Braddock, Edward

BRADDOCK, EDWARD. (c. 1695–1755). British general. Edward Braddock, son of an officer of the same name, was baptised in London on 2 February 1695. In October 1710 he became an ensign in his father's regiment, the Coldstream Guards, and then rose slowly by the purchase of higher rank. By 1745 he was a lieutenant colonel, but almost certainly did not see action during the war of the Austrian Succession. In 1753 he became colonel of the Fourteenth Foot and was a popular acting governor of Gibraltar in 1753 and 1754. In April he was made major general. This was the man—solid, aging, inexperienced in action—who in the autumn was ordered to take two weak regiments to roll back the French in North America.

Braddock's tasks were to get the colonies to organize their own armed forces, co-ordinate a three-pronged offensive against recent French advances, and lead the thrust against Fort Duquesne himself. He arrived with the Forty-fourth and Forty-eighth Foot in Hampton, Virginia, on 20 February 1755 and immediately ran into difficulties. The colonies resisted cooperation, and he found it difficult to get provisions, transportation, and recruits for his own expedition. He attempted to recruit hundreds of Cherokees, only for Governor James Glen of South Carolina to step in and induce the warriors to stay at home. When Braddock's force finally assembled, it amounted to no more than 2,000 effective troops, many of them of indifferent quality. The army finally marched on 10 June, hacking its own road through the wilderness, but Braddock rapidly became alarmed at their slow progress. On 16 June he left about a third of his force under Thomas Dunbar, colonel of the Forty-eighth Foot, to follow with the baggage while Braddock himself pushed ahead with the main body.

Braddock's precautions against surprise were effective: the enemy was unable to harass his advance and decided not to attack him as he crossed the Monongahela River. The next day, however, a fateful slip in vigilance left a key hillock and adjacent ravines unsecured. While a French frontal attack was repulsed, hundreds of Indians were able to stream down both flanks and pour deadly fire into the British column. The lack of light infantry training told as Braddock's orders to reform and advance against the foe in the woods were ignored. After three hours of vainly trying to stem the tide, Braddock was shot in the chest and the army fell back in disarray. On 13 July at Great Meadows, some sixty miles back, Braddock died.

The battle stimulated the development of new light infantry tactics for forest conditions which had a permanent, if uneven, effect on training of the British army. Braddock himself was awarded an undeserved share of the blame, and was caricatured as the archetypal, arrogant British martinet who refused to listen to American advice and had no idea of how to fight under American conditions. This travesty of the truth became widespread in America and had long-term effects upon the relations between colonists and the regular British army.

SEE ALSO Forbes's Expedition to Fort Duquesne.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Fred. The Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Albert A. Knopf, 2000.

Brumwell, Stephen. Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Kopperman, Paul E. Braddock at the Monongahela. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977.

Ward, Matthew C. Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years' War in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003.

                                    revised by John Oliphant