A young man seeking a career requires a role model, or at least benefits from one. George Washington’s father had been a planter and merchant, but Augustine Washington’s early death deprived the boy of direct observation during the years when he was becoming a man. Brother Lawrence Washington’s military service doubtless turned George’s British empires eyes in that direction, yet the temporary nature of Lawrence’s service gave George little more than a taste of what a life at arms entailed. And Lawrence’s early death, following the failure of the Barbados therapy for his tuberculosis, attenuated even that.
Edward Braddock was different. The general revealed the full flowering of a military career in the British empire. Washington’s taste of battle had whetted his appetite for its drama and danger, and his time in command made him think he was good at giving orders and having them obeyed. He wanted more of the soldier’s life, and Braddock showed what more looked like. The British army might be his future.
It would have to be the British army. Washington had hit a wall in the Virginia militia. He’d been promoted to colonel after the death of Joshua Fry, but that simply meant that all the responsibility for the defeat at Fort Necessity fell on his shoulders. He offered the expected excuses: he was outnumbered, supplies ran low, the rain made defense impossible. He overreported the damage his men had done to the French. “The number killed and wounded of the enemy is uncertain,” he wrote, “but by the information given by some Dutch in their service to their countrymen in ours, we learn that it amounted to above three hundred, and we are induced to believe it must be very considerable, by their being busy all night in burying their dead.”
French commander Louis Coulon de Villiers doubtless underreported the French casualties, but his tally of three dead and seventeen wounded was likely closer to the mark. The French were behind cover all day, and of course they won the battle.
Washington adamantly denied having admitted to assassination. “That we were willfully, or ignorantly, deceived by our interpreter in regard to the word assassination, I do aver, and will to my dying moment; so will every officer that was present,” he said. “The interpreter was a Dutchman, little acquainted with the English tongue, therefore might not advert to the tone and meaning of the word in English; but, whatever his motives were for so doing, certain it is, he called it the death, or the loss, of the Sieur Jumonville. So we received and so we understood it, until, to our great surprise and mortification, we found it otherwise in a literal translation.”