1754.] SUCCESS OF VILLIERS. 161 increased the confusion by plundering, and threatening an attack. They knocked to pieces the medicine-chest, thus causing great distress to the wounded, two of whom they murdered and scalped. For a time there was danger of panic; but order was restored, and the wretched march began along the forest road that led over the Alleghanies, fifty-two miles to the station at Wills Creek. Whatever may have been the feelings of Washington, he has left no record of them. His immense fortitude was doomed to severer trials in the future; yet perhaps this miserable morning was the darkest of his life. He was deeply moved by sights of suffering; and all around him were wounded men borne along in torture, and weary men staggering under the living load. His pride was humbled, and his young ambition seemed blasted in the bud. It was the fourth of July. He could not foresee that he was to make that day forever glorious to a new-born nation hailing him as its father. The defeat at Fort Necessity was doubly disastrous to the English, since it was a new step and a long one towards the ruin of their interest with the Indians; and when, in the next year, the smouldering war broke into flame, nearly all the western tribes drew their scalping-knives for France. Villiers went back exultant to Fort Duquesne, burning on his way the buildings of Gist's settlement and the storehouse at Redstone Creek. Not an English flag now waved beyond the Alleghanies.1 VOL. I. -11 1 See Appendix C. - CHAPTER VI. 1754, 1755. THE SIGNAL OF BATTLE. TROUBLES OF DINWIDDIE.- GATHERING OF THE BURGESSES. - VIR- AND THE THE defeat of Washington was a heavy blow to the Governor, and he angrily ascribed it to the delay of the expected reinforcements. The King's companies from New York had reached Alexandria, and crawled towards the scene of action with thin ranks, bad discipline, thirty women and children, no tents, no blankets, no knapsacks, and for munitions one barrel of spoiled gunpowder. The case was still worse with the regiment from North Carolina. It was commanded by Colonel Innes, a countryman and friend of Dinwiddie, who wrote to him: "Dear James, I now wish that we had none from your colony but yourself, for I foresce nothing but confusion among them." The men 1 Dinwiddie to the Lords of Trade, 24 July, 1754. Ibid. to Delancey, 20 June, 1754. 1754.] THE VIRGINIAN CAPITAL. 163 were, in fact, utterly unmanageable. They had been promised three shillings a day, while the Virginians had only eightpence; and when they heard on the march that their pay was to be reduced, they mutinied, disbanded, and went home. "You may easily guess," says Dinwiddie to a London correspondent, "the great fatigue and trouble I have had, which is more than I ever went through in my life." He rested his hopes on the session of his Assembly, which was to take place in August; for he thought that the late disaster would move them to give him money for defending the colony. These meetings of the burgesses were the great social as well as political event of the Old Dominion, and gave a gathering signal to the Virginian gentry scattered far and wide on their lonely plantations. The capital of the province was Williamsburg, a village of about a thousand inhabitants, traversed by a straight and very wide street, and adorned with various public buildings, conspicuous among which was William and Mary College, a respectable structure, unjustly likened by Jefferson to a brick kiln with a roof. The capitol, at the other end of the town, had been burned some years before, and had just risen from its ashes. Not far distant was the so-called Governor's Palace, where Dinwiddie with his wife and two daughters exercised such official hospitality as his moderate salary and Scottish thrift would permit.1 1 For a contemporary account of Williamsburg, Burnaby, Travels in North America, 6. Smyth, Tour in America, I. 17, describes it some years later. In these seasons of festivity the dull and quiet village was transfigured. The broad, sandy street, scorching under a southern sun, was thronged with coaches and chariots brought over from London at heavy cost in tobacco, though soon to be bedimmed by Virginia roads and negro care; racing and hard-drinking planters; clergymen of the Establishment, not much more ascetic than their boon companions of the laity; ladies, with manners a little rusted by long seclusion; black coachmen and footmen, proud of their masters and their liveries; young cavaliers, booted and spurred, sitting their thoroughbreds with the careless grace of men whose home was the saddle. It was a proud little provincial society, which might seem absurd in its lofty self-appreciation, had it not soon approved itself so prolific in ability and worth.1 The burgesses met, and Dinwiddie made them an opening speech, inveighing against the aggressions of the French, their "contempt of treaties," and "ambitious views for universal monarchy;" and he concluded: "I could expatiate very largely on these affairs, but my heart burns with resentment at their insolence. I think there is no room for many arguments to induce you to raise a considerable supply to enable me to defeat the designs of these troublesome people and enemies of mankind." The burgesses in their turn expressed 1 The English traveller Smyth, in his Tour, gives a curious and vivid picture of Virginian life. For the social condition of this and other colonies before the Revolution, one cannot do better than to consult Lodge's Short History of the English Colonies. 1754.] TROUBLES OF DINWIDDIE. 165 the "highest and most becoming resentment," and promptly voted twenty thousand pounds; but on the third reading of the bill they added to it a rider which touched the old question of the pistole fee, and which, in the view of the Governor, was both unconstitutional and offensive. He remonstrated in vain; the stubborn republicans would not yield, nor would he; and again he prorogued them. This unexpected defeat depressed him greatly. "A governor," he wrote, "is really to be pitied in the discharge of his duty to his king and country, in having to do with such obstinate, self-conceited people. . I cannot satisfy the burgesses unless I prostitute the rules of government. I have gone through monstrous fatigues. Such wrong-headed people, I thank God, I never had to do with before." 1 A few weeks later he was comforted; for, having again called the burgesses, they gave him the money, without trying this time to humiliate him. 2 . In straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel, aristocratic Virginia was far outdone by democratic Pennsylvania. Hamilton, her governor, had laid before the Assembly a circular letter from the Earl of Holdernesse directing him, in common with other governors, to call on his province for means to repel any invasion which might be made "within the undoubted limits of His Majesty's dominion." 3 The Assembly of Pennsylvania was curiously unlike 1 Dinwiddie to Hamilton, 6 Sept., 1754. Ibid. to J. Abercrombie, 1 Sept., 1754. 2 Hening, VI. 435. 3 The Earl of Holdernesse to the Governors in America, 28 Aug. 1753. |