Painting of the battle – Fort Necessity by Robert Griffing.
Damn the Capitulation
An Incident at Fort Necessity, July 4, 1754
Fort Necessity in south western Pennsylvania, was a hastily constructed fort built by young Colonel George Washington (in Red Coat facing left with back towards you) and his 300 men in an attempt to defend themselves from an approaching army of 600 French marine and Canadian militia and several hundred of their Indian allies. After Washington was implicated in the death of French officer Joseph Coulon de Jumonville a month earlier (the first shots of the French and Indian War), the French relentlessly pursued Washington’s forces until their encounter at the Great Meadows, where Ft. Necessity was erected. On July 3rd, the battle began with the Virginia and British forces suffering extensive casualties and facing very low provisions. Near midnight, Washington accepted surrender terms by the French which allowed them to leave the fort with their colors, arms, and personal possessions.
Terms of surrender were violated when Major Adam Stephen’s servant called to him that his clothes were being looted. He rushed to the offenders, seized his trunk, and kicked the thief in the backsides. Two French officers warned that if, “he struck the men and behaved so, they could not be answerable to the capitulation”. Stephen damned the capitulation and swore that the French had already violated it with their plundering.
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Event Date: July 3, 1754
Makeshift fort constructed by Lieutenant Colonel George Washington of the Virginia Militia at Great Meadows (near modern-day Uniontown, Pennsylvania) during May-June 1754, subsequently surrendered to the French in July 1754. Fort Necessity was the site of a subsequent battle of the French and Indian War (1754-1763) that pitted 500 British colonial militiamen against 600 French Canadians and 100 American Indian allies.
Following the skirmish at Jumonville’s Glen in May 1754, Washington and his small detachment of 46 men regrouped with other units of the Virginia Militia and withdrew toward the colonial frontier. While they awaited reinforcements, the French prepared their own expedition from Fort Duquesne under Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers, who sought to avenge the death of his brother, Joseph Coulon de Villier de Jumonville, who had been killed at Jumonville’s Glen.
As Washington collected his forces after the skirmish, he was anticipating a French attack. Using his limited skills as a 22-year-old surveyor, he selected low, open ground in a meadow and there built a small stockade fort, aptly named Fort Necessity. The palisades were about 50 feet in diameter, encircling a storehouse of about 14 feet square, and the whole was surrounded by a shallow ditch.
This position was apparently intended as a rallying point for reinforcements, though Washington claimed it could withstand attack from 500 men. As troops from Virginia and South Carolina slowly arrived in the first weeks of June, Washington planned another advance to Fort Duquesne.
Leaving an independent company behind, Washington set out with about 300 Virginians on June 16. Unlike the party at Jumon – ville’s Glen, this larger force was also given the assignment of building a road to the west. This would enable more colonial troops to reinforce the area and make it easier to defend Fort Duquesne once it was taken from the French. This movement was a precursor to the 1755 and 1758 campaigns in which British forces under Major General Edward Braddock and Brigadier General John Forbes, respectively, undertook the same project.
By June 28, 1754, Washington’s road stretched roughly 13 miles, past the frontier home of Virginia trader Christopher Gist toward the Ohio Company blockhouse at Red Stone Creek. On that day, Washington learned that several hundred reinforcements had reached Fort Duquesne, and that some 900 to 1200 French and American Indians were approaching. A council of war recalled the scouts and work parties, and, though Washington initially considered a stand at the Gist house, he decided to retire to Fort Necessity. He would dig in there with his whole force of about 450 men.
Throughout Washington’s expedition, he proved a poor logistician, and he paid for this during his retreat. As pack animals died of fatigue and starvation, the Virginians had to move their baggage by hand, and abandon what they could not carry. When they reached Fort Necessity on July 1, the troops were too exhausted for further retreat. Worse still, Washington’s fort failed to inspire confidence either in his own men or in his native allies. It could accommodate only 60-70 men; the remainder had to sleep in the shallow trench beyond the walls.
After two days’ work, the ditch around Fort Necessity was only slightly deeper, and repairs on the storehouse and palisades were incomplete, at best. Washington’s troops suffered a further misfortune on the night of July 2-3, when a heavy rain turned the trenches into a muddy quagmire, ruined the fort’s rudimentary sanitation, and fouled the colonials’ gunpowder. The following morning, a quarter of Washington’s force was sick, and many of the firearms were too wet or dirty for effective use.
Around 11:00 a. m. on July 3, Villiers’s force of 600 French Canadians and 100 American Indians arrived. They initially hit a small battle line and drove it back to the fort. There the colonials regrouped and brought one or two cannon to bear. Nonetheless, they were penned within their waterlogged trenches and incomplete palisades and were thus fully exposed to French fire from the surrounding woods and hills.
While the French and their native allies remained under cover of nearby trees, Washington’s colonials were bogged down by continuing rain. With limited room for movement, increasingly ineffective firearms, and trenches filling with water, Washington’s position gradually decayed during a 10-hour fight.
Over time, discipline crumbled. Eventually some men broke into the rum supply and became intoxicated while others around them were being killed and wounded. Washington was saved only by a relatively lenient French offer for terms of surrender. Though Washington probably could not have known the poor state of French supplies and morale, on July 3 he happily signed the instrument of surrender, part of which was an admission that he had ordered Jumonville’s murder.
Washington and his force were allowed to withdraw, but news traveled back to France and England that Washington was responsible, in effect, for opening hostilities in North America. French diplomats suddenly proved less tractable in negotiations on the North American frontier, and the British ministers began to consider how their forces might be bolstered. Ultimately, Washington’s expeditions in 1754, and their failure at Fort Necessity, set the stage for large-scale British intervention in North America, starting with Braddock’s expedition in 1755.
References Ambler, Charles H. George Washington and the West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936. Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. New York: Knopf, 2000. Baker-Crothers, Hayes, and Ruth Allison Hudnut. “A Private Soldier’s Account of Washington’s First Battles in the West: A Study in Historical Criticism.” Journal of Southern History 8, no. 1 (February 1942): 23-62. Frégault, Guy. Canada: The War of the Conquest. Translated by Margaret M. Cameron. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.
