Young George Washington’s War Journals

Two decades before achieving heroic status as a General during the American Revolution, George Washington first earned renown as a young Major and later as a Colonel serving in the British Army. In his early 20s, Washington achieved fame (and no small measure of infamy) after two of his personal journals were printed and widely published across the British and French Empires. In these journals, Washington detailed his first two expeditions from Virginia into the disputed Ohio territory, where his encounters with French forces had a profound influence on the start of the French and Indian War.

At the age of 21, Washington volunteered to lead six men on a mission across the Alleghany Mountains to scout out French military positions and to hand deliver a letter from the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, demanding that the French abandon their forts and depart from lands claimed by the British Crown. Although inexperienced, Major Washington was ambitious and physically robust enough for the 500-mile journey across the snowy, mountainous terrain of the Western wilderness. 

In the daily journal Washington kept during the expedition, he recounted the many obstacles and complications that this expedition encountered: it rained or snowed nearly every day for a month and a half, their horses became so exhausted that the men had to dismount and carry their packs on foot, they got ambushed and shot at by French allies in the woods, and Washington fell into the frigid waters of the icy Alleghany River. Major Washington’s journal also noted that when he finally met French officers, they drank so much wine that they admitted their plans “to take possession of the Ohio” and even revealed the locations of their forts. 

When Washington returned to Williamsburg on January 16^th, 1754, Gov. Dinwiddie asked Washington to spend that night preparing his personal journal of the expedition into a report for the full government of Virginia. The young Major had no idea that his personal journal would be distributed up and down the American Colonies and reprinted as a pamphlet in London. The Library’s copy is indeed one of those printed in the capitol of the British Empire.

The Journal of Major George Washington‘s account of the French expansion into the Ohio region convinced the Board of Trade in London to defend British claims by establishing a fort at the forks of the Ohio (present day Pittsburgh). When Gov. Dinwiddie needed an officer to lead 200 soldiers across the Alleghenies to build this fort and to expel the French forces, Washington again volunteered and was appointed Lieutenant Colonel to lead this mission during the spring and summer of 1754.

As with his first expedition, Washington kept a regular journal of his activities and experiences. In this journal, he recounted a skirmish that took place when his troops discovered a group of French soldiers eating breakfast. One of these French soldiers, Jumonville, was on a diplomatic mission to deliver a letter to the British and was wounded in the skirmish. A Native American chief allied with the British took a hatchet to Jumonville’s skull. A massacre of other wounded French soldiers ensued.

When Washington’s forces were later defeated at Fort Necessity, Washington signed a document of surrender that admitted to the “assassination” of Jumonville. Assassinating a diplomat is an act of war. In short, Washington provided the French with justification for initiating the French and Indian War (the American theater of the global Seven Years War). 

Embarrassingly, Colonel Washington accidentally left his journal behind when he evacuated Fort Necessity, and the French found it. Washington’s journal was sent to Paris, translated into French, and published by the Royal Press of France in 1756 as part of the larger collection titled Memoire Contenant le Precis Des Faits Avec leurs Pieces Justificatives, or A Memorandum Containing a Summary of the Facts With their Supporting Documents.

One of the Library’s three copies of this book must originally have been owned by someone close to the French royal family — the leather binding bears the gilt seal of the House of Bourbon (three fleur-de-lis encircled with a chain).

So, the next time you squirm about what you may have written in your own adolescent journals, be grateful that they haven’t been published in multiple countries or used to instigate a global conflict. Yet. 

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