Lecture 6 - “I Heard the Bullets Whistle”: The First World War (1754-1783)

On July 4, 1754, a naïve 22-year-old, made reckless by his ambition, triggered the “first world war.” His
ambition was status, at a time and in a place where status depended on land ownership. He had already
purchased a 1000-acre plantation by the age of eighteen, one year after this self-taught youth had received
a commission as a surveyor. When the young man was hired, in 1751, to do survey work for Thomas and
William Fairfax, whose five-million-acre holding made them the largest landowners in Virginia, the
prospects of becoming a member of Virginia’s landed “gentry” became a distinct possibility.

The Fairfaxes were the most important investors in the Ohio Company, formed a few years after a
meeting held in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. On July 4, 1744, the parties at the meeting—leaders of the Six
Nations, known as the Iroquois League, and representatives from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia
—agreed to the following terms: in exchange for recognizing Iroquois sovereignty over several other
Indian nations, granting permission to Iroquois raiders to pass through Virginia in order to wage war
against, and take as slaves, Cherokee and Catawba Indians in South Carolina, and awarding 200 pounds
of gold to the Iroquois, the Iroquois reciprocated by renouncing any claim to lands within the three
colonies, lands that did not actually belong to the Iroquois but to other Indian nations over whom the
Iroquois were now the acknowledged rulers. The Iroquois and Virginians had very different opinions
about boundaries. The Iroquois believed that Virginia extended only as far as the Allegheny Mountains;
Virginia, referring to its original 1607 charter, contended that its western boundary was the Pacific
Ocean. Since no one in Virginia had any knowledge of the distance to the Pacific, the area that really
mattered was the land directly west of the Alleghenies, known as the Ohio Valley, a vast tract claimed
by the French, the Iroquois, several other Indians tribes, Great Britain, and a number of private land-
speculation companies. Those rival claims set the stage for a major confrontation.
Among the investors in the Ohio Company were two brothers, Augustine and Lawrence, the
latter married to William Fairfax’s daughter. When Virginia welcomed Robert Dinwiddie as its new
lieutenant governor in 1751, the Company offered him one of its twenty shares, a very substantial bribe.
The next year, a new governor-general arrived in New France determined to assert French control of the
Ohio Valley, thereby securing a route that would link Canada to Louisiana. Four forts would protect the
route, the southernmost Fort Duquesne to be located at the Forks of the Ohio, where the Allegheny and
Monongahela Rivers met up with the Ohio River (the site of present-day Pittsburgh and its Three-Rivers
Stadium!). Meanwhile, the Ohio Company received a grant of 200,000 acres, to which an additional
300,000 might be added, for settling the Ohio Valley with one hundred families. The company decided
to build a trading center at Willis Creek and a fort at the Forks of the Ohio.
Dinwiddie received orders from London to demand that the French withdraw from any forts they
had built in the Ohio Valley. Duquesne, the governor-general of New France, received orders from
Versailles to demand that the English withdraw from any forts they had built in the Ohio Valley. Both
Duquesne and Dinwiddie selected envoys to deliver their messages to their rivals. Dinwiddie appointed
Augustine and Lawrence’s 21-year-old half-brother, already a major in the Virginia militia, to lead the
mission. At one point on his difficult trek to Willis Creek, the young officer was fired upon by an Indian,
but the bullet whizzed past his head. Assuming that the Indian had acted on behalf of the French, the
officer vowed to punish his adversaries. Accompanied by a contingent of Mingo Indians headed by an
Iroquois client named Tanaghrisson, the young officer surrounded the French camp, unguarded because
of a torrential rainstorm, in the early morning of May 28, 1754. A fifteen-minute firefight left fourteen
Frenchmen and one Virginian dead. The wounded French commander, a 35-year-old junior officer
named Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, was in the midst of informing the young Virginian,
through a translator, that he had been sent on a diplomatic mission to deliver a letter that ordered the
Virginians to evacuate lands belonging to the king of France when Tanaghrisson smashed Jumonville’s
skull with a hatchet and his warriors proceed to kill thirteen other Frenchmen, behead one of them, and
leave his head on a stake as a symbol of their triumph. [One Canadian soldier who had gone off to
relieve himself lived to give his rendition of events at a later date.] The horrified young Virginian not
only failed to prevent the massacre, he also failed to understand that Tanaghrisson was effectively
declaring war on the French and drawing the Virginians/English into that war. The young commander
sent a misleading report of the events to Dinwiddie, who promoted him to the rank of colonel and
commandant of the regiment, even as Tanaghrisson gave the young man a derisive nickname: “Town
Destroyer.” With the arrival of reinforcements and his gullible acceptance of Tanagrisson’s duplicitous
avowals that Ohio Indians would join the British in a war against the French, the young soldier decided
to attack Fort Duquesne. Before he could act, a French force found him at Fort Necessity. The ten-hour
French assault on the fort led a humiliating and disastrous defeat for the English. The following day,
July 4, 1754, the Virginia commander signed the terms of surrender read to him by the French
commander, who happened to be Jumonville’s older brother. Unfamiliar with French, when the young
man signed his name to a piece of paper on which he acknowledged his responsibility for “assassinating
a diplomatic envoy,” which was, according to 18th-century international law, an act of war, he gave
France the justification to declare war on England.
The young man returned to Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia, where he was lauded for his
“victory” and given a substantial reward for his “bravery.” The young man was quick to take credit for
victories while deflecting blame onto others: Jumonville was responsible for his own death because he
was a spy (a lie on the young man’s part); his translator, whom he labeled a traitor, misled him into
signing the surrender document when he incorrectly translated the word “assassination,” the key word
that led to the so-called French and Indian War. In that war’s earliest stages, when informed that he
would be passed over for command of a new Virginia regiment, the young man resigned in anger and
returned home, only to find that his own mother refused to release his inheritance. He rented Mount
Vernon, the estate of his deceased half-brother Lawrence, awaiting a call back to service. So began the
public career of this young man named George Washington.

Washington would soon receive that summons to serve again, under the ill-fated and incompetent
British General Edward Braddock. During that campaign, Washington heard many whistling bullets. Two
of them killed horses he was riding. Afterwards, Washington claimed “the miraculous care of Providence
(he consistently used this word instead of God, as in the Puritan “good hand of God”) protected me beyond
all human expectation.” Just to be on the safe side, however, after one more frustrating campaign, he retired
from military service for the duration of this war, returned “home,” and married a wealthy widow, Martha
Custis, who brought into the marriage a 6,000-acre plantation and 84 slaves. He bought Mount Vernon,
doubled its size, and increased its slave population to over 100. He also received 23,000 acres for his
limited service during the French and Indian War. His ambition met, Washington continued to cement his
position among the elite of Virginia, all the while the English fought, and defeated, the French in North
America, the Caribbean, India, and Europe, where the war was known as the Seven Years’ War.
The French surrender at Montreal in 1761 effectively terminated the French and Indian War, although
it only formally ended with the signing of the Peace of Paris of 1763. The French ceded Canada to England in
exchange for a return of their recently captured Caribbean sugar islands, which led the French philosopher
Voltaire to quip that the English had exchanged sugar (white gold) for “a few acres of snow.” France
transferred Louisiana to Spain, its recent ally in the war, as compensation for Spain having to cede Florida to
Great Britain. With France now removed from North America, Natives lost the ability they had used for 150
years to play one empire against another. Presciently, a French minister predicted that once Canada had been
ceded to Great Britain, its mainland North American colonies would break free of the British Empire.

What factors proved that prognostication right? The colonial population increased dramatically,
creating greater demands for land. Since all the land east of the Appalachian Mountains had been taken,
that left the new lands of the Ohio Valley, where tensions between colonials and Indians flared
constantly. To the British government, decisions like the Proclamation of 1763 that forbade colonists
from entering the Ohio Valley seemed essential to maintain peace on the western frontier and to
preserve Native American states as buffers between the British and Spanish empires, but to land-poor
colonists this smacked of the same kind of government favoritism toward Indians that was a major cause
of Bacon’s Rebellion a century earlier. Moreover, the French and Indian War, plus continuing
“protection” of the colonies, proved costly. When the British Parliament determined that the colonists
needed to pay their fair share of those expenses, in the form of several newly imposed taxes (to be
discussed in class), colonial anger seethed until it burst into widespread violence.
The war that broke out in 1775 was many conflicts in one: a revolution, a revolutionary war, a
war of independence, the three designations used by Americans; a rebellion, according to the British,
who consistently refused to acknowledge that American captives were prisoners-of-war, for to do so
would validate America’s claim to be an independent country; a civil war between Patriots and
Loyalists; an Indian war; an imperial war; and the second phase of the world war begun in 1754. It was
also a war of words—James Otis and Patrick Henry’s catchy anti-Stamp Act slogan “No taxation
without representation”; identifying the events of March 5, 1770, as a “massacre” (see below); branding
Loyalists on the forehead with the initials G. R. (for “George Rex” = King George); Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense and Tis Time to Part; the greatest piece of propaganda in US history, the Declaration of
Independence, with its litany of royal oppression—“He has,” he has,” “he has.”
 Very often the war of words became symbolic statements, in the form of excessively violent
action, as in the two following examples. A Charleston, South Carolina, mob seized John Roberts, who
like other Anglican ministers remained loyal to Great Britain, tarred and feathered him (as in the photos
below of German-Americans who opposed WWI), hanged him, and burned his body on a bonfire. When
captured, a fifteen-year-old runaway female slave took 80 lashes of the whip, after which hot embers
were poured over her lacerated back.

If the French minister’s selection of the 1763 signing of the Treaty of Paris as the start of the War of
Independence, other individuals offered alternative dates. Benjamin Franklin, addressing British Parliament
in 1768, predicted that the several thousand British troops sent to America in 1767 would “not find a
rebellion, but they may indeed make one.” After some of those British troops fired on American civilians
in March of 1770, John Adams declared, “On that night, the foundation of American independence was
laid.” Three years later, in the wake of the Boston Tea Party, a reaction against policies instituted by
diehard pro-British Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson (the great-grandson of Anne Hutchinson),
General Thomas Gage, commander of the British forces in America, proclaimed, “The crisis is come; the
provinces must be either British colonies or independent and separate states.” Gage himself precipitated
the war when he decided to capture of stockpile of weapons stored at Concord, a town seventeen miles
north of Boston. On April 18, 1775, as Gage’s men crossed a small bridge into Concord, they exchanged
fire with several hundred local minutemen. Those “shots heard ‘round the world” were the opening volleys
in the war. On August 23, 1775, after George III refused to receive the Olive Branch Petition, a last-ditch
appeal to avert war, sent to him by the Continental Congress, he issued a proclamation for “suppressing
rebellion and sedition.” There was no retreat; full muskets ahead.
The Second Continental Congress, acting as the government of the country, quickly selected
George Washington as commander of the American forces. His selection was due to his past experiences,
his political clout, and the fact that, as a Southerner, he could convince the southern states to join a contest
that was disproportionately centered in New England. In early 1776, Washington decided to shift the
majority of the Continental Army to New York, the strategic key to America. The new British
commander, General William Howe, badly defeated Washington’s raw Continental Army on Long Island,
inflicting 400 or so casualties and taking 1100 captives. Instead of pursuing a retreating Washington and
delivering a deathblow to the American cause, Howe chose a more cautious strategy that earned him
several more victories over the next months, during which he captured an additional 2600 American
soldiers and 200 officers.
As losses mounted, desertions increased, and enlistments expired, Washington’s army was wasting
away, with fewer than 2500 men by December 1776. Desperate, Washington drew upon his past
experience to launch a surprise attack. On the sleety night of December 25, 1776, when Washington
assumed the British guard would be down, he led his troops across the icy Delaware River in order to
launch a pre-dawn attack at Trenton, New Jersey. In a tumultuous one-hour battle, he lost four men
whereas the Hessian (German) mercenaries fighting for the British suffered 100 dead and 900 taken
prisoner. Washington continued his assault on British forces two weeks later at Princeton. During those
two weeks, Washington lost 200 men while the British lost 2000. These marked the first major victories
for the Americans.
While Washington was earning America its first military success, Nathanael Greene, one of his
officers, wrote to his wife Catharine about the Loyalists, “the cursedest rascals among us, the most wicked,
villainous, and oppressive,” who assisted the enemy enter the houses of their neighbors, “strip the poor
women of everything they have to eat or wear, and after plundering them in this way, the brutes often
ravish the mothers and daughters, and compel the fathers and sons to behold their brutality.” The enemy as
rapists; imperial Great Britain as the rapist of America. Patriot newspapers harped on this theme, and other
war crimes, as the most powerful narrative available to mold a sense of national purpose. Perhaps reflecting
on his own past, Washington went out of his way to see that his soldiers did not commit any atrocities that
the enemy could use against him or his country in this war of words. Washington was trying to stimulate
his men’s conscience in situations where conscience was commonly overridden by fear and hatred.
On September 11, 1777, a British army over 12,000 strong marched toward Philadelphia, the Patriot
capital. A detachment of camouflaged British marksmen hid in the woods along Brandywine Creek in
Pennsylvania, on the lookout for Washington’s forces. Captain Patrick Ferguson, reputedly the finest shot
in the British army, spotted two riders, one of them a senior American officer. Ferguson then yelled at the
officer, aiming his rifle at the retreating rider, but he refrained from firing. Ferguson had Washington in his
sights and “could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him.” Not Providence but the conscience of a
British soldier unwilling to ambush someone from the back saved Washington this time. Ferguson was
seriously wounded the next day, Washington lost the Battle of Brandywine the next week, and the British
captured Philadelphia the next month.
In the interim, new allies joined the Americans. The deciding factor came in October 1777 when
General John Burgoyne, commander of the British northern army, surrendered a field army of 6000 troops
at Saratoga, New York. Far more than Washington’s surprise assaults, Saratoga was the first major British
defeat of the war and the turning point of the war. As early as the summer of 1775, the colonies had actively
sought French assistance, which came in the form of supplies and weapons, but France was reluctant to
come out publicly on the side of a losing combatant. Saratoga convinced the French that the Americans had
a chance of winning, so France signed a treaty of alliance with the United States (as the United Colonies had
been calling themselves since September 1776) in February 1778. The American war had become a world
war once again, with engagements spreading to the Caribbean, Central America, the Mediterranean, West
Africa, and India. Spain joined the conflict in 1779. Spanish assistance was instrumental to French and
American success, through supplying funds to cover war expenses, extending the support of its navy, and
fielding soldiers. Those two alliances guaranteed victory for the American cause.
The arrival of large contingents of French troops allowed Washington to plan the largest operation
of the war, a campaign of total war, or “extirpation” in the terminology of the day (genocide to us today),
against the Iroquois. General John Sullivan, placed in charge of the offensive, had one-third of the
Continental Army at his disposal. Sullivan oversaw the destruction of 41 Iroquois towns and the entire
food supply of 1779 and 1780. Those Iroquois who could take shelter at British forts faced the worst
winter on record. Thousands died. Congress praised Sullivan for disciplining the Iroquois who had
“perfidiously waged an unprovoked and cruel war against these United States.” One participating officer
expressed regret in a letter to his fiancée, “Our mission here is ostensibly to destroy but may it not
transpire that we pillagers are carelessly sowing the seeds of empire.” Sullivan felt no such regrets as he
proudly boasted that he had “taught the Indians by severe experience the power of the American empire.”
Another observer suggested that with several surveyors attached to Sullivan’s command, the “land-
grabbing agenda of Sullivan’s expedition was an open secret.” At war’s end, Washington, as “Town
Destroyer” still able to strike terror among the Iroquois, toured the region and purchased 6000 “amazingly
cheap” acres.
As 1779 closed, most military action had shifted south. Since Britain was now facing its rivals in
theaters throughout the world, it Americanized the war by relying more and more on armed white
Loyalists and black fighters. One black fighter was Harry Washington, a former slave of George
Washington. A native of the Gambia region of West Africa, Harry had labored at Mount Vernon for a
decade before he fled, with several other of Washington’s slaves, in 1775. He arrived in New York City
in 1776 as a member of the Ethiopian Regiment. In 1780, he entered Charleston, South Carolina, as a
corporal in the Black Pioneers, a regiment of 200 men, all with the phrase “Liberty to Slaves”
embroidered on their uniforms. [When the war ended, the British evacuated Harry Washington and 3000
other blacks to Nova Scotia in Canada. He later left Canada for Sierra Leone, a West African haven for
former slaves, along with 1200 other black colonists. In 1800, he joined a rebellion against the Sierra
Leone Company’s oppressive taxation. When the rebellion failed, Washington was exiled to a distant
settlement, where he died.]
The commander of Britain’s southern army was Charles Cornwallis, who had defeated George
Washington at the Battle of Brandywine. In September 1781, Cornwallis took up a position at Yorktown in
Virginia, where he awaited reinforcements from New York. The French fleet held up the reinforcements,
and Cornwallis found himself surrounded by 16,000 American land and French naval troops. As the siege
wore on, Cornwallis’s men were reduced to eating their horses, dying of smallpox and typhus, and
enduring constant bombardment from 100 American and French cannons. Almost four years to the day
after Saratoga, on October 17, 1781, Cornwallis surrendered his army of 12,000 (7000 British and German
soldiers and 5000 black recruits) men. Two days later, Washington signed the articles of surrender. Two
days after that, the British reinforcements arrived. More proof that Providence was on Washington’s side?
He certainly thought so.
The Battle of Yorktown largely ended the conflict between the British and American armies, but
the war, especially its civil war aspect, continued for another two years. Those two years of “dirty little
wars” were among the most violent, certainly the most hate-filled, of the war. One of the most important
promoters of Loyalist violence was William Franklin, the son of Benjamin Franklin. He sponsored
vigilante attacks and pressed for retaliatory punishment against any Patriot captives. He fled to England
when the war ended.
Roughly 8000 American Patriots never heard the whistle of the bullet that took their life, another
10,000 died of wounds or diseases, and 17,500 died as British “captives,” some of them ending their
lives as slaves in West Africa, where the British had transported them. Surely all those casualties
required revenge, but American leaders like Washington and Alexander Hamilton advocated post-war
reconciliation with the Loyalists. Confiscated property would be returned and citizenship rights restored.
Even Benjamin Franklin, who initially opposed any concessions to Loyalists at the Paris Peace
Conference of 1783, eventually relented. His consideration did not extend, however, to his son, whom
Benjamin disinherited for the “part he acted against me in the late war.”
Benjamin Franklin was the leading American negotiator for what became the Treaty of Paris of
1783. Great Britain recognized the independence of the United States. The boundaries of the newly
independent country stretched from Canada in the north to Florida, returned to Spain, in the south. The
western border would be the Mississippi River. Deals were made about payment of debts and fishing rights.
The treaty made no mention of Indians, although Britain promised to relinquish its Great Lakes forts,
thereby abandoning the Iroquois. No reconciliation for them. More Indian territory passed to the United
States under the terms of the Treaty of Greenville of 1795. Henry Knox, President Washington’s Secretary
of War conceded, “Our modes of population have been more destructive to the Indian natives than the
conquerors of Mexico and Peru.” The American empire, born of intense violence, was taking shape.