Washington [65]
No sooner did Washington’s men glimpse the soldiers ahead than they reeled under the impact of repeated rounds of gunfire and began to fire back. It turned out that Virginians were firing at Virginians. As Washington fathomed the full horror of this mistake, he unsheathed his sword and slashed at his men’s leveled muskets to stop their firing, but it was too late. The misadventure left behind staggering casualties: fourteen dead and twenty-six wounded. Even after the Revolutionary War, Washington said of this star-crossed episode that his life had been “in as much jeopardy as it had ever been before or since.”17
This was now the fourth time that Washington had traversed the path to the Forks of the Ohio, and each time his military aspirations had been foiled by unforeseen developments. For someone of Washington’s dogged nature, the frustration must have been mortifying. The French and Indian War had humbled him with cruel ironies and unexpected setbacks, leaving him more philosophic and reflective. As he wrote a few years later, “Human affairs are always checkered and vicissitudes in this life are rather to be expected than wondered at.”18
When the fall of Fort Duquesne finally came in late November 1758, it was almost anticlimactic. Forbes was about to defer the attack until the following spring when three prisoners disclosed that the French fort was now undermanned. An Indian scout then appeared and told of huge billows of smoke rising from the post. Forbes assembled 2,500 men to take the fort and gave Washington the “brevet,” or honorary rank, of brigadier general for the operation. When this huge force arrived on the scene on November 25, 1758, they found only the charred, smoldering remains of Fort Duquesne. Deserted by their Indian allies, the French had deemed the fort dangerously indefensible, blown it up, and fled by night down the Ohio River. Fort Pitt—the new name paid tribute to William Pitt—would arise on the flaming wreckage of Fort Duquesne. Colonel Bouquet gloated that one reason for the triumph was Forbes’s refusal to capitulate to Braddock’s Road, “which would have been our destruction.”19
The conquest rang down the curtain on Washington’s military tenure after five years of devoted service. With the safety of Virginia’s pioneers and traders temporarily assured, it was an auspicious moment for him to resign his commission and focus his energies on Martha Dandridge Custis and Mount Vernon. His upcoming marriage and service in the House of Burgesses offered a seamless transition into a promising new life. Health reasons also lay behind the resignation. Washington’s dysentery had apparently flared up again, because he described his health as “precarious” that December, having worsened “for many months before, occasioned by an inveterate disorder” in his bowels. 20
As word of Washington’s resignation spread, his officers seemed genuinely crestfallen. He had done a superlative job of taking callow recruits, introducing discipline, and spurring them to function as more professional soldiers. His boon companion, Captain Robert Stewart, spoke for many when he wrote to