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1755

General Braddock’s Defeat

For sixty-five years, Daniel Boone lived in the ghostly presence of a haunted wood of oak and maple. He became a famed and celebrated frontiersman and explorer, the subject of innumerable articles and penny-dreadful novels while he was still alive, yet he’d forever be preoccupied with one formative day of bloodshed.

In the summer of 1755, Boone and a regiment of Virginians led by the Scotsman General Edward Braddock would cross the Monongahela River in anticipation of conquering Fort Duquesne, only to find themselves attacked by a much smaller column of French Canadians and their Indian allies who would decimate the British and their American soldiers.

The forks of the Ohio were claimed by both England and France, while British colonies also disagreed with their provincial lines at the murky western hinterlands of the map—Virginia reached a high-water mark as far north as the current site of Pittsburgh’s East Carson Street. Though Boone was a Pennsylvanian by birth, and eventually a Kentuckian by choice (though the latter was part of Virginia at the time), it was on behalf of Governor Robert Dinwiddie that a twenty-one-year-old Boone served as a wagon driver with Braddock’s men. At Monongahela, the British would find themselves in a Thermopylae, cast in the role of the Persians.

Legend said that as a child, Boone shot a panther through the heart the moment before the beast could rear up and attack him; the man who cleared a path deep into the western frontier and became a veritable archetype of manifest destiny. His biographer John Mack Faragher, writing in Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer, notes that the “bloodiest and most disastrous [of] British defeats … [in] the eighteenth century” was to be the frontiersman’s “initiation into forest warfare.”

Boone’s baptism of blood happened not in Kentucky or Missouri, but on that summer day in 1755. Far from being the ambush depicted by hawkers of broadsheets along Fleet Street in London, or from the printing presses of Beacon Hill in Boston or Southwest Square in Philadelphia, a small garrison of French and Iroquois had actually accidentally stumbled upon Braddock’s men. Braddock was to have come with his own Indian troops, but the sachem Shingas had rescinded his initial offer of assistance when the general informed him that, as regards the fertile Ohio country that lay beyond to the west, “No Savage Should Inherit the Land.”

Just as Braddock rejected the Indians’ aid, he also rejected their strategic thinking about guerilla warfare. Once his Virginians were engaged in open battle with their adversaries, the Scotsman refused to break from the stiff, regimented, aristocratic manner of fighting that defined British military strategy, while the French (as led by Beaujeu, who would die in that battle) were able to flit between the dense grove of trees, their firing muskets “like Leaves in Autumn,” as a survivor wrote.

What followed were three hours of slaughter; though Braddock arrived with over three thousand troops and his enemies had a force only a tenth of that, the day would end with close to 500 dead British soldiers and an equivalent number of wounded, while the French suffered only twenty-seven casualties. Boone barely escaped alive, and as he’d poetically recall decades later, “all attempts were in vain, / From sighs and from tears he could scarcely refrain. / Poor Brittons, poor Brittons, poor Brittons remember, / Although we fought hard, we were forced to surrender.” According to accounts, the French and their allies alike scalped the fallen British, nailing their pates to the trees that grew upon the bluffs overlooking the tributary.

The Battle of the Monongahela was one of the most spectacular British military losses in the entire Seven Years’ War. The bloodshed in North America started a year before the bulk of fighting throughout the globe, triggered at the Battle of Jumonville Glen when a young Virginian colonel and his Indian allies ambushed a contingent of Canadian soldiers, hoping to ultimately begin the dislodging of the French from the Ohio River Valley. Legend recounts that the French commander Joseph Coulon de Jumonville was killed by tomahawk.

Writing in Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of British North American, 1754–1766, historian Fred Anderson observes that the violence in western Pennsylvania is the “most important event to occur in eighteenth-century North America,” though one which “figures in most Americans’ consciousness of the past as a kind of hazy backdrop to the Revolution.” Despite its strange invisibility in both our educations and our popular culture, the French and Indian War was responsible not just for the realignment that saw the British dislodge their French adversaries from much of the continent (despite the former’s spectacular loss at Monongahela), but which also helped consolidate American identity among a disparate thirteen colonies, set the course of Bourbon foreign policy in the eventual aid of a burgeoning independence movement, and inculcated the economic and political preconditions that made the Revolution itself inevitable. In addition to all of that, Anderson writes that without the war near the woods of Pittsburgh, “it would be difficult to imagine the French Revolution occurring as it did, when it did—or, for that matter, the Wars of Napoleon, Latin America’s first independence movements, the transcontinental juggernaut that Americans call ‘westward expansion,’ and the hegemony of English-derived institutions and the English language north of the Rio Grande.”

Before all of that, the defeat reverberated in British fear and embarrassment, as surely as Boone would be haunted for his whole life by the image of scalps nailed to trees. Something about such a decisive and imbecilic loss, tended by Braddock’s hubris and incompetence, broke something in the American spirit, and contributed to the rapacious sense that the Ohio Valley was not just a place for traders (as with the French), but a location to be settled, a land to be possessed. What one person calls mythmaking, another calls a ghost story. To be haunted is to be haunted regardless of the origins of that specter, and the repercussions can extend far beyond the few hundred who are initially effected.

Literary theorist Richard Slotkin argues in Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 that “Through myths the psychology and world view of our cultural ancestors are transmitted to modern descendants, in such away and with such power that our perceptions of contemporary reality and our ability to function in the world are directly, often tragically affected.” When the American revolutionaries declared their intent to secede from the British Empire, the latter’s blocking of colonial settling in the West (in deference to Indian allies in the Ohio region) was a central plank in American dissatisfaction with the monarch and Parliament. For veterans of that initial trauma, there was a haunting that could only be exorcised with a show of strength, a virile statement of national self-determination, a lust for acquiring that forbidden land beyond the Ohio.

The colonel who’d started the war at Jumonville Glen would be a survivor of Monongahela, and though he’d carry Braddock’s sash with him into battle for the rest of his life, he’d write that the British reaction was such that they “struck with such a panic that they behaved with more cowardice than it is possible to conceive.” When it came to rectification for such a nosebleed, George Washington wouldn’t forget those lessons that were imparted at Monongahela.