George Washington’s first war
George Washington is commonly revered as a Founding Father, the commander of the Continental Army, and the first President of the nation. What most people do not know is that he also played an indirect but important role in sparking the Revolutionary War – two decades before it started.
The British and French colonies came into conflict over control of the Ohio Valley in the mid-1750s. A 2000-strong force of French soldiers and their Native American allies began building forts in areas the British had not settled but claimed as their own. Robert Dinwiddie, the governor of Virginia, was an investor in the Ohio Company and stood to lose money if the valley came under French control. He sent a small unit of provincial troops to the area with a diplomatic letter demanding that the French withdraw from Virginian territory. The unit was led by a 21-year old Major named George Washington.
When the expedition reached the French in late 1753, commander Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre invited Washington for dinner and listened to him politely but refused to remove his troops. As a sign of his goodwill, he supplied the British soldiers with food for the way home.
Washington returned to British territory, his intelligence reports and the publication of his expedition journal earned him great fame. Among other things, he noted that the French were assembling a flotilla of riverboats to reach the Forks of the Ohio, where the British also wanted to build a fort.
Washington was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, appointed second-in-command of the Virginia Regiment and sent back to the Forks with 160 men to help finish and secure the British fort. He was instructed not to start a war but had the authority to restrain Frenchmen who interfered with British interests and to kill them if they resisted. On his way to the fort, he received news that the French had beaten him to it: they had already arrived at the Forks in force and forced the British defenders to retreat without a shot. Washington constructed a new fortification, named Fort Necessity, some 40 miles from the original fortification now held by the French.
It was about five miles from this fort that the tension between the British and French erupted into violence. On May 28 a group of a dozen Mingo warriors, who had allied with the British, led Washington and 40 of his men to a group of 35 French soldiers.
According to French claims and records, the Frenchmen were on a diplomatic mission carrying a letter, just as Washington had done the previous year. Washington, however, branded the interlopers as spies upon the evidence that they were hiding in a secluded campsite. Some historians suggest that Tanaghrisson, chief of the Mingo bore a grudge against certain French officers over previous differences and manipulated Washington into attacking.
Jumonville Glen, named after French officer Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, who led the French and was killed in the ambush. This is the spot where the French and Indian War started.
Whatever the true motivations of the sides were, the results were clear: the British ambushed the French, capturing or killing most of them. Wounded French soldiers were finished off and scalped by the Mingo. According to recently discovered testimony from one of the Mingo warriors, Washington himself fired the first shot of the skirmish. He had a habit of firing first, whether aiming to kill or giving the order to open fire.
Washington’s shot and the resulting battle launched a spiral of violence that escalated into a full-blown war. The French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years War (despite it lasting nine years from the first skirmish) dragged the British and French Empires, as well as their allies, into what started as a colonial conflict and ended up a global war. Though Britain emerged victorious, the war doubled its national debt and left it in perilous financial straits.
These economic troubles, in turn, contributed greatly to the friction between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies. The colonies were originally established as what would be deemed “tax havens” today, due to low taxes and significant freedoms to encourage local development. After the Seven Years’ War, however, the British Crown decided to raise colonial taxes to recover some of its expenses. The war was sparked by a colonial border conflict, so the British government thought it only fair that colonies bear some of the financial burden. This did not go over well in America: colonists had come to understand their previous generous financial arrangement as an inherent right. The issue of higher taxation became one of the major irreconcilable differences between the Thirteen Colonies and the Crown, eventually leading to the Revolutionary War. In this sense, Washington’s shot in the Ohio Valley set in motion a chain of events that brought about America’s independence.
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