FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY
The ignominious defeat of British Maj. Gen. Edward Braddock’s forces at the Battle of the Monongahela on July 9, 1755, had not only long-term repercussions on the course of the French and Indian War and the conduct of warfare in general, but also more immediate consequences. As conceived in an earlier meeting between Braddock and colonial governors in Alexandria, Va., the British would mount four campaigns against New France in 1755. Braddock’s main thrust had clearly failed, resulting in the deaths of nearly 500 men, including the general himself. Lt. Col. Robert Monckton’s early June siege of Fort Beauséjour, in Acadia (present-day New Brunswick), had succeeded. But a campaign against Fort Niagara, on Lake Ontario, led by Massachusetts Governor William Shirley, Braddock’s second-in-command, was delayed by logistical shortfalls, then cancelled altogether on news of Braddock’s death.
The last of the four campaigns, a colonial effort against Fort Saint-Frédéric, on Lake Champlain, was led by 40-year-old Sir William Johnson, New York’s appointed Iroquois agent, whom Braddock had commissioned as a major general. Thus a man with little military experience found himself at the head of an army of 3,500 colonial militiamen and upward of 250 Mohawk warriors. By mid-July, despite manpower issues and a persistent shortage of supplies, advance troops under Maj. Gen. Phineas Lyman had marched from Albany up the Hudson River to the point below a series of waterfalls where all navigation ceased, even for canoes and rafts. There, at a portage known as the Great Carrying Place, Capt. William Eyre of the Royal Engineers—the only British regular serving in the expedition—started work on a post he named Fort Lyman. Arriving soon after, Johnson diplomatically renamed the garrison Fort Edward, in honor of the prince, a grandson of King George II and younger brother of future King
