Braddock's Defeat

On July ninth, seventeen fifty-five, the most powerful British army that had yet set foot in North America was destroyed on the banks of the Monongahela River, ten miles east of Fort Duquesne. The disaster is known as Braddock's Defeat, and it shook the entire British colonial world.

General Edward Braddock commanded a flying column of roughly thirteen hundred regulars and colonial troops on a march to capture the French fort. His force had spent months cutting a road through the Pennsylvania wilderness, hauling cannon over mountains. They were professionals, trained in the European style of open-field combat, and they expected the French to either surrender or meet them in formation.

The French and their Native allies, numbering roughly nine hundred in total, most of them Native warriors, did neither. They came out from the fort and engaged Braddock's column in the forested bottomland near the river crossing. The Indians and French fighters spread into the woods on both flanks and began firing from positions the British soldiers could not see. The British regulars, trained to hold formation, stood in columns and became targets. They fired at smoke and at each other. Several platoons shot into their own men.

Of the roughly thirteen hundred British and colonial troops in the engagement, close to nine hundred were killed or wounded. Braddock himself was shot through the lung and died during the retreat four days later. He was buried in the road so that the wagons would pass over the grave and prevent the enemy from finding him.

Among the surviving officers was a twenty-three-year-old Virginian serving as Braddock's aide-de-camp. His name was George Washington. He had two horses shot under him. His coat was torn by four musket balls. He was not hit.

The battle that looked like the end of British ambitions in the Ohio Valley was, in retrospect, the beginning of a war that would span the globe. Braddock's defeat triggered the escalation of the colonial conflict into the Seven Years War.