July 9. general was following with the columns of artillery, 1755. baggage, and the main body of the army, when a very heavy and quick fire was heard in the front. Aware of Braddock's progress by the fidelity of their scouts, the French had resolved on an ambuscade. Twice in council the Indians declined the enterprise. "I shall go," said De Beaujeu, the commandant at Fort Duquesne, “and will you suffer your father to go alone? I am sure we shall conquer;" and, sharing his confidence, they pledged themselves to be his companions. At an early hour, Contrecœur detached De Beaujeu, Dumas, and De Lignery, with less than two hundred and thirty French and Canadians, and six hundred and thirty-seven savages, under orders to repair to a favorable spot selected the preceding evening. Before reaching it, they found themselves in the presence of the English, who were advancing in good order; and De Beaujeu instantly began an attack with the utmost vivacity. Gage should, on the moment, and without waiting for orders, have sent support to his flanking parties. His indecision lost the day. The onset was met courageously; but the flanking guards were driven in, and the advanced party, leaving their two six-pounders in the hands of the enemy, were thrown back upon the vanguard which the general had sent as a re-enforcement, and which was attempting to form in face of the rising ground on the right. Thus the men of both regiments were heaped together in promiscuous confusion among the dense forest trees and thick-set underwood. The general himself hurried forward to share the danger and animate the troops; and his artillery, though it could do little harm, as it played against an enemy whom the forest concealed, yet terrified the savages and made them waver. At this time, De Beaujeu fell; when the brave and humane Dumas, taking the command, gave new life to his party; sending the savages to attack the English in flank, while he, with the French and Canadians, continued the combat in front. Already the British regulars were raising shouts of victory, when the battle was renewed; and the Indians, posting themselves behind large trees "in the front of the troops, and on the hills which overhung the right flank," invisible, yet making the woods re-echo their war-whoop, fired irregularly, but with deadly aim, at “the fair mark" offered by the "compact body of men 1755. beneath them." None of the English that were enJuly 9. gaged would say they saw a hundred of the enemy; and "many of the officers, who were in the heat of the action the whole time, would not assert that they saw one." The combat continued for two hours, with scarcely any change in the disposition of either side. Had the regulars shown courage, the issue would not have been doubtful; but, terrified by the yells of the Indians, and dispirited by a manner of fighting such as they had never imagined, they would not long obey the voice of their officers, but gathered themselves into a body, contrary to orders, ten or twelve deep, and would then level, fire, and shoot down the men before them. The officers used the utmost art to encourage them to move upon the enemy; they told them off into small parties, of which they took the lead; they bravely formed the front; they advanced, sometimes at the head of small bodies, sometimes separately, to recover the cannon, or to get possession of the hill; but were sacrificed by the soldiers, who declined to follow them, and even fired upon them from the rear. Of eighty-six officers, twenty-six were killed, among them Sir Peter Halket; and thirty-seven were wounded, including Gage and other field-officers. Of the men, one half were killed or wounded. Braddock braved every danger. His secretary was shot dead; both his English aids were disabled early in the engagement, leaving the American alone to distribute his orders. "I expected every moment," said one whose eye was on Washington, “to see him fall." "Nothing but the superintending care of Providence could have saved him." An Indian chief-I suppose a Shawnee singled him out with the rifle, and bade other warriors do the same. He had two horses shot under him, and four bullets through his coat, yet escaped without a wound. "Some potent manitou guards his life," exclaimed the savage. "Death," wrote Washington, "was levelling my companions on every side of me; but, by the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been pro 1755. July 9. tected." "To the public," said Samuel Davies, a learned New Jersey divine, in the following month, "I point out that heroic youth, Colonel Washington, whom I cannot but hope Providence has preserved in so signal a manner for some important service to his country." "Who is Mr. Washington?" asked Lord Halifax, a few months later. "I know nothing of him," he added, "but that they say he behaved in Braddock's action as bravely as if he really loved the whistling of bullets." The Virginia troops showed great valor; and, of three companies, scarcely thirty men were left alive. Captain Peyronney and all his officers, down to a corporal, were killed; of Polson's, whose courage was honored by the legislature of the Old Dominion, only one officer was left. But "those they call regulars, having wasted their ammunition, broke and ran, as sheep before hounds, leaving the artillery, provisions, baggage, and even the private papers of the general, a prey to the enemy. The attempt to rally them was as vain as to attempt to stop the wild bears of the mountain." "Thus were the English most scandalously beaten." Of privates, seven hundred and fourteen were killed or wounded; while, of the French and Indians, only three officers and thirty men fell, and but as many more were wounded. Braddock had five horses disabled under him; at last a bullet entered his right side, and he fell mortally wounded. He was with difficulty brought off the field, and borne in the train of the fugitives. All the first day he was silent; but at night he roused himself to say: "Who would have thought it?" The meeting at Dunbar's camp made a day of confusion. On the twelfth of July, Dunbar destroyed the remaining artillery, and burned the public stores and the heavy baggage, to the value of a hundred thousand pounds; pleading in excuse that he had the orders of the dying general, and being himself resolved, in midsummer, to evacuate Fort Cumberland, and hurry to Philadelphia for winterquarters. Accordingly, the next day they all retreated. At night, Braddock roused from his lethargy to say: "We shall better know how to deal with them another time;" and died. His grave may still be seen, near the national road, about a mile west of Fort Necessity. 1755. July. The forest battle-field was left thickly strewn with the wounded and the dead. Never had there been such a harvest of scalps and spoils. As evening approached, the woods round Fort Duquesne rung with the halloos of the red men, the firing of small arms, mingled with a peal from the cannon at the fort. The next day, the British artillery was brought in; and the Indian warriors, painting their skin a shining vermilion, with patches of black and brown and blue, tricked themselves out in the laced hats and bright apparel of the English officers. "This whole transaction," writes Franklin, "gave us Americans the first suspicion that our exalted ideas of the prowess of British regular troops had not been well founded." The news of Braddock's defeat and the shameful evacuation of Fort Cumberland threw the central provinces into the greatest consternation. The assembly of Pennsylvania resolved to grant fifty thousand pounds to the king's use, in part by a tax on all estates, real and personal, within the province. Morris, obeying his instructions from the proprietaries, claimed exemption for their estates. The assembly rejected the demand with disdain; for the annual income of the proprietaries from quit-rents, ground-rents, rents of manors, and other appropriated and settled lands, was nearly thirty thousand pounds. Sharpe would not convene the assembly of Maryland, because it was "fond of imitating the precedents of Pennsylvania." And the governors, proprietary as well as royal, reciprocally assured each other that nothing could be done in their colonies without an act of parliament. Happily, the Catawbas at the south remained faithful; and in July, at a council of five hundred Cherokees assembled under a tree in the highlands of Western Carolina, Glen renewed the covenant of peace, obtained a cession of lands, and was invited to crect Fort Prince George near the villages of Conasatchee and Keowee. At the north, New England was extending British dominion. Massachusetts cheerfully levied about seven thousand nine hundred men, or nearly one fifth of the able-bodied men in the colony. Of these, a detachment took part in establishing the sovereignty of England in Acadia. That peninsular region abounding in harbors and in forests, rich in its ocean fisheries and in the product of its rivers, near to a continent that invited to the chase and the furtrade, having in its interior large tracts of alluvial soil— had become dear to its inhabitants, who beheld around them the graves of their ancestors for several generations. It was the oldest French colony in North America. There the Bretons had built their dwellings, sixteen years before the pilgrims reached the shores of New England. With the progress of the respective settlements, sectional jealousies and religious bigotry had renewed their warfare; the offspring of the Massachusetts husbandmen were taught to abhor "popish cruelties" and "popish superstitions;" while Roman Catholic missionaries were propagating their faith among the villages of the Abenakis. After repeated conquest and restorations, the treaty of Utrecht conceded Acadia, or Nova Scotia, to Great Britain. Yet the name of Annapolis, a feeble English garrison, and five or six immigrant families, were nearly all that marked the supremacy of England. The old inhabitants remained on the soil. They still loved the language and the usages of their forefathers, and their religion was graven upon their souls. They promised submission to England; but such was the love with which France had inspired them, they would not fight against its standard or renounce its name. Though conquered, they were French neutrals. For nearly forty years from the peace of Utrecht they had been forgotten or neglected, and had prospered in their seclusion. No tax-gatherer counted their folds, no magistrate dwelt in their hamlets. The parish priest made their records and regulated their successions. Their little disputes were settled among themselves, with scarcely one appeal to English authority at Annapolis. The pastures were covered with their herds and flocks; and dikes, raised by extraordinary efforts of social industry, shut out the rivers and the tide from alluvial marshes of exuberant fertility. The meadows, thus reclaimed, were covered by richest grasses, or fields of wheat, that yielded thirty and |