Braddock's Defeat

Abstract

THERE would be no point in adding another article to the scores which have been written on Braddock's defeat if a recent discovery of new documents in Windsor Castle had not made possible a revaluation of the traditional interpretation. The basic question has always been that one which the historian Chalmers posed to General Gage long after the battle, What was the true military cause of General Braddock's disaster? 1 Colonel David Humphreys, hoping to follow an essay on Putnam with the life of a greater American, tapped Washington's memories for an answer to a similar question.2 Both of these men, participants in the battle, agreed that the British lost because their infantry were panic-stricken, and that the infantry were panic-stricken because they were fighting a novel and invisible enemy in country to which they were unaccustomed. Later historians have emphasized one or another aspect without ever losing sight of that general conclusion. Some have weighed a contemporary explanation, that the vanguard of Braddock's army, falling back on the main body, threw the soldiers into confusion. To others the rawness of Braddock's troops, Irish drafts or American recruits, seems a sounder excuse for their panic. For still others the answer lies in the steadiness of the French regulars, or in the superb fighting qualities of the Indian himself. Military historians hold that Braddock's defeat taught a lesson badly needed for the time: you cannot employ parade ground tactics in the bush. To almost everyone who in one connection or another remembers Braddock this episode stands as a conflict between Old World and New World ways, with the outcome justifying the New. The new material, without denying that the novelty of Indian fighting in an American forest may have been a contributing factor, permits Chalmers's question to be approached primarily as a problem in tactics. It shows that Braddock and his staff, on the day of the battle, neglected to follow fundamental rules of war laid down in European manuals, that they 'messed up' their formations and never gave their soldiers a chance to demonstrate that Old World methods, properly applied, might have won the day. The fault lay in the quality of the leadership, not in the quality of the men. Official reports, the only sound evidence hitherto