The Mount Vernon house had not yet attained its later magnificence, so visitors singled out the natural setting for their poetic effusions. “The house is most beautifully situated upon a very high hill on the banks of the Potomac and commands a noble prospect of water, of cliffs, of woods and plantations,” wrote one clergyman. ¹ Unlike that of its later and more famous incarnation, the entrance stood on the river side, attesting to the extensive commercial traffic then churning along the Potomac down below. In those days, one could also see thousands of wild ducks gathering on the surface of the water.

As Washington had suspected, his respite from military service proved short-lived. On February 20, 1755, Major General Edward Braddock dropped anchor off Hampton Roads, soon to be accompanied by two smartly dressed regiments of British redcoats. To this British Army veteran, an officer of the Coldstream Guards, had been assigned the task of ejecting the French from Fort Duquesne and blunting their thrust into the Ohio Valley. Washington rushed off a politic greeting to the general. After making inquiries, Braddock learned that Washington possessed an unmatched familiarity with the frontier. Whatever his misgivings about Washington’s conduct at Fort Necessity, Braddock wanted him as an aide-de-camp. On March 2 Captain Robert Orme, a slim, dashing aide to the general, sent a letter to Mount Vernon, inviting Washington to join the general’s personal staff. Judging from the latter’s reply, it seems that his bruised feelings of the previous fall were quickly assuaged by the general’s flattering attention. “To explain, sir,” he wrote, “I wish earnestly to attain knowledge of the military profession,” adding that no better chance could arise “than to serve under a gentleman of General Braddock’s abilities and experience.” ²

Washington hinted that personal problems might hinder acceptance of the post. In fact, he was overwhelmed by the demands of planting his first spring crop at Mount Vernon and confided that the estate was “in the utmost confusion.” ³ Aggravating matters was that he had nobody to whom he could entrust management of the place. As he contemplated service under Braddock, Washington struggled with his special bugaboo, the vexed matter of colonial rank. He still dreamed of a regular army commission, valid for life, but the best Braddock could award him was the temporary rank of brevet captain. Still balking at this demotion, Washington agreed to serve as a volunteer aide to Braddock, and the general, in turn, allowed him to devote time to his private affairs until the army headed west. To brother Jack, Washington explained that under this arrangement, he could “give his orders to all, which must be implicitly obeyed,” while he had to obey only Braddock. ⁴ Already preoccupied with matters of honor and reputation, Washington feared that people might question his motives and suspect him of being a power-hungry opportunist—a recurring leitmotif of his career. Serving without pay would silence such potential naysayers. His sole desire, he told John Robinson, speaker of the House of Burgesses, was to serve his country: “This, I flatter myself, will manifestly appear by my going [as] a volunteer, without expectation of reward or prospect of attaining a command.” ⁵ This theme of disinterested service—honored mostly in the breach when he was young and in the observance when he was older—would be one of the touchstones of his life.

To manage Mount Vernon in his absence, Washington wanted to recruit Jack, which sparked a family feud. Perhaps feeling bereft of family help at Ferry Farm, Mary Ball Washington arrived at Mount Vernon hell-bent upon preventing George from joining Braddock. George was supposed to meet with Captain Orme in Alexandria when Mary, appearing like the wrath of God, insisted upon settling her son’s future plans on the spot. “The arrival of a good deal of company, among whom is my mother, alarmed at the report of my intentions to attend your fortunes, prevents me the pleasure of waiting upon you today as I had intended,” George confessed to Orme. ⁶ This must have come as an extraordinary admission: Washington was canceling a vital military meeting to mollify his overwrought mother. As had happened when her son meditated going to sea, Mary had no qualms about thwarting his career for her own personal benefit. In the end, Jack Washington oversaw Mount Vernon, Ferry Farm, and the Bullskin Plantation for the next three years.

In early May, attended by his body servant, a Welshman named John Alton, George joined Braddock’s army at Frederick, Maryland. At first, he didn’t see much likelihood of a military engagement with the French and was there principally for career advancement. As he told Jack, he spotted a good chance “of forming an acquaintance which may be serviceable hereafter, if I shall find it worthwhile to push my fortune in the military line.” ⁷ While Washington saw the cards stacked against him in the British military system, he warmed to the personal respect he received as a member of General Braddock’s “family,” or personal staff. He found a few other things to admire in the small, pudgy general with the long, sharp nose: a lack of pomp and ceremony in dealing with officers and physical courage in battle. “He was brave even to a fault and in regular service would have done honor to his profession,” he was to write. ⁸

At the same time, Braddock provided Washington with an object lesson in mistakes that any general should avoid, teaching him the virtues of patient moderation. Braddock was hotheaded and blustery, was blunt to the point of rudeness, and issued orders without first seeking proper advice. He also talked down to colonial governors “as if they had been infinitely his inferiors,” said one observer, and was irate that the colonies failed to deliver two hundred wagons and 2,500 horses they had pledged. ⁹ Washington listened to Braddock drone on, spouting prejudiced views with a narrow-minded insistence. Once committed to an opinion, he refused to back down, “let it be ever so incompatible with reason or common sense,” Washington noted. ¹⁰

Schooled in European warfare, Braddock found it hard to adapt to the treacherous terrain of wilderness forests. As his army moved west, he wanted to level every hill and erect a bridge across each brook. Washington tried to impress upon him the improvisational tactics of the French and Indians, but the haughty general wouldn’t deign to accept colonial advice. Benjamin Franklin also experienced first-hand Braddock’s cocksure arrogance. When Franklin urged the general to beware of Indian ambushes, he retorted, “These savages may be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia, but upon the king’s regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they would make any impression.” ¹¹ Braddock was deaf to Washington’s argument that they should travel lightly across the steep mountains and rely on packhorses. Instead he relied upon cumbersome carriages that traversed mountain trails with difficulty, especially when transporting heavy siege guns.

In early May Washington wrote to his mother from the frontier town of Winchester. Probably because she had so hotly opposed his taking the post, he stressed his pleasure in serving on Braddock’s staff: “I am very happy in the general’s family, being treated with a complaisant freedom which is quite agreeable to me, and have no reason to doubt the satisfaction I hoped for in making the campaign.” ¹² Washington ended his formal note with the words, “I am Honored Madam Your most Dutiful and Obedient Son.” ¹³ Mary Ball Washington had a knack for making unreasonable requests whenever her son went off on military campaigns, and she was known to say, “Ah, George had better have stayed at home and cultivated his farm.” ¹⁴ The tacit accusation was always that he had deserted her for the military. She replied to George’s letter by asking him to retain a Dutch servant for her and to buy her some butter. To this impossible request, George replied curtly that it wasn’t in his power to get either the servant or the butter, “for we are quite out of that part of the country where either are to be had, there being few or no inhabitants where we now lie encamped and butter cannot be had here to supply the wants of the army.” ¹⁵

A far more pleasing distraction for Washington was his growing flirtation with Sally Fairfax, wife of his friend George William Fairfax. At the end of April, en route to linking up with Braddock’s troops, Washington stopped by his Bullskin Plantation on the frontier and dashed off a letter to Sally that signaled a startling change in their relationship. Although he addressed the letter “To Mrs Fairfax—Dear Madam . . . ,” he was clearly trying to deepen their intimacy, with nary a mention of George William. Washington promised that he would take “the earliest and every opportunity” of writing to her: “It will be needless to dwell on the pleasures that a correspondence of this kind would afford me.” ¹⁶ This was an uncharacteristically bold and reckless move for Washington, who was playing with fire in seeking a private correspondence with a married woman, and a member of the toplofty Fairfax clan at that. Washington’s dependence on that family was thrown into relief a week later when he wore out three horses and had to appeal to Lord Fairfax for an emergency loan of forty pounds for the forthcoming campaign. ¹⁷ The request, among other things, showed just how inappropriate it had been for Washington to volunteer his services, as if he were an independently wealthy man who could rise above petty monetary concerns.

When Braddock dispatched Washington to Williamsburg on an urgent mission to collect four thousand pounds, the latter made a detour to Belvoir to engage in some extemporaneous wooing. From a follow-up letter he sent to her, we can see that Sally was flirting with Washington, albeit within carefully prescribed limits. She told him to alert her to his safe arrival back at camp, but she also stipulated that he should communicate with her through a third party of her acquaintance—a clear sign that, at this point at least, she feared direct communication. To resort to this ruse, she must have regarded Washington’s attention as something more than a mere schoolboy crush. Washington acknowledged her caution: “This I took as a gentle rebuke and polite manner of forbidding my corresponding with you and conceive this opinion is not illy founded when I reflect that I have hitherto found it impracticable to engage one moment of your attention.” He ended by saying that he still hoped Sally would honor him “with a correspondence which you did once partly promise.” ¹⁸ The coquettish Sally seemed to be feeding his amorous fantasies while simultaneously holding him rigidly at arm’s length.

George Washington clearly had a much more active inner life than his reserved exterior might have suggested. In late May he confided to Jack his interest in obtaining a seat in the House of Burgesses. He said that he probably couldn’t run in his home district because George William Fairfax might stand as a candidate, so he banked his hopes instead on Frederick County. His letter to Jack lays out in remarkable detail his canny political style, which served him well for the rest of his life. He instructed his brother to canvass the opinions of prominent men in the county “with[ou]t disclosing much of mine; as I know your own good sense can furnish you with means enough without letting it proceed immediately from me.” If gentlemen seemed inclined to support him, “you then may declare my intentions and beg their assistance. If, on the contrary, you find them more inclined to favour some other, I w[oul]d have the affair entirely subside.” ¹⁹ It is a highly revealing letter. Washington believed that ambitious men should hide their true selves, retreat into silence, and not tip people off to their ambition. To sound out people, you had to feign indifference and proceed only when convinced that they were sympathetic and like-minded. The objective was to learn the maximum about other people’s thoughts while revealing the minimum about your own. Always fearful of failure, Washington wanted to push ahead only if he was armed with detailed knowledge and enjoyed a high likelihood of success. This cautious, disciplined political style would persist long after the original insecurity that had prompted it had disappeared.

As it turned out, Washington could not pause to savor his influence, for he was “seized with violent fevers and pains in my head” in mid-June . ²⁰ He proved the latest victim of an epidemic exacting a frightful toll on Braddock’s forces: dysentery. This infection of the digestive system produces violent diarrhea, and Washington suffered cruelly from hemorrhoids. At first the stoic young aide tried to conceal the malady, but he soon found it so debilitating that he had to travel lying down in a covered wagon. On June 23 Braddock ordered him to accompany the slower-moving forces in the rear and gave him a patent medicine, Dr. James’s Powder, which Washington pronounced “the most excellent medicine in the world.” ²¹ (It consisted of phosphate of lime and oxide of antimony.) The young aide was so distraught at being left behind that Braddock solemnly pledged that he would be brought forward before Fort Duquesne was attacked. As Washington’s condition worsened, he found it agonizing to lie in the wagon as it jolted along uneven country roads through impenetrable woods dubbed the “Shades of Death.” ²² He told his brother on June 28 that he had barely enough energy to pen the letter and that a doctor had warned him that, if he persisted, he would risk his life. ²³ Although the medicine helped Washington, his illness and frequent bleeding by doctors left him woefully depleted on the eve of a major battle. Even though he had recuperated sufficiently by July 8 to rejoin Braddock a dozen miles from Fort Duquesne, he was still so weak that when he mounted his horse the next morning, he had to strap on cushions to ease his painful hemorrhoids. He would require all the stamina he could muster for the extraordinary events in the offing.

Early on the morning of July 9, Braddock’s advance force, which had grown to some fourteen hundred men, began to ford the Monongahela River in three groups. (The spot stands near present-day Braddock, Pennsylvania.) Each section was led by an officer who was to reappear in the American Revolution. The first party to cross was spearheaded by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage, the son of a viscount and an officer much admired by young Washington. The second party was led by Captain Horatio Gates, said to be the illegitimate offspring of a duke’s housekeeper. The last group to cross in the early afternoon was the five-hundred-man contingent led by Braddock himself, escorted by the weary Washington. All three groups crossed the river without the slightest intimation that a party of nine hundred soldiers from Fort Duquesne lay poised to attack on the other side.

As at Fort Necessity, the French and their Indian allies practiced a terrifying form of frontier warfare that unnerved the British. Letting loose a series of shrill, penetrating war whoops—“the terrific sound will haunt me till the hour of my dissolution,” a shaken British soldier later said—the Indians swooped down suddenly and opened fire on the startled British. ²⁴ Before British grenadiers could fire a retaliatory round, the enemy had melted nimbly into the woods. For a short interval, it seemed they had vanished. Then it became clear that they had split into two wings and encircled the British, releasing a hail of bullets from behind trees and well-protected elevated positions. The impressive miter caps of the grenadiers made them tall, conspicuous targets. In the rear with Braddock, Washington heard the ensuing panic, which he still couldn’t see. The vanguard of British troops, he recollected, “were so disconcerted and confused” by the “unusual hallooing and whooping of the enemy” that they soon fell “into irretrievable disorder.” ²⁵ The British soldiers had never encountered this North American brand of fighting. “If we saw five or six [of the enemy] at one time,” said one soldier, “it was a great sight and they [were] either on their bellies or behind trees or running from one tree to another almost by the ground.” ²⁶ Even as officers tried vainly to subdue the hysterical fears of their men, the latter threw down their muskets and fled helter-skelter. All the while, Indians scalped and plundered the British dead in what became a veritable charnel house by the river.

As Braddock and Washington rode toward this scene of helpless slaughter, panic-stricken redcoats streamed back toward them. After Braddock sent thirty men under Captain Thomas Waggener to climb a hillside and secure a high position, British troops fired at them in the smoky chaos under the mistaken assumption that they were French, while British officers fired at them thinking they were deserters. All thirty men under Captain Waggener were killed by French or British fire. For Washington, who had warned Braddock repeatedly about the unorthodox style of wilderness combat, the situation grimly fulfilled his worst premonitions. Braddock had clung to the European doctrine of compact fighting forces, forming his men into platoons, which made them easy prey for enemy marksmen. Washington now urged Braddock “before it was too late and the confusion became general” to allow him “to head the provincials and engage the enemy in their own way,” Washington recalled years later. “But the propriety of it was not seen into until it was too late for execution.” ²⁷ Scholars have noted that Washington probably saw the superiority of Indian fighting methods much more clearly in retrospect than he had at the time.

Braddock handed Washington two directives: to send another party up the exposed hill and to retrieve two lost cannon. With exceptional pluck and coolheadedness, young George Washington was soon riding all over the battlefield. Though he must have been exhausted, he kept going from sheer willpower and performed magnificently amid the horror. Because of his height, he presented a gigantic target on horseback, but again he displayed unblinking courage and a miraculous immunity in battle. When two horses were shot from under him, he dusted himself off and mounted the horses of dead riders. One account claimed that he was so spent from his recent illness that he had to be lifted onto his second charger. By the end, despite four bullets having torn through his hat and uniform, he managed to emerge unscathed.

One close observer of Washington’s heroism was a young doctor and future friend, James Craik. Handsome, blue-eyed, and urbane, Dr. Craik had studied medicine in Edinburgh and was the illegitimate son of a wealthy man in western Scotland. He watched Washington’s exceptional performance that day with unstinting admiration: “I expected every moment to see him fall. His duty and station exposed him to every danger. Nothing but the superintending care of Providence could have saved him from the fate of all around him.” ²⁸

Even before the battle, Washington had suffered his fill of British condescension from Braddock. Now he was further embittered by his conviction that the Virginians had fought courageously and died in droves, while British regulars had fled to save their skins. “The Virginians behaved like men and died like soldiers,” he insisted to Dinwiddie. By contrast, “the dastardly behavior of the English soldiers exposed all those who were inclined to do their duty to almost certain death . . . at length, in despite of every effort to the contrary, [they] broke and run as sheep before the hounds . . . And when we endeavored to rally them in hopes of regaining our invaluable loss, it was with as much success as if we had attempted to have stopped the wild bears of the mountains.” ²⁹

So many intrepid British officers were killed or wounded—nearly two-thirds of the total—that it led to a complete collapse of the command structure. Among the wounded were Braddock’s two other aides-de-camp. When Braddock was felled by a bullet that slashed through his arm and pierced his lung, only Washington was left to tend him. Braddock had fought with more valor than wisdom, having four horses shot from under him. Washington stretched out the general in a small cart and shepherded him back across the Monongahela. Henceforth Washington received orders from an intermittently lucid Braddock who lay groaning on a stretcher. “I was the only person then left to distribute the general’s orders,” Washington said, explaining that it was difficult to do so because of his own “weak and feeble condition.” ³⁰

One order required Washington to relay a message to a Colonel Dunbar, whose division lay forty miles in the rear, to come forward with supplies, medication, and wagons to assist the moaning legions of wounded soldiers. By now Washington had been on horseback for twelve excruciating hours, yet he gathered up the energy to ride all night and execute Braddock’s command. Thirty years later the horror of that night—the black woods, the ghastly cacophony of sounds, the unspeakable heaps of corpses—was still engraved on his memory. “The shocking scenes which presented themselves in this night’s march are not to be described,” he said. “The dead—the dying—the groans—lamentations—and cries along the road of the wounded for help . . . were enough to pierce a heart of adamant.” ³¹ At this point, the fatigue experienced by the sleepless Washington must have been intolerable.

By his reckoning, three hundred soldiers died on the British side, with another three hundred wounded (the true number likely approached one thousand casualties); at least two-thirds, he thought, had been victims of friendly fire. He fulminated against the British soldiers as “cowardly regulars” who had shot down the men ahead of them, even if they happened to be comrades, and was outraged that the British had been routed by an inferior enemy force of nine hundred men. ³² “We have been most scandalously beaten by a trifling body of men,” he complained to brother Jack. ³³ In comparison, French and Indian casualties—twenty-three dead and sixteen wounded—were minuscule.

On the night of July 13, a shattered Braddock lay dying two miles from the Great Meadows, when he said memorably of his shocking defeat, “Who would have thought it?” ³⁴ He praised his officers even as he damned his men, saying that “nothing could equal the gallantry and good conduct of the officers nor the bad behavior of the men.” ³⁵ Braddock displayed high regard for Washington and recommended that his body servant, Thomas Bishop, find future employment with him. He also gave the young Virginian a red silk sash and a pair of pistols that the younger man always treasured. Washington oversaw Braddock’s burial, a task that fell to him by default as the only officer left standing to issue orders. After his men dug a trench in the road and lowered the blanket-wrapped body, Washington held an impromptu Anglican service by torchlight. Afraid that Indians might unearth the body and desecrate it, Washington had his wagons ride repeatedly over the grave to hide the freshly turned earth and “guard against a savage triumph . . . thus died a man whose good and bad qualities were intimately blended,” he wrote. ³⁶ This stratagem worked, and the French and Indians never located Braddock’s grave.

One suspects that Washington knew that his fond hope of a Royal Army commission had been buried along with the general. The following year Dinwiddie speculated that if Braddock had survived, “I believe he would have provided handsomely for [Washington] in the regulars.” ³⁷ Nonetheless Washington’s reputation grew in defeat. As he trotted homeward in late July, clutching his bullet-riddled hat as a battle souvenir, he knew that his well-publicized bravery had enhanced his image in the colonies. The governor of North Carolina congratulated the twenty-three-year-old “on your late escape and the immortal honor you have gained on the banks of [the] Ohio.” ³⁸ An admiring correspondent in Philadelphia informed him that Benjamin Franklin had paid tribute to his heroism and that “everybody seems willing to venture under your command.” ³⁹

Perhaps the most gratifying response came from the rich, adoring family at Belvoir. The young war hero was lionized by William Fairfax, while Sally Fairfax sent him a sweet bantering note, cautiously cosigned by two friends, that chided him for not rushing to see her. “After thanking heaven for your safe return, I must accuse you of great unkindness in refusing us the pleasure of seeing you this night,” she wrote. “I do assure you nothing but our being satisfied that our company would be disagreeable should prevent us from trying if our legs would not carry us to Mount Vernon this night. But if you will not come to us, tomorrow morning very early, we shall be at Mount Vernon.” ⁴⁰ An unabashed affection for Washington emerges from these Fairfax missives. Much more than merely a young favorite, he had been virtually adopted by the family, which expected great things from him.

In Braddock’s crushing defeat, Washington had established an indelible image as a fearless young soldier who never flinched from danger and enjoyed a special intimacy with death. He had dodged so many bullets that he might have suspected he would escape the ancestral curse of his short-lived family. To Jack, Washington speculated that he was still alive “by the miraculous care of Providence that protected me beyond all human expectation. I had 4 bullets through my coat and two horses shot under and yet escaped unhurt.” ⁴¹ In a stupendous stroke of prophecy, a Presbyterian minister, Samuel Davies, predicted that the “heroic youth Col. Washington” was being groomed by God for higher things. “I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto preserved [him] in so signal a manner for some important service to his country.” ⁴²

Washington’s derring-do even fostered a lasting mystique among the Indians. A folk belief existed among some North American tribes that certain warriors enjoyed supernatural protection from death in battle, and this mythic stature was projected onto Washington. Fifteen years later he encountered an Indian chief who distinctly recalled seeing him at the battle by the Monongahela and told how he had ordered his warriors, without success, to fire directly at him. The chief had concluded that some great spirit would guide him to momentous things in the future.

Perhaps the most enduring influence of Braddock’s defeat was the altered colonial view of British power, formerly deemed to be invincible. “This whole transaction gave us the first suspicion that our exalted ideas of the prowess of British regular troops had not been well founded,” said Benjamin Franklin. ⁴³ Although Braddock had led the biggest British force ever to undertake an operation in the colonies, it had ended in a resounding failure. Washington had witnessed something hitherto unthinkable for loyal colonials: the British Empire could be defeated on a distant continent. For all of Braddock’s derision of colonial troops, they had shown much more courage than the vaunted British regulars. It had been trained British soldiers who all too often had killed their brethren with misplaced fire. Washington was still imbued with the professional standards of the British military, but he had been exposed to the forest warfare perfected by their adversaries and had learned lasting lessons. One report published after the battle told of Washington urging Braddock to split up his troops while the general “obstinately persisted in the form of a field battle, his men standing shoulder to shoulder.” ⁴⁴ Braddock’s defeat spawned a new awareness of the futility of European military practices on American soil, which later emboldened Washington and other colonists to believe that a ramshackle army of rough frontiersmen could defeat the world’s foremost military machine.