His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis

arrival in America: And to express the deep Sense We have of his Majesty’s Wisdom and paternal Care for his Colonies in Sending your Lordship to their Protection at this critical Juncture.” He concluded his letter with a special plea based on the loyalty to Britain’s goals embodied in the Virginia Regiment, “as it in a more especial Manner entitles Us to Your Lordship’s Patronage.” 52
    Lord Loudoun represented the privileged and presumptive aristocratic culture that beckoned to Washington as the epitome of influence. In the Virginia Regiment, on the other hand, officers and rangers were promoted on the basis of their performance, and Washington often resisted efforts by Fairfax to have unqualified friends given commissions. But Britain, and to a great extent Virginia as well, still operated within a social matrix where power flowed within bloodlines and where coats-of-arms trumped merit. Loudoun would have been hard-pressed to distinguish the Alleghenies from the Alps, but by a combination of royal whim and family fortune he controlled British policy and therefore the fate of the Virginia Regiment and its commander. Washington’s attempt to solicit his attention and support for a regular commission was almost comical in its fumbling effort to affect the proper deferential style:
Although I have not the Honour to be known to Your Lordship: Yet your Lordship’s Name was familiar to my Ear, on account of the Important Services performed to His Majesty in other parts of the World—don’t think My Lord I am going to flatter. I have exalted Sentiments of your Lordship’s Character, and revere your Rank; yet, mean not this (could I believe it acceptable). My nature is honest, and Free from Guile. 53
    Loudoun not only ignored the request, but even decided temporarily to disband the Virginia Regiment in order to send several companies to fight in South Carolina. Still determined to make an impression, Washington named one of his forts after Loudoun, which then proved a lingering embarrassment when Loudoun’s failure to mount a successful campaign against Cape Breton caused London to recall and replace him. It seems safe to conclude that Washington understood the rules of the aristocratic game, felt obliged to play by its rules to further his career, but often came off as the provincial American incapable of mastering the deferential vocabulary.
    For the truth was that he had come to feel superior to his superiors, just as he had come to regard his Virginia Regiment as perhaps the finest fighting unit in North America. He and his “blues” had learned the hard way how to fight this kind of war and what it would take to win it. Ultimately, the strategic key remained that fountainhead of French power at the forks of the Ohio. But another Braddock-style campaign would surely end up in the same heap of blood and sorrow. Washington believed that he, more than anyone else, knew how to mount a successful campaign against Fort Duquesne, and he expressed only disdain for the various schemes British officers proposed. When he received one such proposal in March 1758, he apprised his purported superior that the plan was “absurd,” and “A Romantick whim that may subsist in Theory, but must fail in practice.” He ended on a sarcastic note, speculating that perhaps the tactical genius who dreamed up the plan “intended to provide them first with Wings, to facilitate their Passage over so Mountainous & extensive a Country; else whence comes this flight?” 54
    Nevertheless, something big was obviously brewing, something designed to move the Virginia frontier off the back burner of British strategy and make the Ohio Country a major theater of operations once again. In April 1758, Washington learned that General John Forbes, a Scotsman with more than thirty years of experience in the British army, had been given the mission of capturing Fort Duquesne with a force over twice the size Braddock had commanded three years earlier.