Washington [45]
Washington’s derring-do even fostered a lasting mystique among the Indians. A folk belief existed among some North American tribes that certain warriors enjoyed supernatural protection from death in battle, and this mythic stature was projected onto Washington. Fifteen years later he encountered an Indian chief who distinctly recalled seeing him at the battle by the Monongahela and told how he had ordered his warriors, without success, to fire directly at him. The chief had concluded that some great spirit would guide him to momentous things in the future.
Perhaps the most enduring influence of Braddock’s defeat was the altered colonial view of British power, formerly deemed to be invincible. “This whole transaction gave us the first suspicion that our exalted ideas of the prowess of British regular troops had not been well founded,” said Benjamin Franklin.43 Although Braddock had led the biggest British force ever to undertake an operation in the colonies, it had ended in a resounding failure. Washington had witnessed something hitherto unthinkable for loyal colonials: the British Empire could be defeated on a distant continent. For all of Braddock’s derision of colonial troops, they had shown much more courage than the vaunted British regulars. It had been trained British soldiers who all too often had killed their brethren with misplaced fire. Washington was still imbued with the professional standards of the British military, but he had been exposed to the forest warfare perfected by their adversaries and had learned lasting lessons. One report published after the battle told of Washington urging Braddock to split up his troops while the general “obstinately persisted in the form of a field battle, his men standing shoulder to shoulder.”44 Braddock’s defeat spawned a new awareness of the futility of European military practices on American soil, which later emboldened Washington and other colonists to believe that a ramshackle army of rough frontiersmen could defeat the world’s foremost military machine.
CHAPTER SIX
The Soul of an Army
THE DISGRACEFUL DEFEAT of Edward Braddock exposed the vulnerability of western Virginia to attack. Every time the Indians staged a raid in the Shenandoah Valley, terrified British settlers streamed back across the Blue Ridge Mountains to the safety of older settlements. By mid-August 1755, the assembly in Williamsburg voted forty thousand pounds to protect the colony from such threats, and Washington’s name was bandied about as the favored candidate to command a newly reconstituted Virginia Regiment. Evidently the mere prospect that Washington might be appointed elicited stiff resistance from Mary Washington, for George sent her a terse note, justifying his impending decision and holding his blazing temper in check, if barely. After his customary “Honored Madam,” he went on: “If it is in my power to avoid going to the Ohio again, I shall. But [if] the command is pressed upon me by the general voice of the country and offered upon such terms as can’t be objected against, it would reflect dishonour upon me to refuse it and that, I am sure, must, or ought, to give you greater cause of uneasiness than my going in an honourable com[man]d.”1 One notes the pointed rebuke tucked into that word “ought.” Everyone in the colony seemed to cheer on George Washington as a bona fide hero except his own mother.
The same day Washington wrote to his mother—one suspects he already knew of his appointment—Governor Dinwiddie offered to make Washington, twenty-three, not only