Episode 4: Braddock's March-An excellent Plan, In Theory...

In 1755, Britain decided to move its collnnia problem he od fashioned way- by sending a general.  Major General Edward Braddock, veteran ion the Coldstream Guards and chosen of the Duke of Cumberland, arrived in Virginia with two regiments of regulars and an unshakable conviction that discipline and geometry could tame a continent. they could not...

This episode follows Braddock's il fated march to Fort Duquesne - the road building, the supply chaos, and the infamous battle on the Monongahela that ended in disaster. Along the way we meet his unlikely cast of future luminaries:Thomas Gage, Daniel Morgan, Charles Lee, Horatio Gates, and a young George Washington who seems to be bulletproof. It's a story of imperial hubris meeting North American reality. head on, and losing in spectacular fashion. 

We unpack the tactical disaster in detail: the terrain that trapped the British column, the doctrine that doomed it, and the logistical madness that broke it before the first shots were fired. But Braddock's defeat was more than just a military blunder, it was Ann imperial reckoning. His failure shook London, terrified the colonies, and redrew the lines of Native diplomacy across the frontier. The grand design of 1755 collapsed before it had barley begun, and in its place rose the first faint sense that the colonies might be able to stanndon their own.

Next time we'll follow the other three prongs of Cumberland's grand plan- Johnson at Crown Point, Shirley at Niagara, and Mockton in Arcadia- as the empire tries once again to win by pain what it had lost by pride.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stakes In North America
• 1:05 Enter Braddock: Profile And Promotion
• 5:47 Washington, Gage, And The Colonial Tension
• 9:45 Supply Nightmares And Franklin’s Fix
• 16:35 The Four‑Pronged Grand Strategy
• 22:20 Forces, Numbers, And Fragile Assumptions
• 27:10 Cutting Braddock’s Road Through The Alleghenies
• 33:20 Little Meadows To The Monongahela
• 39:25 The Ambush Unfolds
• 45:15 Collapse, Casualties, And Braddock’s Death
• 50:20 Tactical Autopsy Of A Defeat
• 55:35 Strategic Shockwaves Across The Colonies
• 1:01:10 Legacy Of The Road And Rising Legends
• 1:05:20 What Failed, What Endured, What’s Next

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:13

Hello, and welcome to the History of the Seven Years War. I'm your host, Rob Hill, and this is Episode 4, Braddock's March, an excellent plan, in theory. Now, where were we? Ah yes. By the winter of 1754, 1755, the British Empire had decided that enough was enough. For nearly a decade, the French had been expanding deep into the North American interior, building forts from the Great Lakes to the Ohio Valley, linking Canada to Louisiana in a chain of wood and powder that threatened to strangle the British colonies along the coast. To London, this was intolerable. The Empire had the wealth, the fleets, and the manpower to crush the French in North America. What it lacked, until now, was the will to act. But that was beginning to change with the Duke of Cumberland, commander in chief of the British Army and son of King George II, a man who would combine his father's stubbornness with a soldier's blunt confidence. Cumberland was no armchair strategist. He'd fought on the battlefields of Europe, most notably at Culloden in 1746, where he earned both victory and the nickname Butcher for his ruthless suppression of the Scottish Jacobites. He believed in discipline, obedience, and the moral superiority of the regular army over all others. To Cumberland, the chaos in America was an embarrassment. Provincial militia, untrained, unregulated, and utterly unreliable, had stumbled from defeat to defeat. If Britain wanted to restore order, it would need to send a real army led by a real soldier. That conviction found a political partner in the Duke of Newcastle, the Prime Minister and consummate parliamentary schemer. Newcastle knew as much about war as a cat knows about swimming, but he knew how to run a committee, and the Empire, for better or worse, was increasingly being run by committee. Between Cumberland's military pride and Newcastle's political necessity, a grand plan took shape for 1755, a four pronged assault to drive the French from North America. And at the center of that plan stood one man, Major General Edward Braddock. Edward Braddock was, in many ways, the perfect embodiment of the mid eighteenth century British officer class. Brave, competent, confident, and utterly unprepared for the new world. Born in sixteen ninety five, Braddock had spent nearly four decades in uniform. His father, Major General Edward Braddock Sr., had served before him, and young Edward followed the predictable course of a career soldier, commissions, garrison, polite society, and the endless routine of drill, promotion, and bureaucracy. By the seventeen fifties, he was a veteran of Europe's regimented wars, having served in Flanders and on the continent, most recently, as a colonel of the Cold Stream Guards, one of the army's most prestigious regiments. In London, he had a reputation for strict discipline and personal bravery, but also a certain inflexibility, a soldier soldier, comfortable with command, but indifferent to politics. He was no courtier, which oddly made him ideal for Cumberland's purposes. Cumberland, who valued loyalty and professionalism above subtlety, saw in Braddock a man who would do as he was told, a reliable executor rather than a visionary. When the North American command was being filled, Cumberland reportedly said of him, he is a very fine officer, though perhaps a little too quick of temper, but he will fight. And that was enough. In january seventeen fifty five, Praddock was promoted to Major General, and ordered to take command of his Majesty's forces in North America, the first such command ever given to a regular British general on the continent. It was a promotion, but also a sentence. He was fifty nine years old, not ancient by the standards of the day, but well past the age when most men looked forward to anything more than comfortable garrison duty. And yet, he accepted the post with enthusiasm. Perhaps he saw in it the chance for one final victory, one grand campaign to crown a lifetime of unglamorous service. Every general's story is partly the story of the people who served beside him, and Braddock's inner circle, a collection of professional soldiers and eager young provincials, reads like a roll call of future chapters in the American saga. Braddock's most capable subordinate was Colonel Thomas Gage, commander of the forty fourth Regiment of Foot. Gage was a product of the same military world as Braddock, trained in Europe, steeped in the culture of hierarchy and honor, and utterly convinced that order was civilization's highest virtue. He came from the English gentry, respectable, wealthy, the sort of family that had younger sons for whom the army was a respectable outlet for ambition. In North America, Gage found himself both fascinated and appalled. The landscape was immense and untamed, the people by turns different and defiant. The colonial officers lacked polish, the militia lacked discipline, and the very idea of taking orders from farmers was enough to give a man ulcers. Yet Gage was also a sharp observer. He adapted more quickly than his commander and saw, before most, that European methods would not easily translate to American warfare. In his letters he described the frontier as a place where trees are the enemy's greatest ally. It was Gage who later tried, and failed, to convince Braddock to adopt lighter tactics, warning that rigid formations and forced fighting would be suicidal. When Braddock brushed him off, Gage fell silent, as a good soldier should. But the lesson stayed with him. Two decades later, as military governor of Massachusetts, he would again be caught between orders from London and the realities on the ground, and the result, once again, would be disastrous. Then there was George Washington, twenty three years old and still smarting from the humiliations of Fort Necessity. He was tall, composed, and deadly serious, a man who carried himself as though born to command, even if his experience hadn't yet caught up with his confidence. When Braddock's army arrived at Virginia, Washington volunteered his services as an aide de camp. He wanted to learn how a professional army operated. What he got was a front row seat to a master class in how not to fight a war in America. Still, Praddock liked him. The general, who had little patience for most colonials, saw in Washington a spark of professionalism that reminded him of his own youth. He often dined with a Virginian, listened to his advice, when it didn't contradict his manual of arms, and praised his diligence. Washington, for his part, was both awed and quietly frustrated by Braddock's confidence. He admired the general's courage, but winced at his rigidity. When Braddock boasted that no savage shall ever see the back of his Majesty's troops, Washington noted the words, and remembered them grimly. This partnership, the aging professional and the young provincial, would shape Washington more than any battle. From Braddock, he learned the value of preparation, supply, and courage under fire. From Braddock's defeat, he learned the cost of arrogance. In the spring of seventeen fifty five, Braddock arrived in Virginia with two regiments of regulars, a few companies of artillery, and grand expectations. He found instead a logistical nightmare, bickering colonial governors, empty treasuries, impassable roads, and a political culture that valued debate more than obedience. To Braddock, a man who had spent forty years in an institution where orders were law, the colonial system must have seemed like anarchy in a wig. He complained that every governor wanted authority, but none wanted to pay for it. When he wrote home to the Duke of Cumberland describing the colonies, he summed them up in one sentence. They are worse than useless. It was an unfair judgment, but an honest one from his perspective. The British regulars who came to America expected to find loyal subjects ready to assist the king's army. What they found instead were merchants haggling over contracts, assemblies voting down taxes, and farmers suspicious of any officer who spoke with an English accent. It was not a promising start for an empire at war. As Braddock established his headquarters at Alexandria, Virginia, he began the impossible task of turning a coalition of half supplied, ill coordinated colonies into a functioning war machine. He had the soldiers, but not the wagons, the orders, but not the cooperation, the authority, but not the money. It was a situation no amount of drill could fix. When you read about the campaigns of the eighteenth century, the drama is usually in the pages of battles, sieges, and heroic charges, but any soldier worth his salt will tell you the other truth. Wars are won by supply and lost by a dozen tiny embarrassments at the wagon wheel. Napoleon famously said that an army marches on its stomach, and if that's true, then General Braddock's army barely made it out of camp. Before he could fight the French, he first had to feed, clothe, and move about two thousand men through a continent that seemed determined to swallow them whole. For General Braddock, a man forged in the parade ground discipline of Cumberland's army, the war in America began as a logistical problem. Except, as he would rapidly discover, the problem was not the wagons themselves, it was everything around them. Braddock's first weeks ashore in Virginia informed his views of the colonies in a way that would harden into stubborn prejudice. He had expected, in the polite language of Whitehall memoranda, cooperation. What he found was a politics of parochial interest, a culture that prized local autonomy, and a remarkable talent for turning urgent requests into endless debate. De Braddock, accustomed to the near automatic obedience of garrisons and the drilled obedience of troops in Flanders, the assembly's insistence on arguing out every item struck him as not merely irritating, but positively dangerous. When he met the colonial governors, he complained that they were confused, jealous, and irresolute. He believed British authority would be enough to coerce compliance. He was, in short, politely deluded. That delusion took several concrete forms. In Barbados or Portsmouth, you could requisition horses and wagons with a stroke of a pen. In Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania's legislature, dominated by Quakers suspicious of raising money for what might be called offensive operations, would not authorize militia or seizure of property except under the strictest of conditions. Virginia, proud and theatrical, wanted to maintain the dignity of its own House of Burgesses. Maryland held long debates about the legality of impressment. New York, worried about being drained of animals and grain that might never be repaid. Braddock's reaction, recorded in letters to Cumberland, was to call the colonies contrary people, a phrase that made it into more than one dispatch and into the private jokes of officers who preferred the clean chain of command in which obedience was simply assumed. The truth, which Braddock failed to digest, was twofold. The colonies were not disloyal, they were conservative with cash and extremely protective of local prerogatives. Ask an eighteenth century Pennsylvanian to hand over his only wagon, and he would do you a favor only if you could convince him the king had already paid his invoice. That was not impudence, that was economics. What Praddock needed was not theoretical compliance, it was hard things wheels, horses, oxen, harnesses, nails, rope, shovels, tents, and an astonishing amount of flour. He needed men who could drive wagons through mud and men who could mend axles when they shattered. He needed blacksmiths and carpenters and pack horses, not more speeches and governors halls. But late winter and early spring of seventeen fifty five revealed how fragile the supply rub really was. Colonial wagons were the backbone of any overland advance. North American agriculture relied on them, but they were not built in infinite numbers. Many were variants of family wagons, not military baggage wagons, and owners were reluctant to risk them on hazardous campaigns. Horses and oxen were in short supply. The colonies had plenty of livestock, but raising and maintaining teams of draft animals took time and feed. Owners were loath to hand them over without secure payment. Harnesses rotted in damp barns, shoes for horses were expensive, axles needed iron bands and nails that were not always available on the frontier. An army needs calories, and the mid Atlantic colonies produced grain, but large bulk shipments were expensive and slow. Salted meats were in demand. Salted pork could not be improvised overnight. And while you can buy a wagon, sure, you'll need wheelwrights, blacksmiths, and carpenters to keep it rolling. Those craftsmen were in short supply on the frontier. And then there was the road problem. There weren't roads as we imagined them. There were trails and post roads and tens of mud. Moving a carriage two miles per day through forest meant turning every single step into a civil engineering project. These specifics might read like a dry warehouse list, except that each item was a potential campaign ender. The Empire had to convert paperwork into timber, and timber was stubbornly local in its loyalties. So why wouldn't the assemblies just cough up the wagons and the flour? The answers are political, cultural, and very human. In Pennsylvania, the dominant Quaker culture was ideologically opposed to war and to coercive impressment of private property. Many legislatures feared granting the crown the power to requisition property for military use would set precedent that undermined civil rights. They also suspected that funds raised for Braddock might never be repaid. So, instead they argued in committee, negotiated writers, and delayed. In Virginia, the House of Burgesses resented any external command that might diminish Virginia's self image. They had already sent Washington and felt that the immediate crisis was their affair, not a London drama. Paying for wagons or conceding impressment was politically awkward. The Burgesses did not want their constituents to feel ruined by royal demands. And in Maryland and New York, both watched the others, wary of being the only colony to pay. Politics being what it was, no colony wanted to set a precedent unless it could force the neighboring colony to shoulder the same burden. The upshot? Piecemeal compliance. Some wagons would be hired, some provisions bought, but nothing in the numbers Braddock thought necessary. Delays mounted. Braddock's men trained and drilled and waited, and waiting was expensive and morale sapping. Enter our old friend, Benjamin Franklin. If Braddock's problem was logistical and political paralysis, Franklin's solution was practical persuasion and a reputation. Franklin was not a military man. He was a civic entrepreneur, postmaster, printer, scientist, and the man who understood how to make things happen in Pennsylvania. He also had a reputation for a creditworthiness that mattered when the crown could not or would not issue immediate cash. To a farmer wary of sending his only wagon into the forest, Franklin was more credible than a distant royal order. When Braddock arrived in Pennsylvania, complaining bitterly of shortages, Franklin, present in the capital as a colonial representative and a social pivot, quietly assisted the situation. He realized that the army would never move unless local owners of wagons and horses were convinced they could be compensated. So he did what a practical man does. He guaranteed the payments. He published notices, he visited farmsteads, and he promised, in print, that the proprietors who leased their wagons and teams to the crown would be paid. Franklin did so not merely as philanthropy, he was willing to underwrite payment if the crown was slow, but because he grasped the public good involved. If Braddock's army stalled, the whole colony would be imperiled. There's a wonderful Franklinist line doing the rounds of our transcript. When Braddock complained that the farmers were lazy, Franklin replied that they would agree to risk their property if they were sure they wouldn't come back ruined. Franklin's gentle joke they will sell their wagons if they are sure they will come back in one piece might sound like mockery. In reality, it was a diagnosis of the problem. The farmers were making a rational calculation. Franklin provided the guarantee that shifted the calculus. Franklin's diplomacy was twofold practical and rhetorical. He organized the leasing of some one hundred and fifty wagons, figures vary by account, assembled teams, and arranged the purchase of grain and salted provisions. Importantly, he did so with a public face. Broadsides, notices, and personal assurances. The spectacle of a civic leader standing by his word did more to mobilize resources than any order from Whitehall. Braddock, not a man prone to effusive praise, nonetheless, admitted in a letter that Franklin performed service of great importance. Privately, he still believed that the Empire's discipline should have been enough, but he could not deny that Franklin had kept the expedition from stalling entirely. But Franklin's intervention, necessary as it was, came at a cost. Time is currency in war. Weeks were eaten up in negotiation, resources were distributed slowly, and the season, that invisible arbiter of the eighteenth century campaign, was moving on. Every delay meant later arrival in the Ohio, and at a higher risk that weather and the enemy movement would conspire against the army. Moreover, the arrangements were made ad hoc. Leased wagons tended to be family wagons patched for service, not military grade carts. Wagons would break, owners would demand higher payments after the fact, and the army's quartermasters would spend as much time haggling and repairing as they did planning. There's a grim lesson to be learned in this. Empires with the best plans can still be undone by the practicalities of rural credit. Braddock had the Duke of Cumberland's confidence, the forty fourth and the forty eighth on paper, and the strategic map of the Ohio. He did not have the simple, mundane infrastructure that made marching possible. Braddock's temperament did not help. He was quick to anger, slow to accommodate, and impatient with the kind of local argument that, in the colonies, serves as a diplomatic circuit breaker. But he was not a complete fool. Fazed for the stubborn facts, he adapted. Minimally. He accepted Franklin's help with poker faced thanks. He allowed for the requisition of local carpenters and blacksmiths, and he ordered pioneers to work day and night felling trees and laying rudimentary corduroy roads. He set up forges in the field to shoe horses and mend axles. None of this was elegant. None of it at all looked like the proud discipline he favored, but it worked enough to get the column into motion. By late May, the army had assembled at Fort Cumberland, a ragged, lumbering column, red coats dusted with Virginia earth, wagons creaking, artillery in place. The men were fed, provisioned, and weary of waiting. They had the trappings of an army, but not the smoothness of one infused with deep logistical roots. Braddock had won his little victory over the provincial reluctance, thanks in no small part to Benjamin Franklin's practical persuasion. But the victory was partial, provisional, and expensive in the currency of time. The real test would not be contracts and broadsides, it would be the slow, grinding business of moving two thousand men and their baggage through a wilderness that had no sympathy for either empire or invoice. With the wagons finally procured and his patience mostly spent, Braddock would at last do what generals are meant to do march somewhere. And that somewhere, according to London's elegant paperwork, was everywhere at once. The logistical headaches were behind him, or so he thought, and ahead stretched the real campaign, a grand design of four converging armies meant to redraw the map of North America all starting with the road west. If you asked the Duke of Cumberland for a one sentence summary of Britain's task in America, he would have given you something crisp, military, and frankly vindictive. Take away the French interior, secure the Ohio, and leave no question about who ruled North America. In Whitehall, grand ideas are cheap, execution is expensive. Cumberlands Cumberland's planners, led politically by the Duke of Newcastle, drew up a plan for seventeen fifty five that looked from the maps on their table, elegant and terrible, the sort of thing that you design for a continent when you have more confidence than local knowledge. Their answer was this hit the enemy everywhere, all at once. Hence the four pronged offensive, four coordinated expeditions, each attacking a crucial note of French power. The logic was simple deny the French interior mobility and supply, break the chain of forts linking Canada to the Ohio, intimidate native nations back into neutrality or alliance, and put such pressure on French resources that they could not reinforce everywhere at once. In short, strategic suffocation. On paper, I'd read like a classical maneuver, and it looked glorious. Four columns of British and colonial troops advancing simultaneously, north, west, and east, against every major French foothold. A single campaign season, they said, would settle the continent. This, as we'll see, was one of the more optimistic sentences ever committed to Inc. Let's walk through each prong, its commander, and what they were intended to accomplish. The first and most important column, the one everyone in Whitehall cared about, was Major General Edward Braddock's expedition to seize Fort Duquesne, that small but crucial outpost sitting at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. Whoever held that point controlled the Ohio Valley, the entire gateway to the continent's heart. It was a crossroads of empire. Rivers to the Mississippi, trails to the Great Lakes, an influence that reached from the Iroquois in the north to the Cherokee tribes in the south. Cumberland entrusted it to Braddock for one reason. He trusted him. Braddock was his man, disciplined, exact, and unflinchingly loyal to the military hierarchy Cumberland cherished. This was not supposed to be a frontier brawl, it was to be a demonstration of British professionalism. And that of course was a problem. The second expedition was placed under Sir William Johnson, Britain's superintendent of Indian Affairs and longtime resident of the Mohawk Valley. Johnson was unlike Braddock in nearly every way, half frontier diplomat, half local warlord. He knew the Iroquois Confederacy personally, spoke their language, and commanded something close to affection among the Mohawk. His job was to strike northward from Albany, towards Crown Point, the French stronghold guarding the route down Lake Champlain. If he could secure that corridor, the Hudson Champlain access, Britain would have a direct avenue to Quebec. Johnson's campaign was as much about diplomacy as it was about warfare. He was to mend the covenant chain with the Iroquois and to show that the British Empire could protect its native allies as well as, or better than, the French. It was a subtle task, and in a year dominated by blunt instruments, Johnson's was the one hand trying to hold a handshake while the rest drew swords. Next came Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts, that shrewd, rather self important governor who fancied himself a soldier. He wasn't wrong. He had organized the successful capture of Lewisburg a decade earlier and knew how to wrangle provincial troops better than most. Shirley's mission was to push toward Fort Niagara, the French post commanding the western Great Lakes and the portage route between Ontario and Erie. Capturing it would sever the French interior, isolating Canada from Louisiana and cutting off the western fur trade. In Cumberland's grand scheme, Niagara was the keystone strike. Remove it and French Canada would lose its arteries of movement. In reality, Shirley faced impossible distances, empty treasuries, and a colonial recruitment system that made hurry an exotic word. Still, the orders stood build boats, raise men, march west. Finally, Colonel Robert Mocton was given command of a smaller but strategically vital expedition to Acadia, present day Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. His orders were to capture Fort Beausagre, drive out French regulars and Acadian sympathizers, and secure the Atlantic flank. This was the least glamorous front, but perhaps the most efficiently executed. Magden had naval support, shorter supply lines, and an objective that could actually be reached. His success at Beau Sagur would mark one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal year, though it would also begin the tragic deportation of the Acadian population, a story for another episode. So, there it was, a four pronged, synchronized offensive meant to squeeze the French from every direction. In the letter to Newcastle, Cumberland explained the design as a chain of operations, each supporting the other. the other that must secure his Majesty's dominion. Translated from bureaucratic optimism into English, hit them everywhere and see what breaks first. Each commander represented a different face of the British imperial policy. Braddock, the professional regular, the iron fist of the Empire, Johnson, the colonial diplomat, the conciliator, Shirley, the administrative imperialist, the connector. Mocton, the practical soldier, the man who could simply get it done. It was, in concept, balanced. In practice, it depended on four men operating across fifteen hundred miles with no shared logistics, inconsistent support, and communications that took two months to cross the Atlantic. If one prong faltered, the others would be left exposed, like clockwork gears who never quite mesh. The war office loved precision. Maps, charts, orders of march, tables of equipment, all carefully inked by clerks who had never seen a pine tree in their lives. So, as the various expeditions prepared to set out, let's take a look at what all was actually leaving with each commander. Beddock's column was to consist of roughly twenty one hundred men, including the forty fourth and forty eighth regiments of foot, artillery detachments, pioneers and a few hundred provincial auxiliaries. Their march of route from Alexandria to Fort Cumberland through the Allegheny Mountains, and on to Fort Duquesne, the goal, as before, to capture the fort, establish a permanent British post, and to open the Ohio to settlement. Their marching order had an advanced guard of light infantry and pioneers, followed by the main body of regulars, artillery and wagons in the center, and provincial troops as flankers and rear guard. They were expected to cover a pace of approximately ten to twelve miles per day. However, it was much closer to two Johnson's northern force would raise approximately a thousand to eighteen hundred provincial troops from New York and New England, supported by several hundred Iroquois warriors. Stated before, their goal was to open the Hudson Champlain Corridor and to seize Crown Point. Johnson's correspondence with the Border Trade emphasized diplomacy, stating no act of hostility should precede our conferences for the Six Nations. Shirley's Niagara expedition planned to mobilize around twelve hundred provincials, mostly from Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island to march via the Mohawk and Oswego. Their goal, as stated before, was to establish a line of forts along the lakes and to cut the French east west line. In reality, delays, desertion, and insufficient bateau, a fun type of boat that will feature more prominently later on in our story, caused caused numerous headaches. Colonel Mocton's Acadian force was to number between seventeen hundred and two thousand, a combination of regulars and militia, to be transported by sea with naval support to reduce the fort. All told, London imagined roughly seven to eight thousand troops in motion across four axes. For perspective, that was about as many soldiers as the entire British Regular Army had stationed in North America before 1754. It was an unprecedented mobilization, and entirely dependent on the cooperation of thirteen semi independent colonies that couldn't even agree on a postal tax. The plan's elegance was matched by its vulnerability. It required near perfect timing and vast local cooperation. Each prong depended on the others to some degree. If Braddock bogged down, and Braddock in particular now, had a reputation of moving at a pace that pleased parade grounds more than hedgerows, then French commanders could shift forces towards Johnson or Shirley. If Johnson failed to secure native allies, the frontiers could erupt. If Mokden stalled, maritime resupply would be threatened. And then there was the human factor the colonial assemblies. Cumberland's engineers of war assumed cooperation was a given. The colonies regarded cooperation as negotiable. There was a mismatch of expectations that would strain execution from the outset. A final strategic frailty the plan assumed that the metropolitan concepts of force, regular in line, careful siegecraft, hierarchical command, would translate into frontier victory. There was a high risk bet that Britain's cultural and organizational strengths could simply transplant onto a geography and a political ecology that made those strengths awkward at best and fatal at worst. So, as armies assembled in scattered forts and ships readied in Atlantic ports, the British Empire's seventeen fifty five plan looked brilliant on paper, a synchronized multiple front blow that could break French power in North America. The choice of commanders Braddock, Johnson, Shirley, Mocton, showed an attempt to mix metropolitan discipline with colonial experience. What the planners could not fully account for, and what would turn this plan from elegant to catastrophic in ways both immediate and long lasting were three things timing, terrain, and politics. The first two were physical, the last was human, and the human problem, indecisive assemblies, regional rivalries, and assumption about native loyalties, would gnaw the plan like a worm in a pear. When General Edward Braddock finally gave the order to move out from Fort Cumberland in early june seventeen fifty five, he was, in his own words, heartily glad to be rid of the delays of the provinces. His army, about fourteen hundred regulars of the forty fourth and forty eighth regiments of foot, some four hundred and fifty provincial militia and roughly two hundred fifty civilian teamsters, had been training, drilling and waiting for weeks. Behind them, the fort stood as the last trace of civilization. Ahead, one hundred and ten miles of forest, river, swamp, and rock between them and Fort Duquesne. To London strategists, this was the main thrust of a global campaign. To the men hacking through the Alleghenies, it was more like hauling the Empire uphill, one tree at a time. The road they built was officially called the Praddock Road, but that name only came later. At the time it was simply the road, a line of mud and broken stumps that snaked westward, growing a few miles a day under the swing of thousands of axes. It was less a road and more of a defiance against geography. Every morning teams of pioneers and soldiers cut trees, dug ditches, and bridged streams. The army had to make its own path, the forest too thick for wagons, the ground too soft for horses. Each day's march might yield two or three miles of progress, if that. The road was built by pioneers in the literal sense. They hacked a route wide enough for artillery and wagons to pass, laying logs over swamps, corduroy roads, they were called, which looked neat when finished but turned into bone jarring torture tracks once the wagons rolled over them. And the wagons there were over a hundred of them, groaned and snapped under the weight of empire. Axles cracked, wheels split, and every few hundred yards the column stopped to repair something. Men cursed in English, Scotch, and German. Oxen died in harnesses, horses went lame, and the forest swallowed the noise, so the sound of hammering echoed like a drum beat of futility. Braddock, of course, insisted that the column keep its European disciplines, proper intervals, flanking pickets, tight marching order, and constant readiness for inspection. It was the kind of parade ground logic that made sense on the fields of Flanders, but not in the Appalachian Ravine. To his men, it began to feel like marching to nowhere. To his officers it began to feel like marching into a lesson. What's remarkable about Praddock's march is not just its futility, but its cast of characters, a small traveling circus of future revolutionaries, administrators, and legends in the making. Once again we have George Washington, the young Virginian aide de camp, rode near the general staff, twenty three years old, ambitious, already famous for his wrong decisions after the surrender at Fort Necessity the year before. He had a feverish idealism, and soon just a fever. Somewhere near Willis Creek he came down with dysentery so severe he was confined to a wagon, pale, shaking, directing messengers from what one soldier called a bed upon wheels. He'd later recalled Praddock's undaunted resolution, but also that fatal inflexibility, the same discipline that made him admirable in defeat and impossible to advise in advance. Nearby was Thomas Gage, that solid, deliberate officer commanding a battalion of the forty fourth Foot. Gage was everything Washington wasn't, regular, composed, pragmatic, and skeptical of colonial enthusiasm. He kept neat correspondence, fretted over provisions, and quietly observed the breakdown of imperial cooperation. Observations he would remember well when, twenty years later, he'd command British troops in Boston, facing down the very generation of colonials he'd once marched beside. If history has a sense of irony, it's because men like Gage give it one. Then there was Horatio Gates, serving as a commissary officer, essentially a glorified clerk and logistics coordinator. He wasn't glamorous, but he was competent. He was accounting, not adventurous, balancing manifests, checking food stores, and ensuring records matched reality. In the Army of seventeen fifty five, this was the least romantic but most vital job there was. Gates' grasp of paperwork, organization, and correspondence would have become the spine of his later career, and in time his rivalry with Washington. Among the wagoners was a tough, tall Virginian named Daniel Morgan, a teamster, rough around the edges, who had joined for the money and the fight. When an officer struck him across the back for insolence, Morgan struck back, a cardinal sin in the army. He was sentenced to five hundred lashes, a punishment that would kill most men. Morgan survived every single one. He wore the scars for the rest of his life and never forgot the British officer who ordered them. In that moment you can almost see the American Revolution's first glowing embers, though no one knew what they'd ignite. Amongst the teamsters driving Braddock's supply wagons was a young Pennsylvanian frontiersman named Daniel Boone. Only twenty one, Boone had joined the expedition as a civilian wagoneer, hauling supplies along the newly cut road. He wasn't assaulter, not yet, but he'd absorbed every lesson the wilderness had to offer. When the ambush came, Boone escaped the slaughter with his life, retreating east with the survivors. The experience left its mark. Years later he would remember Braddock's road, not as the path of empire, but as the first trail west, the road that pointed him towards his own frontier destiny. And somewhere in the ranks of the forty fourth Foot was Charles Lee, a young lieutenant with more opinions than sense, brilliant, arrogant and convinced he knew better than every superior officer. Lee would later cross half the world as a mercenary before turning up in the Continental Army, where he would finally find a general he could argue with full time George Washington. Even then, in seventeen fifty five, Lee's diary drips with scorn for Braddock's regular foolishness, noting that the general marched as if to a review rather than to battle. He was not wrong, just insufferable. It's a strange thought. In this miserable creaking column under Braddock's strict command were the men who would one day command the armies that fought for and against independence a small army unknowingly rehearsing the revolution to come. As June turned into July the march groaned on the road cut westward through the ridges and every mile grew harder. Horses died faster than they could be replaced, wagons mired in mud, men slept wet, cold and hungry. The officers, used to civilized campaigns, found themselves constantly dirty and bitten by insects. Supplies lagged far behind, the flour turned mouldy, the salted pork, Irish mess, as the soldiers called it, went rancid. Pioneers labored knee deep in mud, chopping, hauling, building causeways and bridges. Rain turned the forest into a green shadow. At night wolves and whipperwills sang over the campfires, and men began to whisper about the French Indians waiting out there, somewhere, invisible. Braddock himself rode the lines daily, inspecting progress, berating lazy wagoneers, and maintaining a fierce optimism that increasingly only he believed. He refused to lighten the column or adapt to native style tactics. His orders were simple the king's troops do not turn Indian. To Braddock, adaptation looked like surrender. But it wasn't just stubbornness, it was faith. The army he thought was civilization. To abandon its discipline in the wilderness would be to abandon the very principle of empire, and so they carried on, precisely, properly and inevitably. And to truly understand the Mirisri, we have to follow the road itself, mile by mile, ridge by ridge to the geography that broke Braddock's army before a single shot was fired. When we talk about Braddock's march, it's easy to imagine a neat red line stretching west across the map, Fort Cumberland to Fort Duquesne, one hundred and ten miles as the crow flies, but to Braddock's men, it was not a line, it was an obstacle course made of rock, forest and water, a journey through what one soldier called a wilderness savage without end. So let's trace the road as they saw it, mile by mile, hill by hill, camp by camp. The march began at Fort Cumberland, at the confluence of Willis Creek and the Potomac River, today downtown Cumberland, Maryland. It was the westernmost outpost of British settlement at the time, and the last place where you could find real buildings, cobbled streets, or a decent pint. The fort itself was a haphazard structure, part stockade, part logistics depot, rained with mud and chaos. This was where Franklin's wagons gathered, where Washington rejoined the column, and where the Army's two regiments began to realize that the road west didn't actually exist yet. Here, the pioneers began cutting the Braddock Road, a route that would roughly follow the old Native American trail known as Numacollin's Path, itself an ancient Iroquois and Delaware track through the mountains. That path, widened to twelve feet by hand and axe, became the spine of the British advance. From Fort Cumberland, the column immediately confronted its first obstacle Haystack Mountain. It wasn't large by alpine standards, but for men dragging cannon and wagons it might as well have been the Himalayas. The ascent was steep and muddy, horses balked, wagons broke, and men cursed every single foot of elevation. Once over the crest, they descended into the Savage River Valley, cutting bridges and causeways as they went. Modern Route forty, the old national road, still follows part of this route, but in 1755 it was virgin forest, dense and unrelenting. The first major camp after leaving Fort Cumberland was Bear Camp, near modern Frostburg, Maryland, a miserable boggy patch of clearing where the army spent days repairing wagons and cursing the rain. At this point average progress was about three to five miles per day. Beyond the savage river rose the Allegheny front, the high backbone of the mountains. Berick's men labored up steep ridges, chopping switchbacks to haul the guns. Every cannon barrel had to be slung with ropes, dragged by hand and horse. The soil was thin, the slopes treacherous, and rain turned every climb into a slipway. The route crossed the eastern continental divide, near present day Grantsville, Maryland, where the waters began flowing westward towards the Ohio instead of eastward towards the Potomac. There was an important psychological moment. They had entered the Western waters, the frontier that had cost Washington his earlier defeat. They camped at a place called Little Meadows, near modern Grantsville around june sixteenth to seventeenth, seventeen fifty five. Washington, bedridden with dysentery, rode in a jolting wagon and wrote that our march is much retarded by the heaviness of our artillery and carriages. Little Meadows would become one of the most famous waypoints on the march, later reused by Washington himself during the French and Indian War and again in 1794 during the Whiskey Rebellion. In a sense, all American roads westward begin here, in the mud of Braddock's labor. After crossing into Pennsylvania, the terrain did not get friendlier. The route twisted through what are now the Laurel Highlands, steep hills and narrow passes near modern Farmington and Uniontown. This was the same country where Washington had fought and surrendered the year before at Fort Necessity, in the clearing known as the Great Meadows. The army camped nearby, revisiting the site where British arms had first been humiliated by the French. Some of Braddock's officers, including Gage, scouted the nearby Jominville Glen, still littered with the remnants of that earlier skirmish. It must have been a chilling sight, the ghosts of last year's defeat standing silently beside the column's new optimism. At this point average progress was down to two to three miles per day. Road crews were stretched thin, and the supply train now extended over six miles long. Every evening wagons had to be parked in defensive circles, artillery unlimbered, and the men set to chopping wood for watch fires. The forest crept right up to the edge of camp, dark, close and full of whispers. By early July Braddock's column reached Redstone Creek, near modern Brownsville, Pennsylvania, on the Monongahila watershed. From here, the army could finally descend toward the French position, but terrain grew even more difficult. The Monongahila Valley was steep, dissected by narrow ridges and sudden ravines. The road wound along the riverbank, rising and falling like a roller coaster built by madmen with axes. They built temporary bridges across streams like Dunbar's Run and Cedar Creek, some of which collapsed under the weight of the guns. Every bridge took days to cut and lash together, only to be washed out in the next rain. The final leg passed through what is now Braddock, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh that still bears the general's name, though it's safe to say he'd have preferred a more triumphant memorial. Here, the army camped near Fraser's plantation, their last major halt before the fateful crossing of the Monongahila River on july ninth. The night before the battle the men cleaned their muskets, officers dined on preserved beef, and Praddock wrote to his superiors that the enemy shall soon see his Majesty's forces in their glory. Preddock's road was one hundred and ten miles long and twelve feet wide, a scar carved into the Alleghenies that swallowed lives, animals and time. It climbed seven major ridges, crossed three river systems, and traversed some of the wettest, steepest terrain in eastern North America. It was both a road and a grave, every mile costing an axle, a horse, or a man. In practical terms, the march from Fort Cumberland to the Monongahila took about five weeks, with a total delay of nearly a month due to weather, road construction, and supply troubles. In strategic terms, it turned the British Army's best equipped column into a sluggish, exposed snake crawling towards an ambush it couldn't see. The irony is that Braddock's road built in blood and sweat would outlast the man who ordered it. For decades afterward settlers, traders, and eventually George Washington himself would travel it westward. It became the seed of the National Road, America's first great highway, proof that even in defeat empires sometimes leave useful ruins. Among the men, the mood soured from weary to wary. Rumors circulated of French patrols, of ambushes ahead, of invisible scouts watching from the trees. Even the regulars, veterans of Flanders and Fontenoi, began to feel it the uncanny silence of the forest, the endless distance from home, the sense that the line between soldier and prey was getting thin. Washington, recovered but still pale, rode beside Braddock and tried, gently, to advise the general to send more scouts forward to break the column into lighter detachments. Braddock dismissed it. Colonel Washington, he is said to have said, these savages may indeed be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia, but upon the king's regular and disciplined troops, sir, they can make no impression. This is one of those quotes that historians suspect may be apocryphal, but like most apocrypha, it tells the truth too well to ignore. Meanwhile, the French and allies at Fort Duquesne were preparing. Captain Daniel de Barjou, a seasoned Canadian officer, had read the terrain perfectly. He knew the British would come by the river roads, that they would march in tight formation, and that they would expect the enemy to stand and fight like gentlemen. Instead, Beju and a mixed force of Ottawa, Shawnee, Huron, and Delaware warriors planned to meet them in the woods before they ever saw the fort. The trap was indeed baited. The only question was how far the British would march before stepping into it. The Monongahila River bends like a serpent southeast of modern Pittsburgh, flowing between low wooded ridges. The road Braddock's engineers had cut wound along the south bank, crossed the river, then rose towards a shallow depression, a natural bowl between two spurs of ridge. It was there, just seven miles from Fort Duquesne that the trail narrowed into a corridor of death. The path sloped gently upward through the trees, hemmed in by thick undergrowth and high banks. The left flank was a wooded ridge, steep, tangled, impossible for wagons. The right dropped into a shallow ravine choked with brush. Visibility just thirty yards at best. The air was heavy with July heat and powdery dust kicked up by the wagons. At approximately one PM, the advanced guard under Thomas Gage crested a small rise and saw a figure ahead a single French officer waving his hat. It was Captain Danil de Bajou wearing a fringed hunting shirt and a silver gorget. Behind him, unseen lay six hundred men, French regulars and Canadian militia in the center, native warriors on both flanks. Then Bojot gave the signal and the forest caught fire. The opening volley came from the French center, perhaps fifty muskets at once, their smoke boiling through the trees. The vanguard halted, returned fire, and almost immediately began to take casualties. Bigot fell in the first minute, shot through the chest, collapsing in the dust, but his men didn't falter. They melted into cover, each man choosing his tree or hollow. Within seconds Ottawa and Delaware poured from sides of the road, flanking the British column unseen. The effect was psychological annihilation. The red coats could not see who was shooting at them, only they saw their comrades dropping, one after the other. The officers, shining like targets in lace and brass, went down first. Drummers, the anchor of formation, were picked off deliberately, silencing the rhythm of command. Gage, still alive, shouting orders, tried to form his men across the road, too deep textbook European line, but the terrain mocked the textbook. The flanks couldn't extend far enough, and every attempt to dress the ranks exposed another handful of men to fire from the tree line. When the front ranks tried to charge they found nothing to charge at. By the time Braddock's main body arrived, the advance guard had collapsed, falling back in disorder. The retreating vanguard slammed straight into the advancing maiden column, over eight hundred men packed into a ravine shoulder to shoulder, unable to maneuver. The road, barely twelve feet wide, became a bottleneck of wagons, horses and human panic. Braddock, riding at the head of the column, saw the smoke and heard the crack of musketry. He ordered the artillery forward. A fatal decision. Two light six pounder field guns rumbled to the front and unlimbered on the road. The gunners fired blindly into the woods, the recoil sending the pieces skidding backward into men and wagons. Smoke thickened, cutting visibility to near zero. Horses screamed, teams broke loose, wagons overturned. Some of the drivers panicked and fled, leaving their loads to block the water The road entirely. The infantry behind, hearing only the constant crash of fire ahead, began firing too, blindly into the smoke, often at the backs of their own comrades. One veteran later said, The air was filled with lead, but none of it went in the right way. Provincials on the flanks, Virginians, Marylanders, and a few Pennsylvania Rangers, tried to fight Indian style, taking cover behind trees and firing by instinct. But the regulars, trained to see such behavior as cowardice, mistook them for the enemy. A deadly, friendly fire followed, the most disciplined army in the world slaughtering itself in confusion. Amid the chaos, George Washington appeared like an apparition. Riding hard between the broken lines, his horse lathered with sweat. He carried Braddock's orders from group to group, trying to rally formations, but found almost no one capable of hearing him. Men fired at ghosts, officers lay dead or dying, even the drummers had fled. Washington's own account, written years later, is restrained, but eyewitnesses were less so. One soldier swore that Mr Washington rode through a hundred deaths untouched. Four bullet holes in his coat, two horses shot from under him, his hat pierced, and not a scratch. At twenty three, Washington learned his first great military lesson that courage can't always overcome bad plans, and that Providence seems to have a taste for irony. Predict himself was everywhere, and nowhere. He had five horses shot from under him, each time remounting to bellow commands over the gunfire. He cursed, exhorted, and refused to retreat. He believed that if he could just get the men to form up, the enemy would break, because that's how battles worked in Europe. But this wasn't Europe. The line refused to hold, because the line no longer existed. One officer remembered seeing Breddock ride through a cloud of powder smoke, sword raised, shouting, We shall see who are the cowards now. A moment later, a musket ball tore through his right arm and into his chest. He dropped from his saddle, gasping, a man undone not by cowardice, but by conviction. The battle had lasted nearly three hours, though to the survivors, it felt eternal. When Braddock fell, Captain Oram and Washington helped carry him off the field, while Colonel Dunbar organized the rear guard to cover the retreat. What followed was not an orderly withdrawal but a collapse. The remaining troops fled back down the road toward the river crossing, pursued for miles by native warriors who took the opportunity to loot, scalp, and avenge earlier British raids. The guns were abandoned, wagons burned, and supplies scattered. The only thing that saved the remnants of the army from total annihilation was exhaustion, both theirs and the enemy's. By dusk what had been an army that morning was now a scattered rabble straggling back towards Dunbar's camp, fifty miles to the east. Out of the approximately fourteen hundred men, four hundred and fifty six were killed, four hundred and twenty two wounded, a casualty rate of over sixty percent. Of the eighty six officers who entered the fight, sixty three were killed or wounded. The French and native force, by comparison, lost fewer than fifty. It was, by any measure, one of the most lopsided defeats in British military history. The battlefield itself was left as a charnel ground, torn uniforms, shattered muskets, and the bodies of men and beasts tangled among the trees. French and native scavengers returned the next day, stripping the dead and taking trophies. To the Delaware and the Shawnee it was not savagery, but balance, repayment for Fort Necessity, for stolen lands, for the arrogance of empire that thought themselves immortal. The wounded general was carried in a wagon eastward along the road he had built. He asked little, spoke rarely, and seemed, for the first time, to understand the depth of the disaster. Washington stayed by his side, commanding the rear guard and organizing the retreat. Two days later, on july thirteenth, Reddock died quietly near the Yorrihenny River. He was buried that night in the middle of the road, so the passing wagons would erase the trace of his grave. Only Washington and a few officers knew the exact spot. When they rolled the last wagon over the mound, the road looked undisturbed, as if the forest had swallowed the general whole. Washington read the burial service by torchlight, then turned back toward the dark road east. In the colonies, word of the defeat spread fast. The shock was profound. The British Army, humiliated by an enemy a third of its size, in a war it had started. But amid the mourning and recrimination, Washington's legend grew. His miraculous survival became a story repeated from pulpit to tavern. One minister declared that the bullet that would have slain Washington was turned aside by the hand of Providence. Pamphlets described him as the deliverer preserved for future service to his country. There was propaganda, yes, but it was also belief. The colonies, uncertain of the empire's power, now had their own hero, young, native born, and apparently indestructible. Braddock's road would one day carry Washington west again, not as a subordinate, but as a commander, and later as the hero of a nation that had outlived the empire which built it. When the smoke cleared over the Monongahila, the British Empire was left with no victory, no general, and no illusions. Major General Edward Braddock lay buried beneath the very road he had carved into the Alleghenies, the man who brought the Empire westward only to die beneath its weight. It is easy to caricature Braddock as the stubborn marionette, the symbol of imperial arrogance, but the truth is more complicated. Braddock was not an incompetent man, he was a competent man in the wrong world. He had been trained in the iron geometry of European war, clear fields, open lines, precise follies, and absolute discipline. The forest offered him none of that. It punished every assumption, muffled every order, and devoured every formation. He did not lose because he was foolish, he lost because he trusted the wrong kind of order. So let's open the battlefield itself, not in hindsight's comfort, but its cold tactical autopsy. The battlefield at the Monongahela was not a field at all. It was a tangle of ravines, underbrush, and broken ridges. The British army, trained for open plains, had forced itself into a defile barely twelve feet wide. The road channeled the troops into a single file, stretching for nearly a mile, a perfect target for envelop fire. The French native forces didn't need numbers, they needed angles. They occupied the high ground on both sides and fired down into the column as if shooting into a barrel. Preddock's intelligence was poor from the start. His scouts, mostly provincial, and a handful of native guides, were dismissed as unreliable. He advanced blindly, convinced that the enemy would stand in fight at the fort, not before it. Even when reports came of French movement ahead, he refused to believe them. They would not dare, he said, a phrase that has buried many armies. When the ambush struck, Breddock's instinct was to do what every British officer had been taught, form up, close ranks, and deliver disciplined volleys. But discipline and geometry don't work when your soldiers can't see what they're shooting at. The French and native warriors were invisible among the trees. The British line of battle was perfectly visible in the open track. Each attempt to dress ranks only made the soldiers better targets. In one bitterly comic sense, Braddock's men fought beautifully. They stood firm, fired in volleys, and died in formation. In the chaos of the forest, communication disintegrated. Drums, the heartbeat of eighteenth century warfare, couldn't carry through the trees. Officers shouted orders, were lost in the smoke. Each company fought its own little war, deaf and blind to the others. When Braddock fell, command dissolved instantly. There was no succession of authority, only the sound of musket fire fading east. Braddock's greatest virtue, personal bravery, became his undoing. He led from the front, rallying troops again and again, convinced that courage was substitute for adaptability. He refused to permit men to skulk behind trees like savages. By denying his troops the freedom to fight as the terrain required, he denied them their only chance to survive it. The irony is that the colonial provincials, whom Braddock distrusted, were the only ones trying to fight effectively. They broke for the trees, fired from cover, and were promptly mistaken for the enemy by panicked regulars. The result? The finest army in the world shooting at shadows, and sometimes at itself. Even before the battle, the campaign was dying of exhaustion. Weeks of road building, hunger, and supply shortfalls had left the men physically spent and mentally brittle. Braddock's insistence on hauling artillery through the wilderness slowed his advance to a crawl. By the time he had reached the Monongahila, he had no reserves, no energy, and absolutely no margin for error. Every musket fire, every broken axle, every dead horse was a part of the defeat already underway. Washington would later call Braddock a man of great worth, and he meant it. He also never forgot what he saw that day, how courage without flexibility is suicide, and how discipline, without imagination, is defeat. From that moment Washington's military philosophy began to diverge from Britain's. When his time came, he would fight not with the Empire's methods, but against them, loose, mobile, adaptive, pragmatic. Braddock's ghost would ride beside him for the rest of his life, whispering what not to do. The defeat at the Monongahela didn't just kill a general. It upended the entire British strategy in North America. Breddock's expedition had been the linchpin of the four pronged offensive. When it collapsed, the other three prongs lost momentum and credibility. Johnson's Crown Point campaign slowed to a crawl. Shirley's Niagara expedition stalled before leaving port, and only Mocton's strike on Beau Sejour succeeded. What had begun as a coordinated conquest turned into a series of disconnected improvisations. From western Virginia to Pennsylvania, settlers fled eastward. The Alleghenies, once seen as the next frontier of expansion, became a wall of terror. Rumors spread that French and native war parties were marching on the Potomac itself. The colonial assemblies that had once hesitated to raise troops now scrambled to defend their borders. Braddock's defeat created almost overnight, a culture of fear that would reshape colonial politics and deepen resentment toward London's distant confidence. The French victory transformed the balance of power amongst the native nations. The Delaware, the Shawnee, and even some Iroquois factions saw the French as ascendant and began raiding British settlements with renewed zeal. The British promise of protection, the very foundation of their alliances, lay in ruins. William Johnson would spend the next year trying to rebuild those relationships with gifts, counsels, and apologies, but the damage was done. Native neutrality had been shattered. In London, the temperature increased. Braddock's loss was seen not as a local embarrassment, but as a strategic crisis. The Duke of Cumberland, however, still stuck in his ways, would not see strategic change as necessary until another powerful player, William Pitt the Elder, enters the field and shakes up how officers are selected after Cumberland sends over two more duds. New generals, Ambercrombie, Howe, Amherst, and Wolf would soon arrive with reinforcements and orders to wage total war. Within a year, Britain and France would no longer be fighting limited frontier skirmishes. They would be at war everywhere, in Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and India. Braddock's defeat did not end the conflict, it ignited the Seven Years War. In the colonies, Braddock's arrogance became legend. His disdain for provincial officers and assemblies lingered long after his death. Many in America began to wonder whether London understood the continent at all. They'd supplied wagons, provisions, and men, and been blamed for the defeat anyway. The sense of betrayal festered. When revolution came twenty years later, more than one rebel pamphleteer would invoke Braddock as a symbol of Imperial Huprus, the general who wouldn't listen. Ironically, Braddock's road, carved through blood and toil, outlasted its maker. In time it became the first great highway west, the skeleton of America's frontier expansion. Washington would return along it in seventeen fifty eight with General Forbes, again in seventeen seventy as a private surveyor, and once more in seventeen ninety four as president pressing the Whiskey Rebellion. Each time he retraced the ghost of that doomed march, and perhaps wondered what the old general would have thought of it all. Braddock's defeat was the Empire's education. It learned that America could not be conquered by maps and memoranda, that the forest and the weather and the people who lived there had wills of their own. It learned too late that the colonies were not children to be commanded, but partners who expected to be heard. So that was Braddock's March, a textbook example of how not to fight a war in North America. The Empire had tried to bring order to the wilderness, and the wilderness had politely but firmly declined their offer. Braddock was gone, the road was littered with the remains of his army, and the grand design of seventeen fifty five lay in ruins. But the story doesn't end in that Pennsylvania ravine, because while Braddock was bleeding out under the trees, the other three prongs of Cumberland's master plan were still marching, north to Crown Point, west to Mont Niagara, and east to Acadia. And if Braddock's road ended in disaster, one of these others will finally deliver Britain its first taste of victory. Next time, we'll leave the Alleghenies behind and follow the war north, to forts, frontiers, and a little place called Lake George. If you've been enjoying listening to the history of the Seven Years' War, please take a moment to raid or review the show on iTunes or wherever you happen to listen. Every review helps more people find the podcast and keeps the humble campaign supplied with metaphorical powder, shot, and perhaps the occasional barrel of rum. So, thank you for listening and for helping to keep the story of this turbulent world shaping century alive.