Not
an English flag now waved beyond the Alleghanies.[160]
[Footnote 160: See Appendix C.]
Chapter 6
1754, 1755
The Signal of Battle
The defeat of Washington was a heavy blow to the Governor, and he
angrily ascribed it to the delay of the expected reinforcements. The
King's companies from New York had reached Alexandria, and crawled
towards the scene of action with thin ranks, bad discipline, thirty
women and children, no tents, no blankets, no knapsacks, and for
munitions one barrel of spoiled gunpowder.[161] The case was still worse
with the regiment from North Carolina. It was commanded by Colonel
Innes, a countryman and friend of Dinwiddie, who wrote to him: "Dear
James, I now wish that we had none from your colony but yourself, for I
foresee nothing but confusion among them." The men were, in fact,
utterly unmanageable. They had been promised three shillings a day,
while the Virginians had only eightpence; and when they heard on the
march that their pay was to be reduced, they mutinied, disbanded, and
went home.
[Footnote 161: _Dinwiddie to the Lords of Trade, 24 July, 1754. Ibid. to
Delancey, 20 June, 1754._]
"You may easily guess," says Dinwiddie to a London correspondent, "the
great fatigue and trouble I have had, which is more than I ever went
through in my life." He rested his hopes on the session of his Assembly,
which was to take place in August; for he thought that the late disaster
would move them to give him money for defending the colony.
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