained on the banks of [the] Ohio.”38 An admiring correspondent in Philadelphia informed him that Benjamin Franklin had paid tribute to his heroism and that “everybody seems willing to venture under your command.”39
Perhaps the most gratifying response came from the rich, adoring family at Belvoir. The young war hero was lionized by William Fairfax, while Sally Fairfax sent him a sweet bantering note, cautiously cosigned by two friends, that chided him for not rushing to see her. “After thanking heaven for your safe return, I must accuse you of great unkindness in refusing us the pleasure of seeing you this night,” she wrote. “I do assure you nothing but our being satisfied that our company would be disagreeable should prevent us from trying if our legs would not carry us to Mount Vernon this night. But if you will not come to us, tomorrow morning very early, we shall be at Mount Vernon.”40 An unabashed affection for Washington emerges from these Fairfax missives. Much more than merely a young favorite, he had been virtually adopted by the family, which expected great things from him.
In Braddock’s crushing defeat, Washington had established an indelible image as a fearless young soldier who never flinched from danger and enjoyed a special intimacy with death. He had dodged so many bullets that he might have suspected he would escape the ancestral curse of his short-lived