37. Early Phases of the French and Indian War

The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle left unresolved the main force for war in European relations: the insensate desire of the English war party for imperial expansion and aggression. The powerful war party was headed by the Duke of Cumberland, the favorite son of King George II, a military leader who had well earned the title “butcher” in suppressing the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland in 1745; Cumberland’s protégé Henry Fox; the Duke of Bedford, at the powerful post of secretary of state for the Southern Department; and, above all, William Pitt. The half-insane Pitt was the prototype of a modern politician: possessed of a charismatic personality, Pitt’s oratory could sway the masses for ever more grandiose war programs. Yet there was method in his madness. Pitt was consistently the spokesman for the imperial clique of London merchants and financiers. Underneath the cloud of patrioteering verbiage that could mobilize the masses, a hard core of vested economic interests was being effectively pursued.

While King George’s War was still under way, Pitt was vainly urging upon the cautious Newcastle an expansion of the war to conquer French Canada. In 1746, Pitt was agreeing with the leading New Hampshire fish merchant William Vaughan on the goal of conquest; in the same year he had his ally the Duke of Bedford submit a memorandum to Newcastle pressing for the seizure of Canada. Among the reasons mentioned was the smashing of French trade and sources of supply; but heading the list was the British seizure of the entire North American fur and fish trade—in which the French colonies were outcompeting the English.

The peace treaty ended these schemes temporarily, but the agitation of the war party continued unabated. The war party was able to strengthen its command of the key cabinet posts: Bedford had moved up from the admiralty to the crucial post of secretary of state for the South; his protégé the Earl of Sandwich assumed his former post; while, as we have seen, his other protégé the Earl of Halifax came in as president of the Board of Trade. William Shirley was selected by Bedford to sabotage the boundary negotiations with France over Nova Scotia and other colonial areas, and thus to keep the war pot brewing. Pelham managed to oust Bedford and Sandwich from office in 1751, and to horrify the war party by slashing army and navy appropriations and pursuing a pacific policy. Halifax, however, at the Board of Trade not only aggrandized his power over colonial affairs, but also pressed his desire for aggression against New France. Finally, the death of the prime minister Henry Pelham in early 1754 eliminated the great leader of the peace forces. Although he succeeded his brother as prime minister, Newcastle, isolated and surrounded by the war party, was pushed into another and far more grandiose war against France.

Caught in a war drive that he opposed, Newcastle decided that the Cumberland-Fox clique, which wanted a limited war against France concentrated on the continent of Europe, was far less dangerous than the Pitt-Bedford warmongers for unlimited aggression against all the French colonies. Newcastle therefore threw in with the former group, and Henry Fox was brought into the cabinet as secretary of war and then as secretary of state.

All the previous intercolonial wars had begun in Europe and were then reflected in the colonies. But the French and Indian War between Britain and France began in the colonies, and only later was extended to Europe as the Seven Years’ War. While the war in Europe lasted from 1756 to 1763, the war in America broke out—albeit unofficially—in late 1753 and was virtually over by 1760.

The French had heroically explored the Mississippi and Ohio valleys and had settled them as efficient fur traders with the Indians. With a population throughout their extensive territory of no more than seventy-five thousand, the French faced an aggressive and powerful set of English colonies containing a million and a half persons—and despite this overwhelmingly superior population, ever subject to hysteria over the supposed “menace” of New France. Moreover, behind the colonies was a British government directing the royal colonial governors, and increasingly in the hands of an extremely aggressive war party frankly dedicated to the total conquest of New France and the reduction of France and French trading competition to second-class status.

The final conflict between British America and New France was precipitated not so much by these general forces as by an Anglo-Virginian attempt at a huge land-grab. English settlements had now reached the Appalachian Mountains. Beyond stretched New French territory, tempting opportunity not only for ousting French fur traders but also for land speculation. Virginia, in particular, began to press its wild and grandiose land claims based on its original charter of 1609 and ignoring all the developments since. According to this questionable thesis, the Virginia government was the rightful sovereign of everything not only west, but northwest of the Appalachians to the Pacific—a claim which directly interfered, of course, with Pennsylvania’s own notion of its proper territorial area.

The first attempted Virginia grab of French land in the Ohio Valley came in 1743, when Colonel James Patton and his partners asked Virginia for a grant of two hundred thousand acres on the New River. At that time, before King George’s War had begun, the Virginia government refused the request on the wise ground that such an aggressive act might precipitate war with France. The advent of war ended Virginia’s scruples, however, helped by an Indian conference at Lancaster in mid-1744, at which the Iroquois signed away the right to the Ohio lands. The fact that the Iroquois’ only connection with this land was their highly dubious assertion of over-lordship, made no difference. A flimsy legitimacy, provided by pliant Iroquois over land they had nothing to do with, was now cast over the British claims.

In 1745, the Virginia government gave the first of its munificent grants of French territory. On the same day it gave away three huge land grants. One was of one hundred thousand acres on the Greenbrier River, across the Alleghenies, to the Greenbrier Company. The company was headed by the leading Virginia oligarch John Robinson, president of the Virginia Council, and included John Robinson, Jr., Speaker of the House of Burgesses, and William Beverly. A second gift granted one hundred thousand acres to the old Patton group, this time on the Ohio and New rivers. A third grant of fifty thousand acres on the Greenbrier River was made to Henry Downes and associates.

All this was ominous enough to the French, but at least these moves were made in the heat of conflict. The truly ominous and critical land-grab attempt was launched immediately after the war, with the grant of a vast amount of Ohio land to the newly formed Ohio Company.

The Ohio Company had its roots in the monstrous-sized land grant of over five million acres given to Lord Culpeper in the Northern Neck and later inherited by Lord Fairfax. An early manager of the Fairfax fief was Robert (“King”) Carter, who was able to use his position to amass a very large amount of land and to gain a dominant position in the Virginia planter oligarchy. Early in the eighteenth century, Fairfax replaced Carter by young Thomas Lee, who in turn used his position to amass a landed fortune. He was also aided in this task by marrying a Ludwell heiress and thus adding the prominent Ludwell estates. Losing his post in 1747, Lee, a member of the Virginia Council, decided to organize the Ohio Company as a speculative group for land settlement, and proceeded to pressure the government for the subsidy of a huge land grant at the forks of the Ohio River. To form the Ohio Company, Lee gathered around him a significant group. Many of them were residents and neighbors of the Fairfax fief, including George Fairfax and the Washington family, especially Lawrence and Augustine Washington. Marylanders among the organizers included the frontier trader Thomas Cresap. Lee and eleven others formed the Ohio Company in 1747, and quickly petitioned the governor and Council for a grant of two hundred thousand acres of land near the forks of the Ohio River. But Governor Gooch was not enthusiastic about the aggressiveness of the land grants, and the powerful Speaker John Robinson, himself a rival land speculator and a determined opponent of the company, was able to secure rejection of the Ohio Company request.

Undaunted, Lee and the others went over the Virginia governor’s head to appeal the decision to the Crown. To petition and put pressure on London, Lee secured the services of a prominent Quaker merchant, John Hanbury. In the spring of 1749, not long after Lee had assumed the post of president of the Council, the Crown directed Virginia to grant the two hundred thousand acres. In the summer, the governor and Council made the grant, conditioned on a hundred families’ settling there within seven years and on the company’s building a fort near the forks. As soon as the conditions were met, the company would take up an adjoining three hundred thousand acres on the same terms. Quitrent payments to the Crown were waived for ten years, and after that would only have to be made for land actually under cultivation.

The conditions of the Ohio Company grant had two fateful consequences: one, the fact of official British sanction alerted the French to the likelihood of dangerous encroachment on their territory; and two, a direct aggressive challenge was thereby laid down to the French. It was, clearly, high time for the French to act.

By the time the grant to the Ohio Company was made, Lee had converted the company all the more into a personal fief. George Fairfax and others had dropped out, while friends and relatives such as Richard Lee, Philip Ludwell Lee, and George Mason were added, as was the powerful Duke of Bedford in reward for his services in securing the grant. The outgoing Governor Gooch, for his part, tried to offset the exclusive privilege of the grant by handing out huge chunks of Ohio territory on the same day to several other groups of land speculators. John Tayloe secured a renewal of the one-hundred-thousand-acre Patton grant; Bernard Moore and others received one hundred thousand acres on the New River; Peyton Randolph and others four hundred thousand acres on the New; William Winston, Jr., fifty thousand acres east of the Ohio River; and the Loyal Company received the staggering total of eight hundred thousand acres along the southern Virginia frontier.

All in all, nearly one million, five hundred thousand acres were blithely granted away by Virginia in one day in 1749. The Loyal Company and the other grantees were not required to colonize or to build forts. The Loyal Company was a coalition of speculators headed by John Lewis of the Shenandoah Valley clique, Edmund Pendleton, a protégé of the Robinsons, and an Albemarle group, including Peter Jefferson and Dr. Thomas Walker. The Loyal Company collaborated closely with the Greenbrier Company of John Robinson’s. In the meanwhile, Thomas Lee became acting governor of Virginia in 1749-50, succeeding Gooch. After Lee’s death in late 1750, the newly appointed governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, had become, not accidentally, a member of the Ohio Company. Dinwiddie, incidentally, had gotten his start in the British bureaucracy as a virulent hatchetman for Lord Carteret, engaged in prosecuting and ousting firm adherents of Walpole from the royal bureaucracy. Dinwiddie was now a protégé of the formidable Duke of Bedford. Soon the company was expanded to include the Mercers, Robert Carter, George Washington, and Governor Arthur Dobbs of North Carolina.

From the time of the grants in 1749, much of Virginia politics may be explained by the emergence of two powerful factions of speculators in Ohio land: the Ohio Company clique of the Lees, Washingtons, Carters, Mercers, and Masons; and the Loyal-Greenbrier Company coalition of the Robinsons, Pendletons, Jeffersons, et al. As we have indicated, the Ohio Company, with its British success, its grip on the governorship, and its duty to build a fort on the forks of the Ohio, was the more alarming speculative group—to the fur traders and politicians of Pennsylvania, to the Indians of the Ohio Valley, and, not least of all, to the French.

The French, for their part, reacted to the threat of Anglo-Virginian aggression in the Ohio Valley with efficiency and dispatch. The French effectively warned the native Indians that the Ohio Company meant to clear and settle, and therefore to oust the Indians rather than to trade with them. The French launched a campaign to oust the English traders from the Ohio Valley, where they had been permitted to operate freely. A string of forts was built by the French throughout the region during 1753; Marquis Duquesne, governor general of New France, used over a thousand men to build a series of defensive forts in the Ohio Valley, including Forts Presque Isle on Lake Erie and Le Boeuf and Venango on French Creek.

Governor Dinwiddie, in his turn, reacted to French defensive measures by desperate appeals to fellow governors and especially to the Crown to take appropriate offensive action to outweigh the French moves. Finally, in August 1753, the Crown, under pressure also of the war party at home, took the fateful decision that was to lead to all-out conflict with France. The English government threw down the gauntlet of aggression. It instructed all the American governors to repel a French “invasion” of what was arrogantly proclaimed the “King’s domain” in the Ohio Valley, specifically referring to any interference with the construction of forts. Governor Dinwiddie was flatly ordered to consider any French forts as ipso facto acts of aggression upon supposed Virginia territory, and the Ohio Company’s plan to build a fort on the Ohio was officially encouraged. Dinwiddie was authorized if necessary to drive French forces from “his” territory by force of arms.

The die was cast. Dinwiddie now had official sanction for the aims of his Ohio Company. Dinwiddie’s first step was to send young Major George Washington, a partner in the Ohio Company, to Fort Le Boeuf with an ultimatum to the French troops to quit the Ohio Valley. When Washington returned with what should have been the expected refusal, Dinwiddie prepared eagerly for war. William Trent, agent of the Ohio Company, was made a captain by Dinwiddie and sent with a troop of armed men to build a fort at the forks of the Ohio and to repel the French; Washington, promoted to lieutenant colonel, was ordered to raise a hundred men and to join him. The governor also sent messages to all the other colonies urging them to join the fight, and to the Indian tribes, inviting them to make war upon the French. Dinwiddie tried to call up the militia, but the sturdy citizens of Virginia proved highly resistant to the draft. They generally refused to leave their families and homes for remote imperial aims. The Council noted that the draft was to be used only for fighting within Virginia, and that the Ohio Valley was only dubiously within the Old Dominion. Calling a special session in February 1754, Dinwiddie managed to convince the House of Burgesses to appropriate ten thousand pounds for the invasion, but he was forced to accept a committee of burgesses to supervise the expenditure of the money. Dinwiddie, however, had to abandon calling up the drafted militia, and desperately tried to encourage enlistments by proclaiming the reservation of two hundred thousand acres of Ohio land for free gifts (free of quitrent) for fifteen years to volunteers for the war.

The Virginians, incidentally, not only refused to be conscripted for the war; they also strongly resisted conscription of their goods and supplies by the military, as Colonel Washington soon found to his dismay.

If the Virginians themselves balked at squandering lives and properties for the invasive war for the Ohio, the citizens of the other colonies proved even more recalcitrant, despite the urging of their royal governors. The New York Assembly tardily questioned the assumption that the Ohio Valley was British territory, and the Quaker-run Assembly of Pennsylvania did much the same. Both refused to call up their militia. The Maryland Assembly also saw no invasion of British colonial territory in the French occupation of the Ohio. The New Jersey Assembly refused aid as well. Isaac Norris, the Pennsylvania Quaker leader, summed up much of colonial opinion when he noted, “The Ohio Company are endeavoring to engage all the colonies under the sanction of the King’s command to defend their lands upon that river.” Only North Carolina voted substantial funds, and planned to enlist a military troop.

The grandiose plans of Dinwiddie and the Ohio Company were rudely shattered when, on April 17, 1754, Trent’s little band, at work on constructing the fort at the forks of the Ohio, surrendered to a formidable French force of one thousand men under Claude-Pierre Pécaudy de Contrecoeur. The French commander magnanimously allowed Trent’s men to return to Virginia with all their possessions, and then rapidly proceeded to build the formidable Fort Duquesne at the same site. Colonel Washington marched rashly into the valley and, after wandering around in some confusion, was, on July 3, quickly smashed at his Fort Necessity by a French force more than double his own. Once again, the French allowed Washington and his troops to leave the valley and return to Virginia. The English aggressors had been totally routed and English troops ousted from the entire Ohio Valley.

The British government had sent several companies of regulars to aid in the war. One company from South Carolina had been in the fray with Washington, but had deeply angered the Virginians by refusing to obey their orders or to cooperate in the necessary labors of the expedition, thereby causing friction between Virginia and the British.

The other aid arrived later and only added to the burdens of Virginia. Two companies of regulars from New York arrived without supplies. A regiment of colonials came from North Carolina, only to find that no one had money to pay them or had the necessary supplies. The harassed North Carolinians mutinied, and mass desertions followed during July and August, finally forcing Virginia to disband the regiment officially. Governor James Glen of South Carolina trenchantly criticized Virginia’s meddling in the Ohio Valley as well as British claims to the territory. Virginia troop morale was understandably very low and desertions continued unremittingly. Only Maryland sent a company of men.

One might rationally suppose that Governor Dinwiddie would be properly chastened by these defeats and forget about the whole Ohio adventure. But not Dinwiddie. Like all hard-liners everywhere, he was resolved to fight to the last life and bit of property of everyone else. In a frenzy, Dinwiddie sought at every hand to push war to the uttermost. The British government he urged to send more troops and supplies, and boldly recommended a parliamentary poll tax upon the entire American continent to finance the campaign. This would have involved the dangerous and highly provocative scrapping of the crucial principle that no colony could be taxed without the consent of its elected Assembly.

At home, Dinwiddie actually ordered Colonel Washington to reinvade Ohio less than a month after his rout, but fortunately a delay in raising funds by the House of Burgesses led him to cancel this scheme. In the fall the lower house agreed to appropriate twenty thousand pounds for the war, and to levy an onerous poll tax to raise the money. The House refused to draft militia for fighting outside Virginia, but did agree to conscript all “vagrants” and to force them to fight for Virginian glory. Dinwiddie had still not given up the idea of a winter campaign to recapture Fort Duquesne, but the lack of interest by the other colonies finally forced him to abandon the plan.

Meanwhile, in late 1753, the New York government decided to call a joint conference of the Northern colonies, with the Iroquois and other Indian tribes, for the following June at Albany. As one of many conferences with the Iroquois and their followers, the idea was to try to mobilize the Indians for a general assault on French possessions in the Ohio Valley. It was the ineffable imperialist and warmonger Governor Shirley of Massachusetts who seized the occasion to try to unite the colonies into a league or confederation. Only when united under one central government could the full resources of the American colonies be mobilized by the Crown for an all-out assault on New France. The old imperialist dream of the Dominion of New England was now to be revived and extended to all the British colonies.

The delegates to the Albany Congress were in the main appointed by the governors, and largely taken from the councillors of their respective colonies. The Indian conference was supposed to be the only problem on the agenda, but under cover of these proceedings the delegates were persuaded by Benjamin Franklin, a delegate from Pennsylvania, to seize the occasion to propose a central government to rule over all the colonies and thus prosecute a far broader and more intensified war against the French. Franklin did this even though unauthorized to do so by Pennsylvania. This Plan of Union —largely Franklin’s—as approved by the delegates in July, urged the British Parliament to impose over all the colonies a central supergovernment, whose executive would be appointed by the Crown and whose legislature would consist of a grand council chosen by the respective colonial Assemblies. Executive salaries were to be provided by the Crown, thus bypassing the salary troubles that the royal governors had all had with the colonial Assemblies, and thus freeing the executive power from the checks and limits imposed on it by the representatives of the American public. Of particular significance was the taxing power, to be given to the president and the Council, and to be appropriated for the functions of the general government.

The Albany Plan, however, was a total dud. The independent and liberty-loving colonists had had enough trouble with royal prerogative embodied in the executive and judicial powers of the individual colonies. They had no desire for another supergovernment to add still another and greater engine of oppression. Rhode Island and Connecticut, now happily free of all royal officials, were especially vehement in opposition. The Connecticut delegates refused to sign the plan and the Connecticut Assembly attacked it bitterly, denouncing it as “against the rights and privileges of Englishmen....” The Rhode Island legislature could not forgive its delegate Stephen Hopkins for signing the proposal. A large majority of the Boston town meeting voted against the plan, Dr. William Clarke perceptively denouncing it to Franklin himself as a “scheme for destroying the liberties and privileges of every British subject upon the continent.” In general, the respective colonies took no notice of the plan. Even Governor Shirley opposed it bitterly, not of course because the central government would be too powerful but because for Shirley it would be far too weak. In particular, the provision for an elected legislature was to Shirley viciously democratic and destructive of the royal prerogative. Shirley urged that Parliament tax the colonies and that the central legislature be all appointed by the Crown. Governor Morris of Pennsylvania also scented a dangerous republicanism in the plan, as well as the destruction of Crown authority. He also insisted that a union of colonies must permit absolute dictation over the army by the supergovernment. Discussion in England of the plan, and of the whole problem of imperial relations with the colonies, was cast aside by the immediate crisis of the rout of Washington at Fort Necessity.

Franklin’s desperate gamble on the Albany Plan stemmed from his fear that Virginia, with its vague and grandiose charter claims, would be able to conquer and keep control of the Ohio Valley land. Pennsylvania’s Quaker Assembly would prevent that colony from contesting the spoils, but a central supergovernment over the colonies would suffer from no such limits or scruples. Hence Franklin’s provision in the Albany Plan that the supergovernment have the power to abrogate existing colonial claims to the western lands, and to create there new governments and land grants. After it was obvious that the Albany Plan would fail, Franklin unsuccessfully tried again: this time to forestall Virginia by creating two new colonies in the upper Ohio Valley. In this plan, Franklin was joined by two of his associates at the Albany congress—Sir William Johnson and Thomas Pownall, secretary to the governor of New York and brother of the influential John Pownall, secretary of the Board of Trade.

With Henry Fox now war secretary and Henry Pelham dead, the English war party had been considerably strengthened, and Cumberland, Fox, Halifax, and Pitt managed partly to push and partly to circumvent Newcastle, and to induce Britain to agree to send two regiments of regulars to America under General Edward Braddock as commander-in-chief of the English forces on the continent. Britain was now committed even more heavily to aggressive war against New France. Braddock’s instructions were to capture the critical French forts south of the St. Lawrence, and Henry Fox trumpeted these aims in the press in order to provoke the French into a general war. In that way, Fox and Cumberland expected to use a conquest of the Ohio Valley, and limited aggression against Canada, as the back door to war against France on the continent of Europe.

But France, instead, proposed an armistice, which war-intoxicated England indignantly refused. In English plans everything was neatly blocked out: General Braddock would launch the main effort from Virginia and recapture Fort Duquesne. At the same time, Governor Shirley and Sir William Johnson would capture the key French forts of Niagara and St. Frederic (Crown Point) at the southern tip of Lake Champlain. Also at the same time, Admiral Boscawen was to patrol the Atlantic coast and intercept any French reinforcements for America. At a conference on April 14, 1755, Braddock and the leading royal governors hammered out their joint plan of campaign.

The tidy plans blew up very quickly. First, the French fleet, bearing reinforcements, was able to slip by the British ambush. But the biggest blow was the fate of Braddock’s expedition. Armed with twenty-five hundred men, mainly British and the rest largely Virginians, Braddock set out in early June for Fort Duquesne.

From the beginning, the Braddock expedition seemed ill-omened. As usual, such colonial Assemblies as Pennsylvania and Maryland balked at voting for any substantial aid funds. Indeed, Dinwiddie, incensed at the colonists’ indifference and their persistence in mutually satisfactory trading with the enemy, called on Britain to tax the colonies and to ban all exports from America. The first error of the expedition itself was the decision to march from Virginia, a far more difficult and rugged path to Duquesne than from Pennsylvania. But Virginia was favored not only as a reliable royal colony not plagued by Quakers or a proprietary, but also as a means of furthering the interests of the Ohio Company. Next, the lack of enthusiasm for the war by the American public was revealed in their indifference to supplying the troops. Braddock was moved to denounce the frontier populace of Virginia and Maryland in no uncertain terms. Only Benjamin Franklin, eager to serve the aggressive British war effort, was able to gull and wheedle the German farmers into providing supplies to the Braddock forces.

Arriving near Fort Duquesne on July 9, the mighty Braddock army was set upon by a French and Indian force of little more than eight hundred and was promptly cut to ribbons. General Braddock was killed in the fray and the demoralized British, under the command of Colonel Thomas Dunbar, fled back as fast as they could across the Alleghenies, destroying large amounts of provisions in order to speed their way. Dunbar did not stop until he had taken the army all the way to the snug safety of Philadelphia. Governor Dinwiddie, still indomitably eager for others to fight to the last man, again urged another early attack on Fort Duquesne, but Dunbar had had enough. Once again the British drive for conquest had been thoroughly crushed by the French.

Dinwiddie’s war frenzy, however, was again redoubled. Bitterly denouncing Dunbar’s retreat to safety, Dinwiddie was tireless in his efforts to continue and escalate the conflict. He had just succeeded in pressuring and cajoling the Virginia Assembly into appropriating ten thousand pounds for the war. Now he reconvened the Assembly, which proved eager to pour good money after bad and granted another forty thousand pounds to be raised by an annual poll tax of one shilling. He also called up the Virginia militia, which he placed at the frontier under Colonel Washington’s command. But the liberty-loving people of Virginia showed no disposition whatever to give up their lives for the sacred cause of grabbing the Ohio land from the French. Nonviolent resistance greatly slowed the rate of conscription as well as the fighting élan of the troops. Washington complained long and loud of the laziness and indifference of the militia officers, especially of the recruiting officers themselves, who preferred carousal to enforcing conscription. Of particular significance is Washington’s report on the libertarian spirit of the militia and their dyed-in-the-wool resistance to the draft. “If we talk of obliging men to serve their country,” Washington lamented, “we are sure to hear a fellow mumble over the words liberty and property a thousand times.” Liberty and property were indeed increasingly becoming the watchwords of the era, and the colonial application was being made not only to the distant French but especially to “their” governments at home.

In Pennsylvania, as we have seen, the Assembly was stampeded after Braddock’s defeat into passing a militia law. However, Quakers were exempted from the draft, and the militia was formed as a people’s army with the officers democratically elected by the men of each company. In this democratic arrangement, the regimental officers were in turn chosen by the elected officers of the company. And finally, in a creatively libertarian provision, no officer or private in the Pennsylvania militia was to be subject to any articles of war unless he personally declared his consent to them in the presence of a judge.

Virginia continued to confront the reluctance of the people to have their bodies or their goods confiscated for purposes of war. Colonel Washington grumbled that Virginians “should be so tenacious of liberty,” and threatened to resign his command if a tougher militia law were not passed. Furthermore, the people persisted inordinately in harboring and aiding deserters from the militia and in refusing to contribute supplies to the army. As Washington complained, “in all things I meet with the greatest opposition. No orders are obeyed but what a party of soldiers or my own drawn sword enforces. Without this, a single horse for the most urgent occasion cannot be had. To such a pitch has the insolence of the people arrived....”

In the fall of 1755, a tighter militia act was passed in Virginia, punishing those who aided deserters and rewarding informers who had helped round them up. Still, collection of the militia proceeded very slowly.

The death of Braddock left the veteran warmonger and imperialist William Shirley in charge of the English forces in America. Governor Shirley was as impossible to discourage as Dinwiddie, the only difference being Shirley’s greater interest in the northern frontier with Canada than in the Ohio Valley. Shirley managed to whip New England and New York into providing thirty-six hundred men for the march on Fort St. Frederic. But the William Johnson expedition in the fall of 1755 bogged down because of a lack of supplies and because of the increasing restiveness of the soldiers, who were able to keep the usual tyranny of an army at a minimum by electing their own officers. The expedition finally had to be abandoned.

Shirley, in the meanwhile, was able to mobilize about fifteen hundred men for his own campaign to seize Fort Niagara, but this too had to be abandoned. Indeed, the only British victory during 1755 was the capture of Fort Beauéjour in New Brunswick (then part of Nova Scotia). And this victory led to problems with the American colonials. During King George’s War, Britain had forced Massachusetts soldiers to remain in Louisbourg beyond their terms of enlistment. To forestall a repetition of this disaster, Massachusetts forced the British to issue certificates to the soldiers guaranteeing discharge at the end of their enlistment. The British were hardly content to leave matters like that, however; during the Nova Scotia campaign they subjected the Americans to special harassment to induce them to enlist in British regiments. This treatment infuriated both the American troops, who began to desert en masse, and the Massachusetts house, which demanded that the men be sent home.