Major General Edward Braddock

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Introduction Major General Edward Braddock was born in 1695 in Perthshire, Scotland. Braddock’s father, also named Major General Edward Braddock, formerly commanded the British during the War of the Spanish Succession. Following in the path of his father, young Braddock was also appointed Major General in 1754, while serving in the British Army. One year later, General Braddock got his first look at North America at the age of sixty. “Short in stature and of ample girth”, arguably too old for the task of expanding King George’s North American borders, General Braddock embarked on his mission to oust the French from the Ohio Country. History In the summer of 1754 Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie had a feeling of panic due to the disarray of Great Britain’s North American Frontier. News spread from the Ohio country that George Washington’s mission to the forks of the Ohio River had ended in a humiliating defeat. On 4 July 1754, Washington surrendered the Fort Necessity, about fifty miles south of Fort Duquesne, to French forces and retreated east to the Potomac. After the loss of Fort Necessity, the French were in control of the Ohio country and even the Iroquois Indians sent messengers to mend relations with them. Prime Minister Thomas Pelham-Holles, the duke of New Castle, stated that “all of North America will be lost” unless the English countered what the French had claimed. Major General Edward Braddock would then be chosen for the task. At the age of sixty, he desperately needed a job and General Braddock “was not one to allow tact to interfere with results”. There were to be four simultaneous attacks on the French frontier. Given the communication and transportation networks of the time, “simult... ... middle of paper ... ...by passing over it. The intention was to keep the Indians from digging up and mutilating the body. One report had the French losses at twenty-eight killed and about the same number wounded, while the Indian losses were eleven killed and twenty-nine wounded. As for the exhausted British the next two days were a new kind of hell. Men too seriously wounded to walk were left for dead as their comrades stumbled down the road without food or water. Once the survivors reunited with the Colonel Dunbar’s troops, the British force still numbered two thousand, with more than thirteen hundred men still able to fight. This would have been a strength great enough to renew the campaign to take Fort Duquesne but Dunbar was demoralized and afraid. Colonel Dunbar ordered the destruction of supplies, mortars and ammunition and marched toward Philadelphia as fast as possible.

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