The 7 Years War: A World Set Ablaze (Part 1)

From Westphalia To The Frontier

SPEAKER_00: Last time out, we were standing in a weed paddock in Western Australia. We were watching two machine gun crews lose a war to birds. And I had a lot of fun with that one. And judging by the emails, so did you judging by the listening counts as well. We're not doing that again today.

SPEAKER_01: Today we're going to go back to the other direction. Let me start with an idea because I want you carrying it throughout the whole series.

SPEAKER_00: About a hundred years before our story begins, Europe finished thirty years of religious slaughter with a set of treaties that were signed in Westfalia. And out of all that wreckage, and the thing that we all still live inside of the sovereign state. The country is a place with edges, and inside those edges, its wars are final. That settlement ended, the worst war Europe had ever fought. And it deserves a series of its own, and we'll get there at some point. But here's what nobody in that negotiation hole thought about.

SPEAKER_00: Draw one across a map of Europe, and you can at least argue about it in a roof. Draw one across 300,000 square miles of forest that no European has walked, mapped, or seen, and what you have is a sentence and a paper and a loaded gun in the woods. And that's where we're going for the next three episodes. A river valley in what is now western Pennsylvania in the spring of 1754. Two empires with overlapping paper claims to the same ground. A dozen native nations living on that ground who never signed anything and have their own plans.

SPEAKER_00: And in the middle of it, a twenty-two-year-old Virginia militia officer with more ambition than judgment. Who is about to make a decision in a rainy land at dawn that puts four continents at war. I want to say something about the name. Because I think the name is why Americans underrated it. In the United States, we call it the French and Indian War. Which makes it sound like a regional school. A warm up boring part of a textbook before the good stuff in 1776. The rest of the world calls it the Seven Years' War.

SPEAKER_00: And Winston Churchill, among others, called it the First World War. He wasn't being cute. By the time it's over, they're fighting in North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, India, the Philippines, and across Europe from Portugal to Russia. Empires change hands. India's future gets decided. And Britain wins it so completely and so expensively that paying for the victory cracks the empire in half within twelve years.

SPEAKER_00: This isn't the warm event.

SPEAKER_01: This is the main event. The American Revolution.

SPEAKER_00: Before we start, let me get something out of the way. The man at the center of this episode is George Washington. And I have to be clear with you about which Washington you're gonna meet. You're not gonna meet the Marvel Washington. The man on the money. This is Washington at 22.

SPEAKER_00: Desperate for a royal commission. Convinced of his own competence and about to be proven catastrophically wrong twice in 14 months. He loses, he surrenders, he sends a confession in a language that he can't even read. And I've come to think you can't actually understand a man who holds an army together in Valley Forge some years later without watching him fail at his very badly at first.

SPEAKER_00: If you like the show and you want to help us out, please leave a rating and a review.com and please tell your friends and your family and anyone else that cares to listen about it.

SPEAKER_01: I would greatly appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00: One of them four times.

SPEAKER_00: Just before sunrise, they meet the man they came to fight. His name is Anna Sherizon. He's Seneca by adoption, Awo by birth, and he speaks for the Iroquois Confederates in a country where the Confederacy's authority is slipping away by the month. He has brought about a dozen warriors with him. He has also brought directions below them. In a hollow between the two rock outcroppings, 35 French soldiers are still asleep on the Debarque Lean Two. They have been camped there for two days.

SPEAKER_00: They are, after all, on a piece of mission. A diplomatic mission.

SPEAKER_00: The warriors take the other.

SPEAKER_00: Somebody in the French camp looks up.

SPEAKER_00: The encounter lasts about 15 minutes. The French break for their stacked arms and never reach. Some run to find the ridge occupied. Ten of them are dead in the hollow. 21 throw down whatever they're holding and put their hands up. One minute. A Canadian named Monceau was over the far side half-dread and keeps running. He will not stop until he reaches the French fort at the forks of the Ohio, 60 miles away. The officer commanding the French camp is alive. Sitting up. His name is Joseph Coulomb de Villy, skilled at New Mobile.

SPEAKER_00: He is 35 years old and he has, in fact, a written stomach to the governor of New Friends ordering the British out of the Ohio country.

SPEAKER_00: Jumal Bean starts to speak. He has an interpreter. He wants somebody to read the paper. Anna Sharrison walks down into the hollow. The Virginians watch the comment. Nobody wants to stop. Whatever is about to happen, it is happening in front of 40-armed British subjects who have been awake for 24 hours and have no idea what they're looking for. Anna Sherrison stops in front of the wounded French officer and says, in French. Six words.

SPEAKER_00: You know how they say you can't understand someone until you walk a mile in their shoes? Well, I'd argue you can't understand a nation until you've walked through its history. Not just to highlight Rio or the sanitized version you find in textbooks. I mean really getting into its DNA. Those defining moments that shaped everything that came after. Those moments where paths were chosen, where decisions were made in palaces and backrooms and city streets that changed the course of millions of lives.

SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Paul, and this is Double Helix, Blueprint of Nations, where we unravel the genetic code of countries through their most transformative moments. Think of it like ancestry testing, but for entire nations. We dig deep into the historical DNA, finding those crucial moments that made countries who they are today.

Why The Seven Years’ War Matters

SPEAKER_00: Ten dead Frenchmen, a summons nobody read, and forty Virginians standing in the rain watching a man they thought was their ally do something none of them expected. We'll come back and take it apart properly because almost nothing about it is what it looks like.

SPEAKER_01: What I want to give you first though is the size of what just started.

SPEAKER_00: Over the next nine years, the quarrel that begins in that glen will be fought on the Elbe and the Ganges Rivers, off of the coast of Portugal, in the sugar islands of the Caribbean, on the beaches of Senegal, in the harbor of Manila, and on the cliffs above St. Lawrence. Something close to a million people will die. The map of North America will be redrawn so completely that France essentially ceases to exist on it. A trading company will acquire an empire of forty million people in Bengal, more or less by accident, and Britain will find itself running India without ever quite deciding to.

SPEAKER_00: Russia, a second-rate kingdom with no natural borders and no business surviving, will hold off France, Austria, and Russia simultaneously, and come out of the other side as a great power with a story about itself that will still be doing damage a hundred and fifty years later. And Britain Britain will win comprehensively, gloriously, on every continent it fights on. And then it will open the ledger, look at what the victory costs, and go looking for someone to help pay the bill.

SPEAKER_01: And that's gonna be over three episodes for today.

SPEAKER_00: We talk about this part in one river valley with a young man who has no idea what he's holding the next time into the fire when it spreads to everywhere the two empires touch each other, which by 1756 is most of the inhabited world at last. And the strange discovery that winning a world war can be more dangerous to an empire than losing one.

SPEAKER_00: We start in the forest with a map that three different peoples believe is theirs.

Washington At 22 And Unready

SPEAKER_00: Let me take you to the place all this is about. Two rivers come down out of the mountains, the Alegeny from the north and the Monungela from the south. And where they meet, they form the Ohio, which runs a thousand miles west and empties into the Mississippi. Stand at that junction, you're standing at the drain point of half the continent. Whoever holds it controls the water route from the Great Lakes to New Orleans. Everything that moves moves through here. Today, it is downtown Pittsburgh. In 1753, it was just a forest, and three separate powers believed it belonged to them.

SPEAKER_00: Francis claim runs through La Salle, who canoed the Mississippi in 1682 and claimed the entire watershed for Louis XIV, which, under European legal theory, meant that every stream feeding the river and every acre those streams drain was French. It was an audacious piece of paperwork. It also happened to be strategically essential because New France was two long thin settlements, Canada in the north and Louisiana in the south, connected by nothing but the interior waterways. Lose the Ohio and the Empire is cut in half.

SPEAKER_00: Britain's claim runs through the colonial charters, and specifically Virginia's, which granted the colony a strip of land running west from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific Ocean. Nobody in 1609 had the faintest idea how far away the Pacific was. That turned out to be convenient. The charter language meant Virginia could argue, with a straight face, that the Ohio Valley was a county. And then are the people who live there.

SPEAKER_00: Many of these people got here by being pushed, refugees from a century of eastern colonial expansion and Iroquois warfare. And they have rebuilt something here on purpose. A place far enough from everybody that they can play the empires against each other and keep their independence. This approach works for a while. The French need furs and can't afford settlers. The British bring better trade goods at better prices. A native leader in the Ohio country in the 1740s has genuine leverage because both empires won him and neither can compel him.

SPEAKER_00: That balance dies in 1747. That's the year a group of Virginia gentlemen formed the Ohio Company. I want to name some of the investors because it matters. Robert Dinwiddle, who becomes Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, members of the Lee family, Lawrence Washington and his half-brother Agustine. In 1749, the Crown grants the company 200,000 acres on the Ohio on condition they settle 100 families and build a fort.

SPEAKER_00: Settle families build a fort. The word settle is the whole story. French traders came to buy fur and go home. Virginians are coming to stay and to survey and to fence. And the men making policy for the colony of Virginia are personally invested in the outcome. Here's a part that'll sound familiar if you were with us for the Israel-Palestine series. At exactly the same time, Virginia is promising the Ohio nations that British protection means keeping the French off of their land. Virginia is selling that same land by the acre to its own gentlemen on paper in Williamsburg.

Jumonville Glen And A Hatchet

SPEAKER_00: Both promises are made sincerely, both are made by the same government. Only one of them can survive contact with reality. Empires seem to find this arrangement irresistible, and they find it irresistible in the Ohio Valley in 1749 for the same reasons they'll find it irresistible in Palestine in 1917. Promising a thing to two parties costs you nothing today, and the reckoning always lands in somebody else's watch. The French see it coming. In 1749, they send Celeron de Blaineville down the Ohio with a party of soldiers and a supply of engraved lead plates, and at the mouth of every major tributary, he buries one, each declaring French ownership of the river and all its branches.

SPEAKER_00: Celeron also reports back with some alarm that the native towns he passed through are full of British traders, and that the local people were polite to him and clearly wish he would leave. So in 1753, the new governor of New France stops barring plates and starts building forts.

SPEAKER_00: A chain of foes marching south towards a fort, and each one is a fact on the ground that no charter can argue with it. Construction is brutal. Hundreds of men die of disease and exhaustion.

SPEAKER_00: In Williamsburg, Robert Dean Whittle reads the reports about these forts, and he's looking at 200,000 acres of his own investment with a French army walking towards it.

SPEAKER_01: So he decides to send a messenger.

SPEAKER_00: The man Dean Whittle picks is 21 years old, and he's being sent 500 miles into the mountains on the last day of October, which means he will be doing the return like in deep winter. Everyone involved understands this, they send them anyway. George Washington has been adjutant to the Virginia militia for about a year now. A position he got at 20 after his half-brother Lawrence died of tuberculosis and which came with the rank of major and essentially no duties. His formal education stopped around age 15.

SPEAKER_00: He has worked as a surveyor in the Shenandoah Valley, which means he can read country, handle horses, sleep outdoors in winter. It also means he has spent his adolescence looking at Western land as a commodity. His family is respectable Virginia gentry, and he is achingly aware that respectable is not the same as first rank. So he volunteers for this mission. Nobody assigns it to him. He hears there's a job going into the Ohio country in November, and he asks for it.

The War’s Global Blast Radius

SPEAKER_00: And on the way north, he does something that tells you exactly who he is. He stops at the junction of the two rivers, the place we talked about during the beginning of our story, and he looks at it the way a surveyor looks at anything. Here's his journal entry. I spent some time in viewing the rivers and the land in the fort, which I think is extremely well situated for a fort, as it has the absolute command of both rivers.

SPEAKER_00: He's 21 years old and on a diplomatic errand in country nobody has mapped, and he's already assessing real estate and fields of fire. That sentence is going to get a lot of people killed. The party is small. Christopher Gist, a frontiersman who has been further west than almost any Englishman alive, goes as a guide. Jacob Van Fram, a Dutchman who taught Washington fencing, comes along as the French interpreter, which is a decision that will matter enormously in about nine months, because Van Fram's French is mediocre and his English is even worse.

SPEAKER_00: Let me take you into the council house at Lochstown, because this is the most important meeting Washington attends, and he walks out of it, having understood almost nothing. It is late November, 1753. The town sits on the north bank of the Ohio. A couple dozen buildings. Shawnee and Delaware and Mingo families living side by side. Washington is shown in and seated. He is the youngest man in the room by a wide margin. He has been in the woods for three weeks, and he's here to ask for warriors to escort him to the French.

SPEAKER_00: Across from him is Tanagarishon. I want to spend a minute on this man, because I think he is the actual protagonist of this episode, and history has handed him a footnote. Tanegarishon was born Katawa in the Carolinas. He was taken as a child by the French, or by native allies of the French, depending on which account you believe, and raised among the Seneca. The Iroquois Confederacy later appointed him as their representative in the Ohio Country, a role the British translated as half king, which tells you exactly how much authority the title carried.

SPEAKER_00: He speaks for the Confederacy to people who are in the Ohio Country precisely because they no longer want to be governed by the Confederacy. So his position is this. He has a title with no army behind it. His influence depends entirely on his ability to deliver something, and the only thing he has to deliver is access to the British. If the British commit to the Ohio Country and push the French out, Tanner Sharison becomes indispensable, and the Confederacy's authority in the West is restored through him.

SPEAKER_00: If the British lose their nerve and go home, he is a man with a borrowed title in somebody else's country. He has also, by his own account, been personally insulted by the French, who told him to his face that the Ohio country was theirs and his opinion about it was irrelevant. What he says he told him, and Washington wrote it down, it was this.

SPEAKER_01: I decided to make it hard.

SPEAKER_01: Washington records all of this in his journal and understands almost none of it. He just sees an ally.

SPEAKER_00: On the 11th of December 1753, in a foot of snow, Washington reaches the French fort and hands over Dinwiddie's letter, which demands that France withdraws from lands belonging to the crown of Great Britain. The commander is Jacques Legadur de Saint-Pierre, an officer in his fifties with one eye on about fifty years of service in the interior. He receives a young Virginian with complete courtesy, puts him again. He gives Washington's men food and rum returning home. And over two days, while Washington waits for a written answer, French officers drink with him and talk freely, and Washington sits there counting canoes in the yard and writing down everything he hears.

SPEAKER_00: Which turns out to be a great deal. From the journal, describing what the officers told him once the wine had been going a while. They told me it was their absolute design to take possession of the Ohio.

Why The Ohio Forks Matter

SPEAKER_00: By God, they would do it. You can almost see him at the table, silent, pleasant, twenty-one, letting the room talk.

SPEAKER_00: Because matters of this importance are above his rank. And as to the summons to withdraw, I do not think myself obliged to obey it.

SPEAKER_00: The journey home nearly kills Washington. Washington and Gist leave the horses behind and go on foot. A native guide traveling with them races a musket at a distance of maybe 15 paces, fires, and misses. Gist wants to kill the men on the spot, and Washington sends them away instead, and walks all night to put distance between them. Crossing the Allegheny on a raft they build with one hatchet, Washington gets knocked into the river by a night square in December, and only survives by catching a log.

SPEAKER_00: They spend the night on an island with no fire. Just puts his fingers to frostbite. Eventually he gets back to Williamsburg on January 16, 1754.

SPEAKER_00: Dinwiddie reads the report, understands immediately that he now has documented proof of French Ford's on ground Virginia claims, and orders the journals printed. The journal of Major George Washington was published in Williamsburg within weeks and reprinted in London that spring. It is written by a twenty-one-year-old with no reputation to protect. It is full of vivid detail, and it makes him briefly famous on two continents. A young man who has spent his entire life wanting to be taken seriously has just discovered what it feels like to be read in London.

SPEAKER_00: While Washington's journal sells in London, Virginia sends about 40 men under William Trent to build a fort at the forts. They get a storehouse up and a stockade started. On April 17th, Claude Pierre Picodie, the Constituteur, calms down the Allegheny with something in the range of 500 men, 18 cannons, and 300 canoes, and invites the Virginians to leave.

SPEAKER_00: Then they demolish the Virginian stockade and build, on the same spot, a proper European fortification with bastions and artillery. They named it Fort Duquesne. Virginia's claim to the Ohio Country now consists of a piece of paper from 1609 and one lieutenant colonel in the woods. And that's Washington. He is now 22, second in command of the new Virginia Regiment under Colonel Joshua Fry, and he's already marching west with about 116 men when the news of the surrender reaches him. He keeps going.

SPEAKER_00: His orders from Denwiddy are, and this is worth quoting because of what it authorizes, to complete the fort and to restrain all persons who attempt to interrupt the English settlements by force of arms if necessary.

SPEAKER_00: By the 27th of May, Washington's column has reached a flat clearing in the mountains called the Great Meadows and stopped. Progress has been miserable. He's cutting a road through the Alleghenies for wagons to keep breaking. His men are on short rations, and a third of his force has not arrived. That evening, two messages reach him. Christopher Gist rides in to report that a party of about 50 French passes settlement. Then a runner arrives from Tennessee Harrison, who says he's found the French campaign, and that if Washington comes now tonight at 50 will lead him to 50-50.

SPEAKER_00: If Washington takes 40 men, 50.

SPEAKER_00: Now, what exactly is happening here, and who is using who is a very good idea.

SPEAKER_00: He has 35 men, which is a strong escort and a weak war party. He has a formal summons ordering the British to withdraw, and he ens camp in a defensible hollow two days' walk from where the British are, without having delivered it. The French will say afterwards he was a diplomat, and Washington murdered him. The British will say he was a scout who was watching their camp and choosing his moment. Honestly, I think he was both. I think both sides knew it. Because sending an officer with an escort to deliver an ultimatum and simultaneously count your guns is exactly how this game was played.

SPEAKER_00: Washington himself had done it in December.

SPEAKER_00: But here's where I keep coming back to. Whatever Dreumonville was, the decision about what happened to him was made by a third man. And the third man had his own reasons. Because if that summons gets delivered and Washington reads it and pulls back to Virginia to ask for instructions, the crisis deflates. Diplomats take over, the French keep Fort Duquesne, the British protest in writing, and Tannis Sharrison goes back to Lochstown as a man who promised the Ohio nation that the British would fight for them and could not produce the fight.

SPEAKER_00: Tannis Sharrison needs blood in that hollow. Blood makes the paper irrelevant.

SPEAKER_00: We are back in Juminville Glenn on May 28th, 1754. We're here at the top of the episode. Let me put you back in it and tell you what I left out. The shooting is over. Ten French are dead, 21 are prisoners. Washington's losses are one man killed and two or three wounded. And he's standing in a hollow full of surrender men trying to work out what he's supposed to do next. While Jumanville's interpreter is calling out that they have a document and the officer wants it read, Kenneth Shariston walks down, says his six words, and buries a hatchet in Jumonville's coffee.

SPEAKER_00: The account we have of what happens next comes from a private named John Shaw, who was not present, and who gave a deposition in South Carolina some months later describing what he'd been told. So I want to flag the evidence honestly. This is technically it comes from a man repeating camp talk, and historians have argued about it for two centuries. What Shaw described was Tennis Charizon washing his hands in the dead officer's brains, and then the warriors moving through the hollow and killing wounded prisoners, taking scouts, and Washington's Virginians standing there and doing nothing at all.

Paper Claims Meet Native Reality

SPEAKER_00: What is beyond dispute is that Jumonville died after surrendering, that the summons was never read, and that the scouts went north with Tanisharrison to be shown to the Ohio nations as proof that the British had finally drawn French blood. And the phrase Tennis Sharison used is worth sitting with.

SPEAKER_00: The King of England has just called a twenty-two-year-old Virginian a novice in print. Washington will never forget it. He is, at this point, still writing letters begging for a royal commission in the regular British army, and he is being laughed at by the man who issues them.

SPEAKER_01: Washington goes back to the clearing and builds a fort.

SPEAKER_00: It goes up through the first weeks of June, and it will be attacked five weeks after Jumanville died. He names it for necessity, which is either an admission or a prophecy. It is a circular palisade about fifty feet across with a small storage shed in the middle and shallow trenches thrown up around it. He builds it in an open meadow with a creek running through the ground, which floods, and with three lines on two sides at a distance of roughly 60 yards. Sixty yards is comfortable musket range.

SPEAKER_00: He has constructed a position that an enemy can fire it into from cover while staying dry. He writes to Dinwiddie, without apparent irony, that he has a charming field for an encounter.

SPEAKER_00: He tells Conrad Weiser, Pennsylvania interpreter, exactly why. Washington, he says, was a good-natured man who had no experience, and he would take no advice from the Indians, and he commanded them as if they were his slaves. Sit with that assessment for a second, because it is the sharpest character sketch of young George Washington that anybody wrote. And it came from a man who had just used him for a purpose and concluded that he was not competent to be used further.

SPEAKER_00: The Ohio nations will draw their own conclusions about British reliability, and they will draw them again in 1755 and again in 1763.

SPEAKER_01: Reinforcements is a common step.

SPEAKER_00: 300 more Virginians, and then about a hundred South Carolina independent regulars in the king's service under Captain James McKay. And immediately there is a problem that tells you what's coming. McKay holds a royal commission. Washington holds a colonial one. Under British Military Convention, a royal captain outranks any provincial officer of any grade.

SPEAKER_00: Because King's troops do not labor alongside provincials. The two of them came separately. The command structure for necessity in the days before the battle ends functionally, the two men being polite to each other. Remember this. A generation of American colonials is about to spend this war being told in a hundred small ways that they are subjects rather than Englishmen. Washington is learning it first, and he is learning it in the most personal way available.

SPEAKER_00: On the 3rd of July, 1754, Louis Coulomb de Villiers arrives with about 600 French and a hundred native allies. He is Jumon Bill's older brother. He requested this command. The French come out of the tree line at about 11 in the morning and then do the intelligent thing, which is to go back into the tree line and stay there. For nine hours, they fire down into the meadow from cover. Washington's men are in the trenches that are filling with rainwater. Powder gets wet. Muskets stop firing. The rain is torrential all day.

SPEAKER_00: By evening, the fort has roughly 30 dead and 70 wounded out of 400 men. The livestock have been shot. The trenches are knee deep. And a number of the garrison have broken into the rum supply and are drunk, which, given the circumstances, is difficult to be too harsh about. At around 8 in the evening, the French call out and offer parley.

Forts, Investors, And Double Promises

SPEAKER_00: I think it is one of the strangest scenes in American history, and almost nobody knows it happened. It is dark and raining hard. The surrender document is in French. Washington reads no French at all. Jacob Van Fram, a fencing instructor, is holding the wet paper near a candle and translating out loud, phrase by phrase, into his own imperfect English. For a 22-year-old who has been under fire for nine hours and has a hundred casualties behind him, the water is coming through the campus. The candle is the only light.

SPEAKER_00: Outside, men are still dying of wounds.

SPEAKER_00: The terms appear to be generous. The garrison may march out with their arms and colors, keep everything but the swivel gun, and go home. They agree to build nothing on Ohio lands for a year. Two officers stay as hostages against the return of the French prisoners taken at the clan. Van Prime himself is one of them. And twice in that document, describing what happened to Schumobil is the word assassinating. The assassination.

SPEAKER_00: And that he never knowingly agreed to the charge.

SPEAKER_00: The French publisher, Corsican. He goes to Paris, Versailles, into pamphlets, into European presses. It is the signed admission of a British colonial officer. For a few months in 1754, the most famous Virginian in Europe is a young man who has confessed to murder. The garrison marches out of Fort Necessity in the morning of July 4th, 1754. Twenty-two years to the day before the Declaration of Independence, George Washington performs the only surrender of his military career.

SPEAKER_00: The winter passes. London reads a report out of Virginia, decides the colony cannot be trusted with this, and sends a real general. Major General Edward Braddock arrives in early 1755 with two regiments of British regulars and orders to take Fort Duquesne. He's about 60, with 45 years in the Coal Stream Guards, competent at everything the British Army does well and completely unequipped for what he's about to walk into. He cuts a 12-foot road over the mountains for his artillery, which is a genuine engineering achievement and which takes so long that everyone in the Ohio country knows precisely where he is and when he will arrive.

SPEAKER_00: Washington, meanwhile, has resigned his commission. After Fort Necessity, Virginia reorganized the regiment into independent companies, which would have demoted him to captain, and he refused to be reduced. So he rejoins his campaign as a volunteer aide of Braddock's personal staff, without rank, without pay, purely for the chance to be seen doing it. He also spends the march trying to tell Braddock that fighting in this country is different. And Braddock listening to him with the exact degree of seriousness you would expect a major general to extend to a 23-year-old colonial who lost his last fort.

SPEAKER_00: We know exactly how Braddock thought about it, because Benjamin Franklin, who arranged the wagons for this expedition, tried the same warning and wrote down the answer. These savages may indeed be formidable enemy to your raw American militia, but upon the King's regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they should make any impression. Franklin, who was nobody's fool, recorded that he decided it was pointless to argue further. Braddock does something worse than ignoring Washington, though.

SPEAKER_00: He meets with Delaware and Shawnee leaders, including a man named Shingas, who asked him a direct question. If the British take the Ohio, what happens to the people already living on it? Shingas told the story afterwards, and what he said Braddock told him was that the English would inhabit and inherit the land, and that no savage should inherit it. Shingas asked again the next day, to be sure he heard right. He got the same answer. The delegations leave, most of the Ohio nations that might have stayed neutral go to the French instead.

SPEAKER_00: And Shingas himself will spend the next four years burning farms along the Pennsylvania frontier.

SPEAKER_00: It's the 9th of July, 1755. A year, five days, Washington marched out of 47. Radics advanced, about 1,500 men, has ported the Munican Halbert, and it's roughly 10 miles of 40. By every reasonable calculation, the campaign has already won. French garrison has no chance against siege artillery. Then, a French detachment of maybe 900, whom roughly two-thirds are native warriors, comes down the road at a run, led by a captain named Beugeot, who is wearing a fringe hunting shirt and a gorge. The two columns collide by accident.

Washington’s Winter Mission To The French

SPEAKER_00: British volley is disciplined and immediate, and it kills Beugeot in the first few minutes. And then the fight goes sideways because the native and Canadian forces do the obvious thing, take the high ground on both sides of the road, and begin shooting into the column that has nowhere to go. What follows is not really a battle. British regulars do what their training tells them to do, which is to close rank and deliver volleys. And the closer they pack, the better the targets get. The advanced party falls back into the main body coming up the road, and the two collide.

SPEAKER_00: And now, 1200 men are jammed into a forest track a dozen yards wide, being shot from above on both sides. Provincial troops try to break for the trees and fight from cover, and I ordered back into line. Some fire.

SPEAKER_00: This ordeal lasts three hours. Raddock has five courses shot from under it before a bullet goes to his arm. 63 of A TikTok killed a bullet. Of roughly 1,300 men engaged, something close to 900 are casualties. Washington white regular article. The phrase he reached for when he wrote it down is the phrase of a man who has lost a certain kind of faith. A broken ramp, teeth pursued by dogs. He had spent two years writing begging letters to London asking to be made one of his dead. Hold on to that.

SPEAKER_00: In the middle of Old Death, Washington was so sick with dystentery that he has ridden the last days of the march in a padded wagon, who has two horses shut out from under him, who finds four bullet holes in this coat afterwards, and who spends the afternoon riding the length of a disintegrated army carrying Braddock's orders through the fire that is killing everyone around him. He's the only mounted officer on Braddock's staff to come through unhurt.

SPEAKER_01: Braddock, for his part, will live for four more days.

SPEAKER_00: Washington is with him, and reports that he said very little, and that near the end he said two things.

SPEAKER_01: The first was a question asked of nobody. Who would have thought it? The second, the night before he died was this. We shall better know how to deal with him another time.

SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, there would be no other time for him. He dies on July 13th. They bury him in the road bed and march the column over the grave so the French can't find it and dig him up. Washington reads the funeral service because there's no chaplain left able to do it. His letter home to his brother, written five days later, is the flattest and the most controlled piece of prose a twenty-three-year-old has ever written about surviving something like that. I luckily escaped without a wound.

SPEAKER_01: So what actually happened in those fourteen months?

SPEAKER_00: A young man who wanted more than anything to be recognized as a serious figure to get two chances in front of the largest audience available to him. He failed at both publicly in print and in two languages. He surrendered a four, he signed a confession of assassination, he watched a British army destroyed on a road, he'd warned them about it. And the strange thing about the second failure is that it made him everyone who came out to the Monungahela told the same story about the tall Virginian who rode through it and didn't break it.

SPEAKER_00: By the end of 1755, he is commander of old Virginia forces at 23 on the strength of a catastrophe.

SPEAKER_01: That's a personal ledger. Now the other one.

SPEAKER_00: That an army in North America is a fragile thing that lives or dies in supply, terrain, and the goodwill of people who live there, and that the British army, the finest instrument in the world, on a European field, can be taken apart in an afternoon by an enemy that refuses to stand and be shot at. In 1776, the men commanding the Continental Army will decline, again and again, to give the British the pitched battle they won. You will trade ground for time. You will keep an army in existence rather than risk it for victory.

SPEAKER_00: People have called that Fabian strategy after the Roman who wore Hannibal down by refusing to fight him. I think it's simpler than that. You saw what happened on the Monagahela Road. And if you were with us back in 1515 at Marignano, you should feel familiar. We spent an episode on how the most fierce soldiers in Europe walked off the battlefield they lost and turned that single defeat into 500 years of Swiss national character. Defeat teaches better than victory does, because victory lets you keep believing whatever you already believed.

SPEAKER_00: Washington gets two of them in 14 months at an age when a man is still deciding what kind of man he'll be. And then the largest ledger of it all. The French and the British had been circling each other in North America for 70 years without a general war, because neither government in Europe considered the interior of a distant continent worth one. What changed in 1754 was that a decision about war and peace got made by people on the ground with their own interests, by a colonial government whose officers were personally invested in Western land, a young officer with orders vague enough to permit anything, and by a native diplomat who needed a war to stay relevant and knew exactly how to start with.

SPEAKER_00: They got it. Formal declarations follow in 1756. And once the two crowns are committed, the machinery of European alliances drags everyone else, and the fighting spreads to wherever the two empires touch. Horace Walpole, sitting in London, wrote in the summary that nobody had improved on. A body fired by young men in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.

SPEAKER_00: Next time, on Double Helix, what began as a local quarrel over a river junction becomes something the world has genuinely never seen. Formal declarations of war in 1756, and then a conflict fought on the same time in Europe, North America, Caribbean, West Africa, and India. Frederick the Great gambles the existence of Prussia against a coalition of every major power and builds, out of sheer refusal to lose, a national story that will echo for the next 200 years. In Bengal, an East India Company clerk, turned soldier, wins a battle that hands the trading corporation an empire.

SPEAKER_00: And on the cliffs above Quebec, two generals die within minutes of each other, deciding which language a continent will speak. Until then, thank you for listening. We will see you soon.