Fort Duquesne

The French and Indian War had reached its fifth campaigning season when British arms finally succeeded in expelling French power from the forks of the Ohio River. The operation that achieved this result, known to history as the Forbes Campaign, stands as one of the most methodical and least celebrated triumphs of the eighteenth-century British army. Between June and November 1758 a mixed force of regulars, provincials, and Native auxiliaries cut a new road across the full breadth of Pennsylvania, overcame disease, desertion, difficult terrain, and intermittent enemy raiding, and advanced to within sight of Fort Duquesne before the garrison destroyed the post and withdrew. The event itself lasted only hours and involved no direct assault, yet its consequences were profound: the Ohio Country, the vast pays d’en haut that France had claimed for three generations, passed irrevocably into British control.

The forks of the Ohio had been contested ground since 1753, when the governor of New France dispatched Captain Pierre-Paul Marin with 2,000 Canadians and Indians to drive Virginia traders from the upper Allegheny and to erect a chain of posts culminating at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. The French completed Fort Duquesne in April 1754 on the triangular point subsequently known as the Golden Triangle. Its position commanded the principal water route between Canada and Louisiana and blocked British expansion westward.

Virginia responded first. In 1754 Lieutenant Colonel George Washington, then twenty-two, marched to the forks with a small provincial force, built Fort Necessity in Great Meadow, and on 28 May 1754 opened the war by attacking a French reconnaissance party under Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville. The resulting capitulation of Fort Necessity on 4 July 1754 and the diplomatic uproar over the alleged assassination of Jumonville gave France a propaganda victory and stiffened European resolve against British encroachment.

The British Crown assumed direct responsibility the following year. Major General Edward Braddock arrived in Virginia with two understrength regular regiments and orders to capture Fort Duquesne. On 9 July 1755 his column of 1,400 men was ambushed and virtually destroyed nine miles from the fort by a smaller force of French marines, Canadians, and Indians. Braddock died of wounds, two-thirds of his officers were killed or wounded, and the survivors retreated in disorder to Philadelphia. The Ohio valley remained French, and for three years Indian raiding parties supported from Duquesne devastated the frontiers of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.

By 1758 the strategic balance had shifted decisively. British naval supremacy strangled French transatlantic supply, the Royal Navy and provincial privateers captured Louisbourg in July, and an Anglo-American army under John Forbes and Colonel Henry Bouquet prepared the third and final attempt on Fort Duquesne.

Major General John Forbes assumed command in March 1758. A Lowland Scot, forty-eight years old, Forbes had served at Culloden and Fontenoy and had spent recent years on half-pay battling the illness that would kill him within nine months of the campaign’s end. He never enjoyed robust health during the expedition and directed operations from a horse-litter for much of the summer and autumn.

Forbes’s army was a microcosm of the hybrid imperial force Britain employed in North America. At its maximum strength in August it numbered approximately 7,000 men:

• Regulars
  1st Battalion, 60th Royal American Regiment (approx. 900)
  77th Regiment of Foot (Montgomerie’s Highlanders) (approx. 1,100)
  Detachments of Royal Artillery and independent companies
• Provincial troops
  1st and 2nd Pennsylvania Regiments (1,800)
  1st Virginia Regiment (700) under Lt. Col. George Washington
  2nd Virginia Regiment (600)
  Lower Counties (Delaware) battalion (300)
  Maryland companies (400)
  North Carolina provincials (500) under Major Hugh Waddell
• Native auxiliaries
  Up to 700 Cherokee and Catawba warriors in June–July, dwindling to fewer than 100 by September

Forbes’s second-in-command and effective field commander was Lieutenant Colonel Henry Bouquet, a Swiss professional serving in the Royal Americans. Bouquet’s meticulous administration and engineering skill proved indispensable.

Forbes rejected the route Braddock had followed in 1755. Braddock’s Road ran south-west from Fort Cumberland through western Maryland and entered Pennsylvania only at its western end. Its use would have favoured Virginia contractors and Virginia political influence, but more importantly it traversed narrow defiles that had proved fatal three years earlier. Forbes insisted on a new road driven directly west from Pennsylvania, beginning at Harrisburg, passing through Shippensburg and Carlisle, and striking the Alleghenies at Raystown (Bedford). The decision was politically contentious yet militarily sound: the Pennsylvania route was shorter by nearly 100 miles to the forks and avoided the worst of the Laurel Hill narrows.

Construction began in May 1758 under the supervision of Colonel James Burd and Sir John St Clair, the quarrelsome quartermaster-general. Twelve thousand axes were issued. Trees were felled, corduroy laid across swamps, and bridges thrown over every significant stream. The road was cut twelve feet wide, with a crowned surface and drainage ditches. Depots were fortified at regular intervals: Fort Bedford at Raystown, Fort Ligonier at Loyalhanna, and smaller stockades at Edmund’s Swamp, Quemahoning, and Stony Creek. By November the road stretched 250 miles from Philadelphia to within fifty miles of Fort Duquesne.

Fort Duquesne in 1758 was a substantial but vulnerable work. Its main enclosure was a square of log palisades approximately 150 paces on a side, surrounded by a ditch and fraise. Outworks protected the landward side, and the rivers defended the other two approaches. Thirty-two cannon and swivels were mounted. The garrison under Captain de Lignery rarely exceeded 1,000 Europeans and Canadians, supplemented by 300–600 Native warriors in the spring and early summer.

Supply remained the critical weakness. The Venango trail from Presque Isle was raided repeatedly by Cherokee and provincial scouts. Convoys from Montreal were reduced to a trickle. By October the garrison subsisted on horseflesh and parched corn.

Equally serious was the erosion of Native support. The Ohio Nations (Delaware, Shawnee, Mingo) had allied with France primarily to halt British settlement. When it became evident that France could no longer protect them, many warriors began to negotiate with the British. Christian Frederick Post, a Moravian missionary, and Pisquetomen, a Delaware headman, carried messages between the Forbes army and the eastern Delaware towns in July and August. At the Treaty of Easton in October 1758 Pennsylvania and the Six Nations agreed to prohibit settlement west of the Alleghenies in exchange for Delaware neutrality. Though the agreement was ambiguous and would be ignored after the war, it neutralised most Native opposition for the remainder of the campaign.

Advance parties reached Raystown in June. The main body concentrated there by mid-July. Forbes established a major hospital and magazine and pushed road construction westward. Sickness ravaged the command; at one point in August more than 2,000 men were unfit for duty.

On 14 September Major James Grant led 850 Highlanders and provincials on an ambitious reconnaissance toward Fort Duquesne. Grant intended to lure the garrison into the open, but his force was surprised before dawn on the heights east of the fort (subsequently Grant’s Hill). In a running fight that lasted most of the morning the French and Indians inflicted 342 casualties, including eight officers killed and Grant himself captured. The defeat delayed the advance by weeks and confirmed the danger of operating beyond supporting distance of the road.

Forbes responded by strengthening the forward depot at Loyalhanna, fifty miles from the forks, and naming it Fort Ligonier. Bouquet occupied it in early October with 2,000 men. From this base light parties scouted the final approaches and intercepted French supply canoes on the Allegheny.

By early November intelligence confirmed the desperate condition inside Duquesne. Deserters reported fewer than 500 effectives and almost no powder. Forbes, now critically ill, resolved on a final push despite the onset of winter. Between 13 and 23 November the army advanced in three columns through snow and freezing rain, abandoning heavy baggage and slaughtering draught animals for food. Hundreds fell out from exposure.

On 24 November Bouquet’s vanguard reached Turtle Creek, twelve miles from the forks. Patrols reported fires visible on the horizon and the sound of explosions. Lignery had decided that further defence was impossible. That evening he evacuated the garrison by boat up the Allegheny toward Venango, taking with him the artillery, remaining stores, and the military chest. Before departing the French fired the barracks, magazines, and palisades. Successive explosions of the powder stores levelled most of the interior works.

At first light on Saturday, 25 November 1758 a detachment of the 1st Virginia Regiment under Colonel George Washington entered the smoking ruins. Only the brick bake-ovens and portions of the river bastions remained intact. A few drunken marines who had failed to embark lay dead within the lines, scalped by departing Native allies. The British flag was raised over the ashes.

Forbes, carried forward in his litter, arrived on 27 November. He spent two hours inspecting the site and formally renamed it Fort Pitt in honour of the Secretary of State, William Pitt. Construction of a new fort began immediately under Bouquet’s direction. By spring 1759 a substantial five-bastioned work of earth and brick, mounting thirty-two cannon, dominated the Point.

The French withdrawal from the Ohio valley was permanent. Lignery’s detachment wintered at Venango and was recalled to Detroit the following year. No serious attempt was made to reoccupy the forks. The fall of Quebec in 1759 and the capitulation of Montreal in 1760 merely confirmed a decision already taken in the ashes of Fort Duquesne.

The political consequences were immediate. Virginia issued 200,000 acres of bounty land west of the mountains to officers and men of the 1754–58 campaigns, grants that Washington and other speculators rapidly consolidated. Pennsylvania merchants poured goods into the vacuum left by French traders. Within a decade the Ohio valley was receiving thousands of settlers annually along the very road Forbes had cut.

Native nations recognised the changed balance. Pontiac’s War in 1763 was in large measure a desperate attempt to reverse the consequences of 1758. It failed. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, which sought to restrict settlement west of the mountains, was unenforceable precisely because Fort Pitt and the Forbes Road had already made the interior accessible.

The campaign cost Britain more than £200,000 and the lives of at least 1,100 soldiers and provincials, the majority from disease. French losses in the Ohio Country between 1754 and 1758 are harder to calculate but certainly exceeded 1,500 killed, wounded, or captured, in addition to the decisive loss of Native alliance.

Thus on a cold, wet Sunday morning in November 1758 the centre of gravity in North America shifted. The event attracted little contemporary notice in Europe, overshadowed by the more spectacular victories at Louisbourg and Quebec. Yet no operation of the Seven Years’ War did more to determine the ultimate extent of the English-speaking settlements on the continent. The destruction of Fort Duquesne and the construction of Fort Pitt marked the moment when the interior valley of North America ceased to be a French sphere and became, irreversibly, part of an expanding British Atlantic world.

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Chicago-Style Bibliography (Notes and Bibliography System)

1. Forbes, John. The Writings of General John Forbes Relating to His Service in North America. Edited by Alfred Procter James. Menasha, WI: Collegiate Press, 1938.
2. Washington, George. The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series. Vol. 6, September 1758 – December 1760. Edited by W. W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988.
3. Bouquet, Henry. The Papers of Henry Bouquet. Vol. 2, The Forbes Expedition. Edited by S. K. Stevens, Donald H. Kent, and Autumn L. Leonard. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1951.
4. Pouchot, Pierre. Memoir upon the Late War in North America, between the French and English, 1755–60. Vol. 2. Translated and edited by Franklin B. Hough. Roxbury, MA: W. Elliot Woodward, 1866.
5. Sargent, Winthrop, ed. The History of an Expedition against Fort Duquesne in 1755 under Major-General Edward Braddock. Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. 5. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1855. (Contains Grant’s defeat correspondence relevant to 1758 context.)
6. Pennsylvania Archives. Series 1, vol. 3. Edited by Samuel Hazard. Philadelphia: Joseph Severns & Co., 1852. (Includes Christian Frederick Post’s journals and the Treaty of Easton proceedings.)

7. Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. (Chapters 26–28 provide the most authoritative modern narrative of the Forbes campaign.)
8. Jennings, Francis. Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.
9. McConnell, Michael N. A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.
10. Ward, Matthew C. Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in the Pennsylvania and Virginia Frontier, 1754–1765. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003.
11. Cubbison, Douglas R. The British Defeat of the French in Pennsylvania, 1758: A Military History of the Forbes Campaign against Fort Duquesne. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010. (The most detailed modern military study of the campaign.)
12. Hunter, William A. Forts on the Pennsylvania Frontier, 1753–1758. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1960. (Remains the standard reference for Fort Duquesne’s physical description and garrison strength.)
13. Stotz, Charles B. Outposts of the War for Empire: The French and English in Western Pennsylvania: Their Armies, Their Forts, Their People, 1749–1764. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985 (reprint 2005). (Authoritative on the archaeology and layout of both Fort Duquesne and the subsequent Fort Pitt.)
14. Gipson, Lawrence Henry. The British Empire before the American Revolution. Vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.