The conclusion of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was followed by the usual reduction of the forces in Britain. The ten new regiments and several other corps were disbanded, leaving for the cavalry all the regiments now in the Army List down to the Fourteenth Hussars, and in the infantry the Foot Guards and the First to the Forty-ninth Regiments of the Line. The strength of all corps was of course diminished and the British Establishment was fixed at thirty thousand men, two-thirds of them for service at home and one-third for colonial garrisons. The rest of the Army, thirty-seven regiments in all, but very weak in numbers, was as usual turned over to the Irish Establishment. Efforts were of course made in both Houses of Parliament to cut down the numbers of the Army to a still lower figure, and the antiquated arguments in favour of such a step were repeated as though they had not already done duty a thousand times within the past forty years. Nay, so vigorous is the old age of folly and of faction that men were still found, when the Mutiny Act was brought forward, to urge the needlessness of courts-martial in time of peace. These childish representations, however, received little notice or encouragement; while, on the other hand, divers projects for reform in the Army were brought forward which, even though they led to no result, received at least careful attention and intelligent debate. Of these matters it will be more convenient to speak when the narrative of the war is concluded. For although peace had been proclaimed, and estimates and[262] establishment had been accordingly reduced, the struggle with France, far from being closed, was not even suspended abroad. It would seem that not a few members of both Houses were alive to the fact; while fugitive notices in the newspapers, announcing that "Mr. Clive, a volunteer, had the command given to him to attack a place called Arcourt," may have suggested it even to the gossips of the coffee-houses. The Government, however, was not one which could be expected to take thought for the morrow, or indeed for anything beyond the retention of power. It was that Administration which had been formed by Henry Pelham in 1744, and is generally identified with the name of his brother, the Duke of Newcastle, who is remembered chiefly through his ignorance of the fact that Cape Breton is an island. This deplorable person possessed no talent beyond an infinite capacity for such intrigue as lifts incompetence to high office, and was only less of a curse to England than Madame de Pompadour was to France. One able man, however, there was in the lower ranks of the Administration, William Pitt, who, after a vain effort to become Secretary at War, had accepted the post of Paymaster of the Forces. He now lay quiet, though not without occasional outbursts of mutiny, abiding his time and fulfilling the duties of his place with an integrity heretofore unknown in the Paymaster\'s Office.
1749.

One important military measure, meanwhile, the Government did take. The number of men disbanded from fleet and army was so large that it was deemed prudent, in the interests alike of humanity and of public security, to make some provision for them. Accordingly fifty acres of freehold land, with an additional ten acres for every child, were offered to all veterans who would emigrate as settlers to Nova Scotia; their passage outward being likewise paid, and immunity from taxation guaranteed to them for ten years. The system was copied from the model given by the French in Canada, and by them doubtless borrowed from ancient Rome;[263] but it was successful. Four thousand persons, with their families, took advantage of the offer, embarked under the command of Colonel Cornwallis and landed at the harbour of Chebucto, from thenceforward called, in honour of the President of the Board of Trade and Plantations, by the name of Halifax. Three companies of rangers were formed for the defence of the settlement, in addition to which two battalions of regular troops were detailed for the garrisons of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. For it was intended that Halifax should be not only a refuge for disbanded soldiers, but a fortified station in counterpoise to the French fortress at Louisburg.

The French in Canada instantly took the alarm, and after their unscrupulous manner incited the Indians to murder the settlers, sparing no pains meanwhile to alienate the hearts of the Acadians from the British. The priests were their instruments in this treacherous policy, and their proceedings were fully approved at Versailles. What was called an Indian war was, in the plain words of Governor Hopson of Nova Scotia, no other than a pretence for the French to commit hostilities on British subjects. Yet through the trying years that followed, the British officials behaved always with exemplary patience and forbearance, though, owing to the incessant intrigues of the French, occasional skirmishes between French and English were unavoidable. But British settlers had touched French America elsewhere on a more tender point even than in Acadia. British traders had found their way across the Alleghanies to the Ohio, and had stolen the hearts of the Indians on the river from their French rivals. To Canada this was a serious matter, for the chain of French posts that was designed to shut off the British from the interior ran from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and if the British should sever this chain at the Ohio French America would be parted in twain. In 1749 a French emissary was despatched from Montreal to vindicate French rights on the river and to bid the[264] English traders depart from it. His reception by the Indians was not encouraging, and even while he was on the spot a company was formed by some capitalists in Virginia to settle the country about the Ohio. The Governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia quickly perceived the importance of the position on the fork of the river where Pittsburg now stands, and were anxious to secure it by a fortified station; but unfortunately the public spirit of the colonies was less intelligent than the private enterprise. The Provincial Assemblies quarrelled with their governors and with each other, and refused to vote a farthing either for building a fort or for presents to conciliate the Indians in the valley of the Ohio.
1752-1753.

Then, as usual, while the colonies debated and postponed the French took prompt and decisive action. In the summer of 1752 a new Governor, Duquêsne, had arrived in Canada, who, as soon as the spring of 1753 was come, sent an expedition of fifteen hundred men through Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, where they landed on the eastern shore and built a fort of logs at Presquile, the site of the present Erie. Thence cutting a road for several leagues southward to French Creek (then called Rivière aux B?ufs), they constructed there a second fort named Fort le B?uf, from which, when the water was high, they could launch their canoes on the creek and follow the stream downward to the Alleghany and the Ohio. The expedition was to have built a third fort at the junction of French Creek and the Alleghany, and descended the Ohio in order to intimidate the Indians, but the project was defeated by the sickliness of the troops. Garrisons were therefore left at Fort le B?uf and Presquile, and the remainder of the force returned to Montreal, having thus secured communications between the St. Lawrence and the Ohio.
1753.
Dec. 11.

Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia no sooner heard of this movement on the part of the French than he sent a summons to the commanders of the forts to withdraw forthwith from the King of England\'s territory. The bearer of the message was the Adjutant-General of the[265] Virginian militia, a young man of twenty-one with a great destiny before him, George Washington. There were two British trading stations on the Ohio, Venango, at the junction of French Creek and the Alleghany, and Logstown, some miles below the site of Pittsburg. On arriving at Venango, Washington found it converted into a French military station, the officers of which received him hospitably, but told him that they had orders to take possession of the Ohio, and that "by God they would do it." Making his way from thence to Fort le B?uf, Washington delivered Dinwiddie\'s letter, and returned with the reply that it should be forwarded to Montreal, but that the garrisons had no intention of moving until orders should arrive from thence. Dinwiddie meanwhile had again appealed to the Virginian Assembly to vote money to build forts on the Ohio. He could show a letter from the Board of Ordnance in England approving of the project and offering arms and ammunition, as well as a letter from the King authorising the execution of the work at the colony\'s expense and the repelling of force by force; but the Assembly, though alive to the danger, would not vote a sixpence.
1754.
February.

Such obstinacy was enough to drive a Governor to despair, but Dinwiddie was blessed with considerable tenacity of purpose. A renewal of his appeal in the ensuing session was more successful, and the Assembly grudgingly voted a small and insufficient sum, with which the Governor was forced to be content. Urgent applications to the neighbouring colonies for aid met with little response. The remoter provinces thought themselves in no way concerned; those nearer at hand refused help chiefly because their governors asked for it. It was in fact a principle with the Provincial Assemblies to thwart their governor, whether he were right or wrong, on every possible occasion; they being, as is so common in representative bodies, more anxious to assert their power and independence than their utility and good sense. North Carolina alone granted money[266] enough for three or four hundred men. However, the British Government had sanctioned the employment of the regular companies at New York and in Carolina, and Dinwiddie having raised three hundred men in Virginia, ordered them to the Ohio Company\'s station at Will\'s Creek, which was to be the base of operations. Meanwhile he despatched a party of backwoodsmen forthwith to the forks of the Ohio, there to build, on a site selected by Washington, the fort for which he had pleaded so long. Forty men were actually at work upon it when, on the 17th of April, a flotilla of small craft came pouring down on the Alleghany with a party of five hundred French on board. The troops landed, trained cannon on the unfinished stockade, and summoned the British to surrender. Resistance was hopeless. The backwoodsmen perforce yielded; and the French having demolished their works erected a much larger and better fort on the same site, and called it Fort Duquêsne. The name before long was to be altered to Pittsburg, but the change was as yet hidden behind the veil of years. For the present the French had stolen a march on the British, and Dinwiddie was chagrined to the heart. "If the Assembly had voted the money in November which they did in February," he wrote, "the fort would have been built and garrisoned before the French approached."

The Governor, however, was by no means disposed meekly to accept this defeat. The French had expelled a British party from British territory by force of arms, and both he and Washington treated the incident as equivalent to a declaration of war. Washington, though but half of his troops had yet joined him, presently advanced over the Alleghanies to the Youghiogany, a tributary of the Monongahela; and there on the 27th of May he came upon a small party of French and fired the shots which began the war. A few weeks later he with his little force, something less than four hundred men, was surrounded by twice that number of Frenchmen, and after a fight of nine[267] hours and the loss of a fourth of his men, was compelled to capitulate.

Dinwiddie was vexed beyond measure by this second reverse, and by the delay in the arrival of the reinforcements which had caused it. The two companies of regular troops from New York came crawling up to the scene of action in a disgraceful state. Their ranks were thin, for their muster-rolls had been falsified by means of "faggots"; they were undisciplined; they had neither tents, blankets, knapsacks, nor ammunition with them, nothing, in fact, but their arms and thirty women and children.[251] The troops from North Carolina were still worse than these in the matter of discipline, so much so that they mutinied and dispersed to their homes while yet on the march to the rendezvous. The peril was great; yet the colonies remained supine. The Assembly of Virginia only after a bitter struggle granted Dinwiddie a competent sum; that of Pennsylvania, being composed chiefly of Quakers and of German settlers, who were anxious only to live in peace and to cultivate their farms, refused practically to contribute a farthing. New York was unable to understand, until Washington had been actually defeated, that there had been any French encroachment on British territory; Maryland produced a contribution only after long delay; and New Jersey, safely ensconced behind the shelter of her neighbours, flatly declined to give any aid whatever. New England alone, led as usual by Massachusetts, showed not only willingness but alacrity to drive back the detested French. United action was as yet inconceivable by the colonists or, as the English more correctly called them, the Provincials. It was only in deference to representations from the British Government that New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the four colonies of New England met in congress to concert for joint action in securing the unstable affections of the Indians. A project for colonial union[268] broached by Benjamin Franklin at this same congress was wrecked by the jealousy of Crown and Colonies as to mutual concession of power.
September.

In such circumstances the only hope lay in assistance from the mother country; and Dinwiddie accordingly sent repeated entreaties to England for stores, ammunition, and two regiments of regular infantry. The Ministry at home was not of a kind to cope with a great crisis. Henry Pelham was dead; and the ridiculous Newcastle as Prime Minister had succeeded in finding a fool still greater than himself, Sir T. Robinson, to be Secretary of State in charge of the colonies. Nevertheless, in July ten thousand pounds in specie and two thousand stand of arms were shipped for the service of the colonies,[252] and on the 30th of September orders were issued for the Forty-fourth and Forty-eighth regiments, both of them on the Irish Establishment, to be embarked at Cork. Each of these regiments was appointed to consist of three hundred and forty men only, and to take with it seven hundred stand of arms, so as to make up its numbers with American recruits.[253] But the nucleus of British soldiers was presently increased to five hundred men, the augmentation being effected, as usual, by drafts from other regiments; not, however, without difficulty, for the service was unpopular, and there was consequently much desertion. The next step was to appoint a commander; and the choice fell upon General Edward Braddock, sometime of the Coldstream Guards. He was a man of the same stamp as Hawley, and therefore after the Duke of Cumberland\'s own heart,—an officer of forty-five years\' service, rough, brutal,[254] and insolent, [269]a martinet of the narrowest type, but wanting neither spirit nor ability, and brave as a lion. His instructions were sufficiently wide, comprehending operations against the French in four different quarters. The French were to be driven from the Ohio, and a garrison was to be left to hold the country when captured; the like was to be done at Niagara, at Crown Point, and at Fort Beauséjour, a work erected by the French on the isthmus that joins Nova Scotia to the Continent. This plan had been suggested by Governor Shirley of Massachusetts; and in furtherance thereof the British Government had ordered two regiments, each one thousand strong, to be raised in America under the colonelcy of the veterans Shirley and Pepperrell, and to be taken into the pay of Great Britain.[255] There might well be doubt whether the means provided would suffice for the execution of the scheme.
1755.
April.

It was January 1755 before the Forty-fourth and Forty-eighth were embarked at Cork, and past the middle of March before the whole of the transports arrived in Hampton Roads. Good care seems to have been taken of the troops on the voyage, for Braddock was able to report that there was not a sick man among them.[256] The transports were ordered to ascend the Potomac to Alexandria, where a camp was to be formed; and there on the 14th of April several of the governors met Braddock in council to decide as to the distribution of the work that lay before them. All was soon settled. Braddock with the two newly arrived regiments was to advance on Fort Duquêsne; Shirley with his own and Pepperrell\'s regiments was to attack Niagara; William Johnson, on account of his influence [270]with the Indians, was chosen to lead a body of Provincial troops from New England, New Jersey, and New York against Crown Point; and to Lieutenant-Colonel Monckton, an officer of whom we shall hear more, was entrusted the task of overpowering Fort Beauséjour. The first and second of these operations were designed to cut the chain of French posts between the St. Lawrence and the Ohio, and may be described as purely offensive. Why, however, it should have been thought necessary to sever this chain at two points when one point would have sufficed, and why therefore the whole strength of the blow was not aimed at Niagara, are questions not easily to be answered. The capture of Crown Point would serve alike to bar a French advance southward at Lake Champlain and to further a British advance on Montreal, and hence combined objects both offensive and defensive. The reduction of Fort Beauséjour having no other purpose than the security of Acadia, was a measure wholly defensive.

The Council broke up; the commanders repaired to their several charges, and Braddock was left to cope with his task. A great initial blunder had been made by the military authorities in England in sending the troops to Virginia and ordering them to advance on the Ohio by the circuitous route from Wills\' Creek. This was, it is true, the line that had been taken by Washington; but Washington, like Shirley, was but an amateur, and a sounder military judgment would have shown that the suggestions of both were faulty. Disembarkation at Philadelphia, and a march directly westward from thence, would have saved not only distance and time but much trouble and expense; for Pennsylvania, unlike Maryland and Virginia, was a country rich in forage and in the means of transport. It was the collection of transport that was Braddock\'s first great difficulty. The Pennsylvanians showed an apathy and unwillingness which provoked even Washington to the remark that they ought to be chastised. It was only by the mediation of Benjamin Franklin, of all persons,[271] that Braddock at last obtained waggons and horses sufficient for his needs. The General\'s trials were doubtless great, but his domineering temper, and the insolent superiority which he affected as an Englishman over Americans and as a regular officer over colonial militiamen, could not tend to ease the general friction between British and Provincials. His example was doubtless followed by his officers, the more so since it had been ordained that the King\'s commission should confer superiority in all grades, and that Provincial field-officers and generals were to enjoy no rank with Imperial officers of the same standing. Nevertheless Braddock was too capable a man to blind himself to the merit of the ablest of his coadjutors; and it was in terms honourable to himself that he invited and obtained the services of Colonel Geo............