About this time, Col. Fry died at Wills's Creek, where he had lain ill of a fever for several weeks; and Washington, as the next in rank, was obliged to take command of the regiment. Although this change brought with it an increase of pay and honors, yet it caused him the sincerest regret; for even then, young as he was, he had the good of his country more earnestly at heart than his own private advantage. He said, and with unfeigned modesty, that he feared he was scarcely equal to the discharge of such high and responsible duties, without the aid and counsel of some older and more experienced officer.

Capt. de Villiers was now commander of the French at Fort Duquesne. When tidings of the late encounter reached this officer through the swift-footed Canadian, he swore a deep oath that he would chastise the audacious young Virginian for what he chose to call this barbarous outrage, and avenge the death of De Jumonville, whose brother-in-law, as ill luck would have it, he chanced to be. Foreseeing his danger, and to defend himself against the superior force he knew would be brought against him, Col. Washington set about forthwith to strengthen his works. He dug the ditches deeper, raised the breastworks higher, and surrounded the whole with a row of palisades, firmly planted in the ground, and set so close together as scarcely to allow of a gun-barrel passing between them.

Owing to the shameful neglect of those whose duty it was to send up supplies, he and his men suffered much from the want of food,—many days at a stretch sometimes passing by without their tasting bread. To aggravate this new distress, the Half King and many of his warriors, with their wives and children, now sought refuge in the fort from the vengeance of the French and their savage allies; which added nothing to their strength, and only increased the number of hungry mouths to be fed. To this place, then, where gaunt famine pinched them from within and watchful enemies beset them from without, Washington gave the fitting name of Fort Necessity. Luckily for them, while in this pitiable plight, days and days passed by, and still no avenging De Villiers showed himself, though alarms were frequent.

Col. Washington now ordered Major Muse to bring up the rest of the troops that had been waiting all this while at Wills's Creek, with the heavy stores and cannon. To reward the friendly Indians for their services and fidelity, Major Muse brought with him presents of hatchets and knives, guns, powder and lead, tin cups, needles and pins, beads, and dry-goods of every gaudy hue, and it may be, although we can only guess it, a ruffled shirt or two. In addition to these, there came a number of silver medals for the chief sachems, sent by Gov. Dinwiddie at the suggestion of Col. Washington, who well knew how much these simple people prize little compliments of this kind. Major Muse handed out the presents, while Washington hung the medals about the necks of the sachems, which yielded them far more delight, you will be sorry to hear, than their good old missionary's catechism. This was done with all that show and parade so dear to an Indian's heart; and, to give a still finer edge to the present occasion, they christened each other all over again: that is to say, the red men gave the white men Indian names, and the white men gave the red men English names. Thus, for example, Washington gave the Half King the name of Dinwiddie, which pleased him greatly; while he, in his turn, bestowed on his young white brother a long, high-sounding Indian name, that you could pronounce as readily spelt backwards as forwards. Fairfax was the name given a young sachem, the son of Queen Aliquippa, whose eternal friendship to the English, it must be borne in mind, had been secured by Washington, the previous winter, by the present of an old coat and a bottle of rum.

By the advice of his old and much-esteemed friend, Col. William Fairfax, Washington had divine worship in the fort daily, in which he led; and, thanks to the early teachings of his pious mother, he could do this, and sin not. Solemn indeed, my dear children, and beautiful to behold, must have been that picture,—that little fort, so far away in the heart of the lonely wilderness, with its motley throng of painted Indians and leather-clad backwoodsmen gathered round their young commander, as, morning and evening, he kneeled in prayer before the Giver of all good, beseeching aid and protection, and giving thanks.

As if to put his manhood and patience to a still severer test, there came to the fort about this time an independent company of one hundred North Carolinians, headed by one Capt. Mackay, who refused to serve under him as his superior officer. As his reason for this conduct, Mackay argued that he held a royal commission (that is to say, had been made a captain by the King of England), which made him equal in rank, if not superior, to Washington, who held only a provincial commission, or had been made a colonel by the Governor of Virginia. This, in part, was but too true; and it had been a source of dissatisfaction to Washington, that the rank and services of colonial officers should be held at a cheaper rate than the same were valued at in the royal army. It wounded his honest, manly pride, and offended his high sense of justice; and he had already resolved in his own mind to quit such inglorious service, as soon as he could do so without injury to the present campaign, or loss of honor to himself. To most men, the lofty airs and pretensions of Capt. Mackay and his Independents would have been unbearable; but he kept his temper unruffled, and, with a prudence beyond his years, forbore to do or say any thing that would lead to an angry outbreak between them; and as they chose to encamp outside the fort, and have separate guards, he deemed it wisest not to trouble himself about them, only so far as might concern their common safety.

Days, and even weeks, had now passed away, and still no enemy had come to offer him battle. His men were becoming restless from inaction; and the example of the troublesome Independents had already begun to stir up discontent among them, which threatened, if not checked in season, to end in downright insubordination. As the surest remedy for these evils, Washington resolved to push forward with the road in the direction of Fort Duquesne, and carry the war into the enemy's own country. Requesting Capt. Mackay to guard the fort during his absence, he set out with his entire force of three hundred men, and again began the toilsome work of cutting a road through the wilderness. The difficulties they had now to overcome were even greater than those which beset them at the outset of their pioneering. The mountains were higher, the swamps deeper, the rocks more massive, the trees taller and more numerous, the torrents more rapid, the days more hot and sultry, and the men and horses more enfeebled by poor and scanty food. You will not wonder, then, that they were nearly two weeks in reaching Mr. Gist's plantation on the Monongahela, a distance of but fifteen miles.

But hardly had they pitched their tents, and thrown themselves on the grass to snatch a little rest, when there came the disheartening intelligence, brought in by their Indian spies, that Capt. de Villiers had been seen to sally from Fort Duquesne but a few hours before, at the head of a force of five hundred French and four hundred Indians, and must by that time be within a few miles of the Virginia camp. For three hundred weary and hungry men to wait and give battle to a force three times their number, fresh and well fed, was a thing too absurd to be thought of for a single moment. Washington, therefore, as their only chance of safety, ordered a hasty retreat, hoping that they might be able to reach the settlements on Wills's Creek before the enemy could overtake him. The retreat, however, was any thing but a hasty one; for the poor half-famished horses were at last no longer able to drag the heavy cannon and carry the heavy baggage. Moved with pity for the lean and tottering beasts, Washington dismounted from his fine charger, and gave him for a pack-horse; which humane example was promptly followed by his officers. Yet even this was not enough: so, while some of the jaded men loaded their backs with the baggage, the rest, as jaded, dragged the artillery along the stony roads with ropes, rather than that it should be left behind to fall into the hands of the enemy. For this good service, rendered so willingly in that hour of sore distress, they went not unrewarded by their generous young commander.

Capt. Mackay and his company of Independents had, at Washington's request, come up a little while before, and now joined in the retreat. But they joined in nothing else; for, pluming themselves upon their greater respectability as soldiers of his Britannic majesty, they lent not a helping hand in this hour of pressing need, although the danger that lurked behind threatened all alike. They marched along, these coxcombs, daintily picking their way over the smoothest roads, and too genteel to be burdened with any thing but their clean muskets and tidy knapsacks. This ill-timed and insolent behavior served only to aggravate the trials of the other poor fellows all the more; and when, at last, they had managed to drag the cannon and the wagons and themselves to Fort Necessity, they were so overcome with fatigue and hunger, and so moved with indignation at the conduct of the Independents, that they threw down their ropes and packs, and flatly refused to be marched further. Seeing their pitiful plight, and that it would be impossible to reach the settlements, Col. Washington, as their last chance of safety, turned aside, and once more took shelter in his little fort.

As Capt. Mackay and his company of gentlemen fighters had done nothing towards strengthening the works during his absence, Washington ordered a few trees to be felled in the woods hard by, as a still further barrier to the approach of the enemy. Just as the last tree went crashing down, the French and their Indian allies, nine hundred strong, came in sight, and opened a scattering fire upon the fort, but from so great a distance as made it little more than an idle waste of powder and lead. Suspecting this to be but a feint of the crafty foe to decoy them into an ambuscade, Washington ordered his men to keep within the shelter of the fort, there to lie close, and only to shoot when they could plainly see where their bullets were to be sent.

A light skirmishing was kept up all day, and until a late hour in the night; the Indians keeping the while within the shelter of the woods, which at no point came within sixty yards of the palisades. Whenever an Indian scalp-lock or a French cap showed itself from among the trees or bushes, it that instant became the mark of a dozen sharpshooters watching at the rifle-holes of the fort. All that day, and all the night too, the rain poured down from one black cloud, as only a summer ruin can pour, till the ditches were filled with water, and the breastworks nothing but a bank of miry clay; till the men were drenched to the skin, and the guns of many so dampened as to be unfit for use.

About nine o'clock that night, the firing ceased; and shortly after a voice was heard, a little distance beyond the palisades, calling upon the garrison, in the name of Capt. de Villiers, to surrender. Suspecting this to be but a pretext for getting a spy into the fort, Col. Washington refused to admit the bearer of the summons. Capt. de Villiers then requested that an officer be sent to his quarters to parley; giving his word of honor that no mischief should befall him, or unfair advantage be taken of it. Whereupon, Capt. Van Braam, the old Dutch fencing-master, being the only French interpreter conveniently at hand, was employed to go and bring in the terms of surrender. He soon came back; but the terms were too dishonorable for any true soldier to think of accepting. He was sent again, but with no better result. The third time, Capt. de Villiers sent written articles of capitulation; which, being in his own language, must needs be first translated before an answer could be returned. By the flickering light of one poor candle, which could hardly be kept burning for the pouring rain, the Dutch captain read the terms he had brought, while the rest stood round him, gathering what sense they could from the confused jumbling of bad French, and worse English he was pleased to call a translation. After this, there followed a little more parleying between the hostile leaders; when it was at last settled that the prisoners taken in the Jumonville affair should be set at liberty; that the English should build no forts upon the disputed territories within a twelvemonth to come; and that the garrison, after destroying the artillery and military stores, should be allowed to march out with all the honors of war, and pursue their way to the settlements, unmolested either by the French or their Indian allies. When we take into account the more than double strength of the enemy, the starving condition of the garrison (still further weakened as it was by the loss of twelve men killed and forty-three wounded), and the slender hope of speedy succor from the settlements, these terms must be regarded as highly honorable to Col. Washington; and still more so when we add to this the fact, that the Half King and his other Indian allies had deserted him at the first approach of danger, under the pretext of finding some safer retreat for their wives and children. Whether they failed from choice, or hinderance to return, and take part in the action, can never now be known with certainty.

Thus the dreary night wore away; and, when the dreary morning dawned, they destroyed the artillery and the military stores, preparatory to their setting forth on their retreat. As all the horses had been killed or lost the day before, they had no means of removing their heavy baggage: they therefore secured it as best they might, hoping to be able to send back for it from the settlements. Still in possession of their small-arms, they then marched out of the fort with all the honors of war,—fifes playing, drums beating, and colors flying. They had gone but a few yards from the fort, when a large body of Indians pounced with plundering hands upon the baggage. Seeing that the French could not or would not keep them back, Washington, to disappoint them of their booty, ordered his men to set fire to it, and destroy all they could not bring away upon their backs.

This done, they once more took up their line of march; and a melancholy march it was. Between them and the nearest settlements, there lay seventy miles of steep and rugged mountain-roads, over which they must drag their weary and aching limbs before they could hope to find a little rest. Washington did all that a kind and thoughtful commander could to keep up the flagging spirits of his men; sharing with them their every toil and privation, and all the while maintaining a firm and cheerful demeanor. Reaching Wills's Creek, he there left them to enjoy the full abundance which they found awaiting them at that place; and, in company with Capt. Mackay, repaired at once to Williamsburg to report the result of the campaign to Gov. Dinwiddie.

A short time after, the terms of surrender were laid before the Virginia House of Burgesses, and received the entire approval of that wise body; who, although the expedition had ended in defeat and failure, most cheerfully gave Col. Washington and his men a vote of thanks, in testimony of their having done their whole duty as good and brave and faithful soldiers.