A Year With George Washington – February 10th

A Year With George Washington

On February 10, 1763, the French & Indian War, which twenty-two-year-old George Washington was largely responsible for starting nine years earlier, officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris.

The fuse that Washington ignited followed his having delivered an ultimatum to the French command on behalf of the acting governor of Virginia, demanding that they vacate their forts in the Ohio Country. 

When they refused, Lt. Colonel Washington returned in the spring of 1754 with a small company of men, including a few Mingo warriors led by “Half King” Tanacharison. 

Washington and his troops came upon a force of roughly thirty-five French Canadiens under the command of Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville. A battle ensued, and several of the French troops were killed, including Jumonville. 

The conflagration lasted only about fifteen minutes, but that and the acknowledgement that Jumonville had been killed are the only things all the participants agreed on. 

Washington’s various accounts of the battle are consistent with one another. He maintained that his men were fired upon first, and he then gave the order to return fire. He detailed his account in his diary a short time after the battle:

“We were advanced pretty near to them … when they discovered us; whereupon I ordered my company to fire … [Wagonner’s] Company … received the whole Fire of the French, during the greatest Part of the Action, which only lasted a Quarter of an Hour, before the Enemy was routed. We killed Mr. de Jumonville, the commander … also nine others; we wounded one, and made Twenty-one Prisoners”. 

A French account stated that Jummonville had begun reading a summons demanding that Washington remove his troops from French territory and was shot in the head before he could finish.

A third account by Private John Shaw recounted that Washington and his men had surrounded the French troops, some of whom were sleeping. He stated that one of them fired upon Colonel Washington, missing him. He then ordered a return fire, which overwhelmed the French, forcing them to surrender. Shaw said it was Tanacharison who killed Jumonville with a tomahawk blow to the head and did so after he had surrendered. 

A fourth account combined aspects of the others but differed still.

Word of the battle spread quickly, and Jumonville’s brother, Louis Coulon de Villiers, stationed at Fort Duquesne, assembled a force of 600, including French, French Canadians, and Indians, and promptly routed Washington and his men at the Battle of Fort Necessity. Washington naively signed a Letter of Capitulation written in French, a language with which he was not familiar. 

Washington and his men were given parole and sent home. To his horror and embarrassment, he would later learn that the document he signed effectively declared that Washington and his men had assassinated Jumonville, who was simply delivering a summons in the same manner that Washington himself had done the year before at Fort LeBoeuf.

News of the two battles reached England, and King George II, along with his Prime Minister, ordered an army expedition, under the Command of Major General Edward Braddock, to oust the French from the Ohio Country. Braddock was killed at the Battle of Monongahela, commonly referred to as Braddock’s Defeat. Though the French would meet with early success in the nine-year conflict, they would eventually lose the war that had spread across the globe. 

As the victor, Great Britain gave France a choice: either give up its vast territorial possessions east of the Mississippi River or cede the Caribbean Islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Remarkably, France chose to relinquish its North American territory as it considered the sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean more valuable than the fur trade in America.

Some two decades later, George Washington would again meet the French in America. This time, however, they would fight on Washington’s side and avenge their humiliating loss to Great Britain.