Читать книгу The Old Glade (Forbes's) Road (Pennsylvania State Road) - Archer Butler Hulbert - Страница 8

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There is no truer picture of the dark days of 1755-56 along the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia than that presented in the correspondence of Washington at this time. A great burden fell upon his young shoulders with the failure of the campaigns of 1755. Though far from being at fault, he suffered greatly through the faults and failures of others. The British army had come and had been routed. Now, after such a victory as the Indians had never dreamed possible, the Virginia and Pennsylvania frontiers, five hundred miles in length, lay helpless before the bands of bold marauders drunk with the blood of Braddock’s slain.

The young colonel of the remnant of the Virginia Regiment took up the difficult task of defending the southern frontier as readily as though a quiet, happy life on his rich farms was an alternative as impossible as alluring. But perhaps a bleeding border-land never in the world needed a twenty-three year old lad more than Virginia now needed her young son. A flood-tide of murder and pillage swept over the Alleghenies. The raids of the savages brought the people to their senses, as the most terrible of tales came in from the frontier. But soon the question arose, “Where is the frontier?” The great track Braddock had opened for the conquest of the Ohio valley became the pathway of his conquerors, and soon Fort Cumberland, the frontier post, was far in the enemies’ country. The Indians soon found Burd’s road on the summit of the Alleghenies and poured over it by Raystown toward Carlisle and Shippensburg. Each day brought the line of settlements nearer and nearer the populous portions of Virginia and Pennsylvania, until Winchester became an endangered outpost and fears were entertained for Lancaster and York. Hundreds now who had refused the despairing Braddock horses and wagons saw their wives and children murdered and their homesteads burned to the ground.

Whether Dunbar did right or wrong in hurrying back to Virginia, it was a bitter day for Virginia and Pennsylvania. When his army hastened from the frontier, it became the prey of the foes whose appetite that army had whetted. Yet Shirley, reconsidering his former scheme, ordered Dunbar to New York. After drawing the full fire of the French and Indians upon Virginia and Pennsylvania, this army was sent to New York.

Looking backward, with the stern years 1775-82 in mind, it is easy to see that then, in 1755, Pennsylvania and Virginia were to be put through a hard school for a glorious purpose. They were to be trained in the art of war. Of it they had known practically nothing. They had no effective militia. Of military ethics they had no dream. They knew not what obedience meant and could not understand delegated authority. Their liberty was license or nothing. Of the power of organization, concentration, discipline, routine, and method they were almost as ignorant as their redskinned enemies. Although the men of New England had not been given such great obstacles to overcome, it is undoubtedly true that their militia was far more adequate than anything of which Pennsylvania or Virginia knew, at least until 1758.[43] And yet Braddock died cursing his regulars and extolling the colonials!

Washington was elected commander-in-chief in Virginia on his own dignified terms; the army was increased to sixteen companies and £40,000 were voted for general defense. By October the young commander was at Winchester, where he faced a situation desperate and appalling. The country-side was terror-stricken, and few could be found even for defense; many chose “to die with their wives and families.” The few score men who attempted to stem the tide of retreat were almost powerless. “No orders are obeyed,” Washington wrote Dinwiddie, “but such as a party of soldiers, or my own drawn sword enforces.” Such was the frenzy of the retreat of the frontier population that threats were made “to blow out the brains” of all in authority who opposed them. But the young commander continued undaunted. He impressed men and horses and wagons, and sent them hurrying for flour and musket-balls and flints; he compelled men to erect little fortresses to which the people might flee.

Not the least of his trials—undoubtedly the most discouraging—was the faithlessness of the troops sent out by Governor Dinwiddie upon the reeking frontier. Many of them were themselves panic-stricken and fled back with the rabble. The whole militia régime was inadequate; there was no authority of sufficient weight vested in the commanding officers to enable them to deal even with insolence, much less desertion. “I must assume the freedom,” Washington wrote the governor, “to express some surprise, that we alone should be so tenacious of our liberty as not to invest a power, where interest and policy so unanswerably demand it.... Do we not know, that every nation under the sun finds its account therein, and that, without it, no order or regularity can be observed? Why then should it be expected from us, who are all young and inexperienced, to govern and keep up a proper spirit of discipline without laws, when the best and most experienced can scarcely do it with them?”

As the winter of 1755-6 approached, the Indian atrocities ceased and for a few months there was quiet. But by early spring the raids were renewed with merciless regularity. Every day brought a new tale of murder and pillage; and very soon every road was filled with fugitives “bringing to Winchester fresh dismay.”

With his few men this first hero of Winchester (who by the way was at his post, not “twenty miles away”) was again straining every nerve that Virginia might not lose the great stretch of beautiful country west of the Blue Ridge. “The supplicating tears of women and moving petitions of the men, melt me into such deadly sorrow, that I solemnly declare, if I know my own mind, I could offer myself a willing sacrifice to the butchering enemy, provided that would contribute to the people’s ease.” Perhaps the vacillating Dinwiddie threw this letter down as too ardent a one for a military hand to pen; if so Edward Everett has raised it aloft to show his thrilled audiences “the whole man” Washington. “The inhabitants are removing daily,” he again wrote—“... in a short time will leave this country as desolate as Hampshire.” To such a degree were the people terrified that secret meetings were held where leaders openly spoke of making terms with the French and Indians by renouncing all claims to the West—no less traitors to the best good of the colonies than those who celebrated over Braddock’s defeat.[44]

The campaign of 1756, as conducted by Shirley, contained no hope of relief for Pennsylvania or Virginia; “so much am I kept in the dark,” Washington exclaimed, “that I do not know whether to prepare for the offensive or defensive; yet what might be absolutely necessary in the one, would be quite useless in the other.” He well knew a determined stroke at Fort Duquesne, “a floodgate to open ruin and woe,” was the only hope of the southern and central colonies. In the meantime he led a desperately exasperating life attempting to hold the frontier with his tatterdemalion army by following Pennsylvania’s example of building a line of forts to defend the country. There was no destitution or distress of which he did not know; at times he was begging for blankets to cover his naked soldiers, and again for shoes and shirts; there were few guns in a state of repair and at times in days of danger hundreds flocked to him who could neither be fed nor armed. His life must have been known to Lord Fairfax who wrote in the following strain: “Such a medley of undisciplined militia must create you various troubles, but having Cæsar’s Commentaries and perhaps Quintus Curtius, you have therein read of greater fatigues, murmurings, mutinies, and defections, than will probably come to your share.” The fact is, in these days there was no officer’s duty with which Washington was not acquainted. He supervised the building of forts, the transportation of stores and guns and ammunition, here reprimanding a coarse mountaineer for profanity, there leading the scouts as they threshed a mountain for lurking Delawares; he personally hurried off wagons to endangered outposts with flour and powder, and then listened to and quieted the fears of frantic women and men.

Is the splendid lesson of these years clear? By Providential dispensation these colonies were a miniature of the America of 1775, suddenly thrown upon its own resources and in war. The divine hand is not more clearly seen in our national development than in the struggle of the colonies between 1745 and 1763, which prepared a nation for the hour her independence should strike. And now it was that Washington, Gates, Mercer, Gladwin, Lewis, Putnam, Crawford, Gibson, Stephen, St. Clair, and Stewart learned for themselves and then taught their countrymen to fight; now Washington found what it meant to be the commander of bare-foot armies, already a hero of two defeats, he was yet to play the hero in bitter, pitiful extremities, to become a dogged believer in hopeless, last alternatives, a burden-bearer for hundreds of homeless ones—a people’s mainstay when other men were faltering. Now, as in 1775, his task was to rouse a people only half awake to the crisis; to demonstrate the superiority of wisely ordered liberty over license, and the inferiority of personal independence compared with a unity made strong through faithful coöperation, and hallowed by mutual self-sacrifice. And fortunate it was for all the colonies that England compelled them to learn how to carry war’s heavy harness now, against the day when they should be assailed by something more disastrously fatal to the cause of liberty than savages fired to murder and pillage by French brandy.

In all these wild days, the old path westward from Shippensburg and Carlisle was often crowded with fugitives fleeing from the reeking frontier, and, quite as often, shrouded in a cloud of dust raised by squads of wan militia hastening westward to the defense of the outposts. Though no officer guarding this strategic passage-way became endeared to his countrymen as Washington, here heroism and devotion were displayed, if ever on this continent. The plans of England during these years will be described elsewhere, but it is to our purpose to know now that for the present she deserted the southern provinces; that she was “willing to wait for the rains to wet the powder, and rats to eat the bow-strings of the enemy, rather than attempt to drive them from her [southern] frontiers.” Until 1756 the matter of the defense of the Pennsylvania frontier was left almost entirely to individual initiative. But already the road through Carlisle and Shippensburg had been fortified. Fort Lowther was erected in Carlisle as early as 1753. It was an important post on the route to Virginia, over which the wagons and horses raised by Franklin for Braddock, were, in part, forwarded to Fort Cumberland. Here Governor Morris came, to be in closer touch with Braddock, and here the news of the defeat reached him.

Fort Franklin was erected on the old road at Shippensburg, twenty miles west of Carlisle and thirty-six from Harris Ferry (Harrisburg). It was built sometime previous to Braddock’s time but was not used after 1756. Ten miles further on at Falling Springs (Chambersburg) there was no fortification in 1755, nor was there one at Loudoun (Loudon) thirteen miles west of that point. Two miles south of Fort Loudoun Morris erected a deposit at McDowell’s Mill (Bridgeport, Franklin County) but, though the spot was well known on the frontier, there seems to have been no regular fort there until 1756.[45] It was at this point that the new road toward Raystown diverged westward from the main road running south to Virginia. This junction was considered a strategic point by the time of Braddock’s defeat, as shown by Shirley’s order to Dunbar quoted at the close of the last chapter.

Up to the time of Braddock’s defeat the Pennsylvania Assembly had done nothing toward the preservation of the colony, save ordering the road cut from Carlisle to the Youghiogheny river. They furnished not a man for Braddock’s army and voted not a pound toward the expense of securing the wagons and horses which made Braddock’s march possible. The stores which Governor Morris laid in along the line of the road, at Shippensburg and McDowell’s Mill, were secured and forwarded without aid from the Assembly. Though many Pennsylvanians served, in one way or another, in the unfortunate expedition, the public was divided on this issue. Some were loyal to the Assembly and many favored warlike measures. It has been asserted that had not Forbes’s Road been built in 1758 its building would have been postponed twenty years.

Passing this interesting speculation, it is sure Braddock’s defeat brought to Pennsylvania a terrible and bloody awakening; nothing can show this more strikingly than the fact that when Braddock’s successor came, only three years later, the Pennsylvania Assembly quickly supported him by voting twenty-seven hundred men for offensive service and appropriating half a million dollars for war.

The change was not more striking than was the need for it. All the terrifying scenes in Virginia were reproduced in Pennsylvania; the savages poured through the mountain gaps and fell with unparalleled fury upon a hundred defenseless settlements. Pennsylvania had not expanded further at this time than to the Blue Mountains. Her frontier was not, therefore, nearly as broad as Virginia’s, and the frontier firing-line was not so far removed from the populated districts. At the same time it is probable that the Indians from Logstown and Kittanning could get a scalp quicker (so far as distance was concerned) from Pennsylvania than from Virginia—and the French paid as much for one as for the other!

Late in 1756 the Pennsylvania Assembly, now awakened to the condition of affairs caused by their shortsighted, prejudiced policy, took the matter of protection of the frontier into their own hands. Failing to furnish the ounce of prevention, they came quickly with the pound of cure. A chain of forts was planned which, stretching along the barrier wall of the Blue Mountains from the Potomac to the Delaware, should guard the more prominent gaps. “Sometimes the chain of defenses ran on the south side, and frequently both sides of the mountains were occupied, as the needs of the population demanded. Some of these forts consisted of the defenses previously erected by the settlers, which were available for the purpose, and of which the government took possession, while others were newly erected. Almost without exception they were composed of a stockade of heavy planks, inclosing a space of ground more or less extensive, on which were built from one to four blockhouses, pierced with loopholes for musketry, and occupied as quarters by the soldiers and refugee settlers. In addition to these regular forts it became necessary at various points where depredations were most frequent, to have subsidiary places of defense and refuge, which were also garrisoned by soldiers and which generally comprised farmhouses, selected because of their superior strength and convenient location, around which the usual stockade was thrown, or occasionally blockhouses erected for the purpose. The soldiers who garrisoned these forts were provincial troops, which almost without exception were details from the First Battalion of the Pennsylvania Regiment, under the command of that brave and energetic officer, Lt. Colonel Conrad Weiser.”[46] The appended map is a photograph of the original which was made in this year, 1756—for the forts of 1757 are not included. It is of particular interest because it gives the complete cordon of forts along the frontier from the Hudson to the last fort in Virginia which Washington was building. Among other things this map shows clearly how much wider were the frontiers of the southern than those of the northern colonies. The most westerly fort in Virginia was fifty miles further west than Fort Duquesne. The Appalachian range trends southwesterly and its influence upon the expansion of the colonies is most significant.