Battle of the Monongahela

On July 9, 1755, near the outset of the French and Indian War, arms clashed at Braddock's Field, the ground now occupied by Braddock, Pennsylvania, some 10 miles (16 km) east of Pittsburgh. This engagement is remembered under several names, among them the Battle of the Monongahela, the Battle of Braddock's Field, and the Battle of the Wilderness. There, a British column commanded by General Edward Braddock, advancing with the aim of seizing Fort Duquesne, met defeat at the hands of French and Canadian soldiers led by Captain Daniel Liénard de Beaujeu, who fought alongside their American Indian allies.

This setback brought the Braddock Expedition to a close, dashing British hopes of capturing Fort Duquesne and thereby securing dominance over the strategically vital Ohio Country. Both commanding officers perished in the fighting: Beaujeu fell during the engagement, while Braddock suffered a mortal wound and succumbed to it as his forces withdrew, dying near what is now Uniontown, Pennsylvania. In his final requests, Braddock asked that George Washington, who had joined him on the campaign, take charge of arranging his burial. What remained of the British force then pulled back toward the southeast. French control over Fort Duquesne and the territory surrounding it persisted until the position finally fell in 1758.

Debate

Almost as soon as the guns fell silent, people started asking how a force like Braddock's, well trained, larger in number, and backed by cannon, could have come apart so completely. That argument has never really settled. Blame fell variously on Braddock himself, on the officers beneath him, and on the regular and provincial soldiers they commanded. Washington took Braddock's side in this dispute, pointing instead to shortcomings among the regulars.

Braddock's methods on the battlefield remain a point of contention among historians. According to one line of thinking, his adherence to conventional European formations, lines of men packed tightly together in open ground, discharging volleys on command, simply did not suit warfare on the frontier, and this choice doomed him. By contrast, the loose, individual, cover based fighting that colonists had picked up from frontier conflict ("Indian style") suited American conditions far better, or so this argument goes.

Other scholars push back hard against that reading, calling the notion of "Indian style" superiority something of a myth. They point out that European standing armies already fielded irregular units of their own and had well developed thinking on both waging and countering guerrilla warfare. Stephen Brumwell takes the opposite position, noting that figures close to Braddock's own era, including John Forbes and Henry Bouquet, understood that fighting amid American forests bore little resemblance to fighting in Europe.

Peter Russell offers yet another angle, arguing that Braddock lost not because he clung to European convention but because he abandoned it when it mattered. He notes that the British Army had already faced irregular opponents during the Jacobite uprisings, and that by the 1740s, Eastern European irregular fighters such as Pandurs and hussars had already reshaped both practice and theory in European warfare. Under this view, Braddock's undoing came from applying established military doctrine poorly, especially his neglect of distance, rather than from any failure to adopt frontier style tactics. Russell's research further points out that Braddock, before the fateful engagement, had repeatedly used standard European tactics to fend off ambushes with success, making him, by that point, almost impervious to previous French and Canadian assaults.