This Day in Colonial History (Washington Escapes Ambush of British in Pennsylvania Wilderness)

July 9, 1755—Marching through the thick forests of Western Pennsylvania with too few advance scouts, approximately 1,500 British troops were attacked, then defeated by an outnumbered force of 900 Indians, French, and Canadians.

The panicked redcoats hardly even bothered to protect their mortally wounded leader, General Edward Braddock, the recently appointed commander in chief of all British troops in North America. The stinging defeat did, however, provide excellent experience for a 23-year-old Virginian hired by Braddock as a volunteer aide-de-camp, George Washington.

The debacle near present-day Pittsburgh wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Braddock was a soldier with 45 years’ experience. Moreover, his troops were among England’s best, drilled to maintain cohesion along the combat line and looking forward to reaching Fort Duquesne—the opening wedge in their attempt to supplant France as the dominant power in North America.

But, under fire from the French and their Indian allies using trees and rocks for cover, with their own scarlet uniforms serving as excellent targets, His Majesty’s troops found their training of little use in a new kind of asymmetrical warfare. After three hours, with 60 of 80 officers killed or wounded, they broke under the pressure, leaving wagons, provisions, clothing, and personal effects in their wake.

By the time they stumbled away from the Battle of the Monongahela, half of Braddock’s army had been killed or wounded, shocking the British public and their American colonies.

Braddock was not without virtues or insights. He did, after all, spot talent in young Washington, even though the Virginian had, in effect, inadvertently started the French and Indian War in a skirmish in the woods of the Ohio Valley. (See David Preston’s discussion in the October 2019 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.) And he was justly annoyed by the lack of material support he was provided when he first reached the colonies (a situation quickly redressed by horses and wagons rounded up by Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin).

But each day, Braddock proved that his inflexibility was matched only by his irascibility. And, by the end of the campaign and his life, he would have proof that he was mistaken in believing that colonists’ “slothful and languid disposition renders them very unfit for military service.”

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Washington, Douglas Southall Freeman summarized succinctly the limitations of Braddock in a foreign environment:

“Braddock, of course, was entirely ignorant of the type of combat that prevailed in America. What was worse, he was not a man to learn. He lacked all originality of mind and exemplified the system that produced and schooled him, a system traditional, methodical and inflexible. A man of his training was not apt to fail to do everything the regulations and the accepted tactics prescribed. It was still less likely he would do anything more. Trained for war on the continent of Europe, where the masters employed their art, Braddock believed that the tactics in which he had been drilled for forty years were close to perfection…. As a matter of fact, few of the political elders who had the temerity to talk to Braddock about his chosen art of war had any personal experience in frontier fighting. Young men like Washington scarcely counted until they proved themselves.”

Proving himself was what Washington ended up doing in multiple ways in the ambush. Despite having two horses shot from under him, as well as four bullets flying through his hat or uniform, he helped Braddock rally his men; managed to get his wounded commander across the river with the yells of nearby Native Americans ringing in his ears; dug a makeshift grave for Braddock, then covered the evidence of it so the commander’s remains would not be desecrated by his foes; and coordinated the stunned army’s retreat, ensuring its remnants would fight another day.

Though a wave of second-guessing ensued after the battle over why the English forces as a whole performed so badly, young Washington emerged from the catastrophe with an enhanced reputation for coolness and bravery under fire. He finished his service in the French and Indian War as the highest-ranking officer among the Virginia troops, positioning him to be named commander in chief of the Continental Army when hostilities broke out between Britain and its colonies in 1775.

But the Battle of the Monongahela influenced Washington’s career in other key ways, too, through the lessons he took away:

*Native Americans were a powerful force that would have to be dealt with—diplomatically if possible, militarily if necessary. During the American Revolution, Iroquois attacks led Washington to authorize Gen. John Sullivan to crush harassment by the Indians and their Loyalists in southern New York. As President, he sought unsuccessfully to institute a just Indian policy, trying to simultaneously ward off British incitements of Indian raids and settlers' incursions into Indian lands in the Northwest Territory.

*The advice of aides was not to be dismissed lightly. At critical junctures, Braddock, believing that he knew best, ignored the advice of subordinates, including about the need to bolster their number of Indian scouts. In contrast, when he commanded the continentals, Washington was cautious and deliberate to a fault, listening carefully at councils of war.

*Inadequate attention to detail could harm an army. An officer noted that Braddock was “very indolent and seemed glad for anybody to take business off his hands.” In the crucial run-up to battle, his failure to ensure proper reconnoitering ensured that he would blunder into the wilderness. Freeman was scathing about this failure: “Great dangers often are rendered small by vigilance; lesser dangers always are enlarged by negligence.” Washington—who managed his plantation from afar as well as his army during the Revolutionary War—would never make the same mistake.

*British forces were not invincible. Always a realist, Washington knew just how great the odds were that he could defeat the far numerically superior British forces. But his experience with Braddock surely also convinced him that Britain commanders’ overconfidence rendered them vulnerable.

*Military intelligence was crucial. At the Monongahela, the French commander had used intelligence supplied by his network of intelligence scouts to expertly deploy his troops. Braddock’s failure to match this made his defeat inevitable. On the other hand, Washington’s constant attention to this in the American Revolution meant that he could shift the odds against victory more in his service.

*Surprise, even against a heavily favored foe, could carry the day. Shock helped break the will of Braddock’s troops. Two decades later, at the Battle of Trenton, Washington ensured the survival of the patriot cause with a dawn attack on British troops still hung over from Christmas revelry the night before.

This Day in Military History (Robert Rogers, Special Ops Pioneer, Dies)

May 18, 1795—Major Robert Rogers, a New Hampshire soldier whose tactics and leadership of an elite unit of unconventional warriors in the French and Indian War foreshadowed the modern “Special Forces,” died alone and impoverished at age 63 in London, far removed from the brilliant exploits in the North American wilderness that made him famous throughout the 13 American colonies.

If you are wondering what a picture of buckskin-clad Spencer Tracy is doing in a post about an 18^th-century military commander, it is because the great actor spurred my interest in this legendary but flawed soldier by playing him, with his usual intensity and conviction, in Northwest Passage, King Vidor’s 1940 adaptation of the bestselling novel by Kenneth Roberts. 

I can still remember being enthralled as a child by numerous scenes in this epic Technicolor tale of daring and survival—notably, a “human chain” that enables “Rogers’ Rangers” to cross a torrential river.

With America more than a year away from entering World War II, Rogers’ exploits showed how America, with little of the intense training that characterized Continental soldiers, could still revolutionize warfare by teaching a motley force unconventional new tactics. 

“Rogers’ Rangers” represented a sharp break with the English tradition of military service, where commissions were bought and common soldiers were drilled to march in strict formation. In contrast, the soldiers that Rogers molded were woodsmen, provincials, farmers, and Indian scouts, all ready to follow their charismatic leader in asymmetrical warfare where traditional methods could not find traction.

The film ended in triumph for Rogers and his soldiers. MGM had originally subtitled their feature “Book One: Rogers’ Rangers,” in the hope that its success would convince the studio’s most acclaimed male star that he should come back for the second half of the Roberts novel. 

But Tracy, exhausted by its arduous on-location filming, saw the downbeat second half of the book as a reason why it should not be filmed. “I’ll play him [Rogers] up to the point where he has achieved his objective, but I’ll be damned if I’ll play him when he becomes a drunkard. Audiences won’t want to see him in that stage of life.”

Offhand, I can think of only two epic films that challenged audiences with second halves that saw their real-life heroes suffer the kind of shattering disillusionment and death that Tracy saw as box-office poison: Lawrence of Arabia and Reds, about the American journalist who served as an eyewitness-participant in the Russian Revolution, John Reed. Northwest Passage, about an American further removed in time, would have been an even harder sell in tracing how its hero subsequently failed at politics, business, and marriage. 

The great 19^th-century historian of the colonial conflict between England and France, Francis Parkman, summed up Rogers’ opposing tendencies in Montcalm and Wolfe: 

“He had passed his boyhood in the rough surroundings of a frontier village. Growing to manhood, he engaged in some occupation which, he says, led him to frequent journeyings in the wilderness between the French and English settlements...He does not disclose the nature of this mysterious employment; but there can be little doubt that it was a smuggling trade with Canada. His character leaves much to be desired. He had been charged with forgery, or complicity in it, seems to have had no scruple in matters of business, and after the war was accused of treasonable dealings with the French and Spaniards in the west. He was ambitious and violent, yet able in more ways than one, by no means uneducated, and so skilled in woodcraft, so energetic and resolute, that his services were invaluable.”

A few of Rogers’ exploits were especially noteworthy, not only for the way he employed speed and surprise against the French and their Native American allies but also for the hardships endured by him and his men:

*The St. Francois Raid, the climax of a 150-mile march, much of it through marshy bog, that ended in the destruction of an Indian village that had served as the launching pad for several deadly raids into the northern colonies; 

*The Second Battle of the Snowshoes, in which, after attempting to ambush the French, Rogers’ men had the tables turned on them—surviving by the skin of their teeth (including, a possibly apocryphal tale claims, by sliding 400 feet down a sheer cliff to a frozen Lake George; and 

*The 1760 capture of Fort Detroit and other French outposts, secured after Rogers and the Rangers marched west—through enemy forests not even charted by the English.

Rogers’ career after the end of the French and Indian Wars marked a tragic fall from grace. He had made an enemy of General Thomas Gage, a rival of Rogers’ commander and mentor, British General Jeffrey Amherst. Gage, as Parkman indicated in the passage I quoted earlier, brought charges of treason against Rogers and had him hauled to Detroit in chains.

Rogers was acquitted following a trial. But, at the start of the American Revolution, he made a worse enemy in George Washington, who, because of the major’s extensive travels in the colonies as unrest spread against English rule, suspected that Rogers was a Loyalist spy. 

Forced to choose side, Rogers elected to fight against the New Englanders he grew up with, even playing a role in one of the earliest English intelligence coups of the war: the capture of Nathan Hale. But he was removed from a leadership role of “The Queen’s Rangers,” and his drinking and indebtedness mounted until he faded into obscurity far from home. 

Nevertheless, his contribution to American warfare remains. It not only was maintained through his aide John Stark, who would win the Battle of Bennington for the colonials in the American Revolution, but through his “Rules of Ranging,” a set of guidelines for guerrilla warfare that is still distributed by the U.S. Army Ranger School.

This Day in Canadian History (Wolfe Defeats Montcalm in Battle for Quebec)

September 13, 1759—One hundred and fifty years of French rule in Canada came to a sudden end, as the forces of British General James Wolfe surprised and routed those of General Louis Montcalm in less than a half hour on the Plains of Abraham in the Battle of Quebec.

Besides the larger meaning of the battle—a conclusion to the worldwide Seven Years War (called, in its North American component, the French and Indian War)—what electrified Great Britain was how it was accomplished.

“What a scene!” wrote Horace Walpole after learning the news. “An army in the night dragging itself up a precipice by stumps of trees to assault a town and attack an enemy strongly entrenched and double in numbers!”

The consequences of the battle, in which the two opposing commanders were mortally wounded, were enormous. At a stroke, Britain vastly enlarged its overseas empire, while France saw its own vastly diminished.

The defeat also brought with it the possibility of forced repatriation of a host of French-speaking citizens in Quebec. Four years before Wolfe and Montcalm engaged in their momentous clash, Col. Charles Lawrence, the acting governor of Nova Scotia, had ordered the deportation of disbelieving Acadians to be scattered “among the several colonies on the continent.”

Given that track record, as well as how Britain had exiled rebellious Irishmen to the West Indies, the French-speaking population of Quebec was amply justified in fearing for the worst.

“The worst” did not happen, at least partly because, through the Quebec Act passed in 1774, Britain gave legal recognition to French civil laws, the seigneurial system, and Roman Catholicism. (The legislation was lumped together by patriots to the south as part of the “Intolerable Acts.” The vehement anti-Catholicism thus expressed did not endear American forces under Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold when they invaded Canada in late 1775.)

Nevertheless, the French loss meant that North America, whether in the 13 colonies or the Canadian territory now in the hands of the Hanoverian monarchs, would now be a vast expanse in which Protestantism would be the dominant religious norm. Moreover, Canadiens would become accustomed to a government in which, unlike the absolute monarchy they had long known, the power of the head of state would be checked by elected representatives.

In the province of Quebec—a population increasingly aggrieved in recent years at the Anglophone Parliamentary majority in Ottawa—Montcalm’s loss can still rankle.

A year or two ago, one French-speaking Canadian, a work colleague of mine, dismissed the French commander as an idiot, noting that Montcalm was so startled by Wolfe’s daring strategy—as Walpole indicated above, scaling the cliffs west of Quebec—that he’d lost the battle in only about 15 minutes.

Before his audacious move, Wolfe had been stymied in an old-fashioned siege—a move necessitated both by Quebec's advantageous geographical position (on a great height overlooking the St. Lawrence River, where it would be easy to spot and fend off invaders) and by his adversary’s deft deflection of any attempt on the city.

“Montcalm is at the head of a great number of bad soldiers and I am at the head of a small number of good ones,” Wolfe wrote at one point. He might have been surprised to learn that Montcalm shared his assessment, as well as an inability to get along with partners in his military adventure.

A fervent believer in the regular French army, Montcalm had little use for colonial troops, even though they had rebuffed Wolfe’s first attempt to seize Quebec, in July 1759, at Montmorency Falls. And, while Wolfe was squabbling with his subordinates on how to take the city, Montcalm was increasingly disregarding the man whose cooperation he should have courted, New France Governor-General Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil.

Throughout the long siege, Montcalm had been cautious to a fault—leading Wolfe to resort to what was, in effect, a Hail-Mary gambit. But Montcalm made some mistakes at the worst possible time that undoubtedly have fueled my friend’s annoyance:

* He dismissed Vaudreuil’s fear of a landing at Anse-au-Foulon: “We need not believe the enemy has wings!” Bad guess.

* He thought that even if the British scaled the cliffs, a light force in this commanding position would be enough to fight them off. Again, wrong.

* He was caught so off-guard by seeing an army of redcoats in front of him that he decided he couldn’t allow Wolfe any more time to consolidate his forces, and had to attack right then. Had he waited for cannon, he might have pummeled Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham, where the British commander would be hard-pressed to retreat.

The great narrative of the fall of the campaign, Montcalm and Wolfe, was written by Francis Parkman. The New England historian—who struggled for years to complete his epic France and England in North America while plagued with nervous breakdowns and failing eyesight—completed this section about the great conflict out of chronological sequence in his multi-volume work, for he wanted the concluding volume to be finished in case he died.

For Parkman, the 32-year-old Wolfe became, in effect, a stand-in for himself—a representative of the Anglo-Saxon race who imposed his indomitable will over precarious health in order to achieve his great life’s work.

At one point, Parkman relates how Wolfe, perhaps to calm his nervous tension, recited Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” dwelling especially on “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

“Gentlemen,” the general told his subordinates, “I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec.” In his fatalistic acceptance of death, Wolfe reminds me of nobody so much as another poetry-loving military hero two centuries later: John F. Kennedy, asking his wife Jacqueline to recite his favorite poem, Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous With Death.”

(The image accompanying this post is, of course, Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe. )