From The Conversation: How Washington turned adversity into triumph
This past Presidents’ Day, I was thinking about George Washington — not with respect to his finest hour, though, but possibly his worst.
In 1754, a 22-year-old Washington marched into the wilderness surrounding the future site of Pittsburgh with more ambition than sense.
He volunteered to travel to the Ohio Valley on a mission to deliver a letter from Robert Dinwiddie, governor of Virginia, to the commander of French troops in the Ohio Territory. This military mission sparked an international war, cost him his first command and taught him lessons that would shape the American Revolution.
As a professor of early American history who has written two books on the American Revolution, I’ve learned that Washington’s time spent in the Fort Duquesne area taught him valuable lessons about frontier warfare, international diplomacy and personal resilience.
In 1753, Dinwiddie decided to expel French troops and fur trappers from the strategic confluence of three mighty waterways crisscrossing the interior of the continent — the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio. This confluence is where downtown Pittsburgh now stands, but was wilderness at the time.
King George II authorized Dinwiddie to use force if it proved necessary to secure lands Virginia was claiming as its own.
As a major in the Virginia provincial militia, Washington wanted the assignment to deliver Dinwiddie’s demand the French retreat. He believed it would secure him a British army commission.
Washington received his marching orders on Oct. 31, 1753. He traveled to Fort Le Boeuf in northwestern Pennsylvania and returned a month later with a polite but firm “no” from the French.
Dinwiddie promoted Washington from major to lieutenant colonel and ordered him to return to the Ohio River Valley in April 1754 with 160 troops. Washington quickly learned the French had assembled a force of about 500 and deployed it to the formidable new Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio.
It was at this point that he faced his first major test as a military leader. Instead of falling back to gather reinforcements, he pushed on anyway. This reflected an aggressive, perhaps naive, brand of leadership characterized by a desire for action over caution.
Washington’s initial confidence was high. He famously wrote his brother that there was “something charming” in the sound of whistling bullets.
Perhaps the most controversial moment of Washington’s early leadership occurred on May 28, 1754, about 40 miles south of Fort Duquesne. Guided by the Seneca leader Tanacharison and 12 Seneca warriors, Washington led about 40 militiamen in ambushing a party of 35 French Canadian militiamen led by Ensign Joseph Coulon de Jumonville.
Ten of the French were slain, including Jumonville, who was executed by the Seneca warriors. The affair lasted only 15 minutes, but its repercussions were global.
Washington’s inability to control his Native American allies exposed a critical gap in his early leadership. It showed he lacked the ability to manage the volatile intercultural alliances necessary for frontier warfare.
Washington also allowed an enemy soldier to escape and warn Fort Duquesne. This effectively ignited the French and Indian War, putting Washington at the focal point of a burgeoning international crisis.
Washington then made the fateful decision to dig in and call for reinforcements instead of retreating in the face of inevitable French retaliation.
Reinforcements eventually arrived, after many weeks of delay, in the form of 200 Virginia militiamen and 100 British regulars. They brought news from Dinwiddie as well — congratulations on Washington’s victory and a promotion to colonel.
His inexperience next showed in his design of Fort Necessity.
He positioned the small, circular palisade in a depression surrounded by wooded high ground that allowed enemy marksmen to fire down with impunity. Worse, Tanacharison, disillusioned with Washington’s leadership and British dallying, departed with his warriors before the reinforcements got there. And when the French attacked on July 3 with Native American allies of their own, heavy rain flooded the shallow trenches, soaking gunpowder and leaving Washington’s men vulnerable inside their poorly designed fortification.
The Battle of Fort Necessity was a grueling, daylong engagement in the mud and rain.
Approximately 700 French and Native American allies surrounded the combined force of 460 Virginian militiamen and British regulars, who were outmaneuvered as well as outnumbered. Washington faced the most humbling moment of his young life at this point — the necessity of surrender to the French commander, Jumonville’s brother, Louis Coulon de Villiers.
His decision to capitulate was a pragmatic act of leadership that prioritized the survival of his men over personal honor. But it included a stinging lesson in the nuances of diplomacy.
Because Washington could not read French, he signed a document using the word “l’assassinat,” which translates to “assassination,” to describe Jumonville’s death. This inadvertent and incorrect admission to having ordered the assassination of a French diplomat became useful propaganda for the French, teaching Washington the vital importance of optics in international relations.
The 1754 campaign ended in a full retreat to Virginia, and Washington resigned his commission shortly thereafter. Yet, this period was essential in transforming Washington from a man seeking personal glory into one appreciating the weight of responsibility.
He learned that leadership required more than courage – it demanded understanding of terrain, political acumen and cultural awareness of both allies and enemies. The strategic importance of the Ohio River Valley, a gateway to the continental interior and vast fur-trading networks, made these lessons all the more significant.
Ultimately, the hard lessons Washington learned at the threshold of Fort Duquesne provided the foundational experience for his later role as commander in chief of the Continental Army. The decisions he made in Pennsylvania and the Ohio wilderness, including the impulsive attack, the poor choice of defensive ground and the diplomatic failings, were errors he would spend the rest of his military career correcting.
Though he did not capture Fort Duquesne in 1754, the young George Washington left the woods of Pennsylvania with a far more valuable prize — the tempered, resilient spirit of a leader capable of learning from his mistakes.
From The Conversation, an online repository of lay versions of academic research findings found at https://theconversation.com/us. Used with permission.
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