Chainsaw History - Part One: Young George Washington Helped Kick Off A World War

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

Siblings Jamie & Bambi Chambers talk about how ambitious fancy-boy George Washington failed his way upward and helped start the first global war in world history. Learn more and support our podcast over on Patreon!

I don't even know how she can cope with that like how do you get shingles in your eye and I was like and you win yeah that's one of the most horrific things I can think of outside of genitalia. Shingles on the junk is even worse than the eye. Anything on the junk seems to be the ultimate. Well speaking of shingles on the junk that has nothing to do with what we're going to talk about today. Surprisingly more diseases than you might expect. I'm Jamie Chambers this is my sister Bambi. Hello. This started because I fell down a rabbit hole of genealogy after I got an ancestry.com DNA kit as a Christmas gift this is not an endorsement I'm not being paid to talk about them it just is a thing that's true but when I started

got the DNA results then I started doing some family tree business ended up subscribing to some paid services just so I can do the research and then I started looking at history because I was going to be a college history professor once upon a time like that was. How did that work out. I changed my major twice minored in history and then never did anything with it ever again. So call it. I'm really glad I'm facing crippling student. How's that student loan. Not paid off yet. So who knows what this is actually going to be called but I can tell you that's the main thing to know is I am not a historian. I only minored in history but I am kind of a fan and nerd about history and so like one of

the things I think I'm good at is is taking history making it relatable to more people who aren't as into it as I am telling it in terms that you can kind of get on board with and start to understand and however I'm probably like if we put this online I'm probably going to classify it as comedy because I intend to swear a lot and reference drugs and speakable behavior. No one can ever make me stop squaring. It's it's really terrible. Old people and small children just hate me. Yeah. No. Your little kid should not listen to this fucking podcast. No. Little kids I'm to the point where if you don't like swearing around your child please don't bring your child around me. I'm just no longer give any fucks. We

will offend you. So maybe what we're going to be doing today is I'm going to be giving you a hopefully not incredibly boring nerdy history lecture but it's going to be related to something in our family tree. So we're going to start there with a family connection and luckily this is going back many generations so we can't humiliate anyone currently alive which is you know it's good and also sort of and this is actually like this story is one of the things that gave me the idea of doing this show at least the thing we're going to intro with and then it's going to lead us into a larger historical topic that I don't think enough Americans talk enough about or know enough about really. So you

ready to do this. I was about to say that could literally be anything. So what would be that's so vague. What would be your fictional time travel machine that we need to use to jump back to 18th century colonial America. So well this is going to be full historical but I was just thinking like do we want to take like H.G. Wells's time machine or the TARDIS. Oh no no no I need Mr. Peabody's way back machine. Okay. Excellent. That's that's where I am. I if we're getting in a time machine I'm getting in with the dog. Excellent. So we're going to the driver. So we're going to Jack Mr. Peabody's and we're going to take it back a first to the year 1756 before we jump back a few extra years before that.

So it was Saturday February 10th 1756 a 12 year old boy named David Boyd was sent by his mother to gather dry firewood while the father of the family was visiting their nearest neighbor who was over a mile away. This was central Pennsylvania in the mid 1700s when these were like settler families that did not have a lot of neighbors. They were just trying to carve out. They didn't have a lot of anything. Yeah. Period. So these settlers were strict Presbyterians and it was kind of their habit to get all the important work done by the end of the day because Sunday is meant to be purely rest and worship. Grabbing his hatchet young David took his little brother John Jr. who was six years old along to gather

the firewood. That's when a band of Native Americans from the Delaware tribe according to the sources surprised the boys and took them captive without much struggle. Okay. John Boyd Sr. the father was missed walking through the woods but the rest of the family was gathered together. The mother Nancy was not in great health and it could be that she just hadn't recovered yet from childbirth. Well yeah because she probably had had several of those. Yeah. There's like seven or eight of these Boyd kids. Oh okay. Because yeah I mean women you know you either gave birth to children or you died in childbirth. She was constantly pregnant. Constantly because I mean that

was you're either pregnant or you're dead. Yeah and so far she had good luck when it came to delivering all these kids. Unfortunately her luck runs out. This is not a great day for Nancy. All we know is that she wasn't in great health so it could be that she was still recovering from childbirth because she's carrying her infant James Thomas but she can't keep up because these are fast moving native raiders. Yeah. And a bunch of like frontier settler children who are all in great shape. So. Well yeah I mean after your entire fucking reproductive system gets turned into mince meat. Yeah. Like seventh time. For like the seventh time. Yeah. Yeah. In colonial times when there was no such thing as modern medicine

and she was probably just like leaky and bleedy and terrible. Poor Nancy. Yeah and unfortunately things are not going to get any better for Nancy at this point. Oh I hope Nancy dies swiftly. So this is pretty fucking grim but here we go. She's got her infant son James Thomas and they realize the natives realize this woman can't keep up. They're taking prisoners but she can't keep up with them in their own foot. So she sits the natives sat Nancy down with her baby on a fallen tree and let her say goodbye to her children one at a time. David he quoted her later in life saying oh God be merciful to my children going among savages. She was only 37 years old. Once the captive children were out of sight the warriors

left behind killed both the mother and the child and scalp them both. Yeah sounds about right. David and his sister Sally were forced to later take turns carrying the scalps of their murdered mother and baby brother for an entire day. And now only one example of the humiliation and cruelty they'd be forced to endure which started cradling your mother's head. Yes the top of your mom's head and your little baby brother. Oh that's that's fucking brutal. We don't know exactly how old the kid was but it was less than a year is that's that's kind of what we know. So he's either a small toddler or a true infant. We don't know. Either way that's pretty fucking rough. And then they had to watch as their their home

their family farmhouse was looted and burned before they all had to run off taking turns carrying mom's scalp. That also sounds about right. Welcome to the mid 1700s. That was a fucking terrible place. John Boyd senior the distraught father of this family was forced to watch his home burn from a distance before setting off to alarm local settlers and organize a pursuit. He took one look at this situation is like I could rush down there and die. Yeah I mean dying doesn't seem like a very intelligent option. Although you know when he finds his wife and baby's you know head eventually hopefully then that's also fucking terrible. There's no there's not great either way. So but he did what made the most sense. He went to organize

people but because like their nearest neighbor was the one he was just at a mile away. By the way those two people were killed in this raid as well. They were childless. That family completely wiped off the map and their their home also burned. So because the pioneers were scarce in central Pennsylvania took some time to gather the needed men guns and supplies which was more than enough time for the swift Delaware raiding party and the white pioneer children to make a lot of distance. When the pursuit party led by John Boyd senior they found shreds of Nancy's dress clinging to some bushes off a trail and then they followed tracks to a nearby ravine. Oh that's horrible. And looking down in the ravine they see these

scalp and mutilated bodies of Nancy and baby James. The headless corpses. Well not decapitated just the you know just scalped. So by the time the world was terrible. Yeah by the time David and his surviving siblings reached the native villages in what's now Ohio John senior had given up hope of ever seeing his children alive again. Now we'll get back to David in a different conversation but I bring his story up first because the earliest sources are all about how cruel and the savagery of the native people but they always just talk about it just purely in that that context and never in the larger story about what else is going on. So that's what I'm going to do today. These brutal raids were part of a larger conflict that American history books

call the French and Indian war. So like as a you know pulling from high school history do you remember anything at all about the French and Indian war? No not a thing. I mean I could guess that it would be between both French people and Native Americans. And that's about as much as anybody does because the truth is our you know public education in the United States tends to gloss over this because the Revolutionary War is only a couple decades away and that's the that's what excites everybody because you know we're in terms of indoctrinating people. We're not French. Indeed without this war and without our colonial ancestors victory in that war there would almost certainly be no United States of America as we know it. It's really fascinating struggle in its

own right while setting all the initial pieces on the the chessboard for what it'll eventually be America's war for independence. But it's also important to remember the French and Indian war is just one theater in a larger conflict between European colonial powers that span five continents. Winston Churchill called it the true first world war beating the one we call World War One by a hundred and fifty years. Because we didn't care about those people. In fact that's exactly right. Nobody gave a fuck. The indigenous populations in all of these places get caught in the middle and screwed over. Completely fucked. Because these small relatively small European nations were projecting power all over the globe. Yeah I mean it's like yeah the Native American people

were very brutal and very savage and very very very pissed off at this point and who could blame them. This is when colonialism started really getting going you know. So the so the global war is is called the seven years war which lasted either seven years or nine years or maybe even 22 depending on which historian you ask and which like which skirmish. Well if it's if it's the 22 year war I feel like the seven year war is a really misnomer. There's a lot of that in history but the fact is at the same time like the French and Indian war. That's a big discrepancy. I mean seven and nine sure. Seven and 22. That's pretty fucked y'all. You know it's all just about deciding at which point which point is like the starting bell. You know which things officially kicked it

off because especially for the global war there was a lot of stuff related to like royals like succession and like little territorial disputes. So it's there's an argument to be made of where it really started. However a lot of people will say it started in the colonies and that's what we're going to get into. I also started with David Boyd's story for one more reason. He is our fifth great-grandfather. So that guy's family entirely kidnapped. The Boyd's yes. Yeah that was our our maternal grandmother's family. So if you go to our grandmother's father's father and going up to what's our fifth great-grandfather that was David Boyd who at 12 years old was kidnapped by Delaware natives and we will get back to him like I'm gonna we're gonna do a whole separate

mini episode just in his life because I assumed all of our ancestors would have boring as shit lives. And then you found out about the horrific kidnapping scalping. That turns into kind of a real life dances with wolves kind of story. It's really it's it's interesting and complicated because it's like on one hand when you know the whole larger story you can understand why the natives did their raids. You can also understand why it sucks when your mom gets scalped. You get captured and tortured. Forced to carry around her but then later on like I'll get out. We'll talk about it later but David goes full native and actually comes to love the chief of that tribe. Who was there when his family was captured and his phone burned but came to see that man as

his true father. It's a it's an interesting story but we'll get back to him. So Stockholm syndrome. We'll get back to David Boyd at another time because we're gonna at this point we're gonna get into the larger history that's the why all that shit just happened to him and his family. The French and Indian War. French and Indian War. So I'm not gonna get into the whole seven years world war thing. I'd rather focus on the slice of it that concerns our country and our ancestors because we don't have like seven hours to talk about this. The international business is like an entire history course all by itself but ironically it's kind of worth noting that there was a point where British soldiers were fighting the French and Indians from India on the subcontinent while

we had our own French and Indian War going on over here. So there was too many Indians we didn't yeah we're really bad at naming things misnomers. Yeah so we had literally that level of confusion going on at that point. So let's set the stage for our conflict. England and France had had beef for basically ever at this point in the 18th century always looking for an excuse to you know get back for the previous scuffle that they'd had. Well I mean that's pretty much half the wars throughout history is just you know well I mean revenge or get territory you lost back. Most wars are just pissing contests between men over land and yeah. White rich men are you know trying to fight over more stuff. Fighting back and forth. So England France constantly going at it you know

and meanwhile this was like I said this has been colonized the colonialism is really getting going so. Because white men didn't want to pay taxes. Going all over the fucking place. Rich white men didn't want to pay their fair share of taxes. Well that that gets into American Revolution of course. Like you're gonna see so much of like seeds of what makes Americans Americans all the way back before there was such a thing. The British colonies were all in the like the eastern coastline of the United States and then the French were holding the territory to the north and west of the Appalachian mountains. So up into Canada and then going spilling down into the mainland from there. Okay. But over more on the western side. So some cold motherfucking land. And similarly to know yeah there's a

population difference. So like for you know the British the British population vastly outnumbered the French Canadians. But at the same time France had vast more territory. Kind of like how Canada is huge but has one tenth of the population in the United States. Because it's fucking cold there. But that was the situation they were in. Now you always got to remember the purpose of a colony is to generate profit for the mother country through the mercantile. Well every everything is about profit. Always. Always. Now you know you know and that's another thing like you know what they tell you back in school and the sort of oversimplified version of the mercantile system is that you know raw goods are gathered from the the colony. Shipped back over to the

mother country where they're turned into finished manufactured products. And then sold some of them sold back to the original places they came from. With all of the markups that come with overseas sea shipping twice. And everybody getting their cut along the way. But now the British colonies for well over 100 years had enjoyed what's called salutary neglect. Now neglect doesn't sound good but salutary is literally the same root word as salute. It literally is like a term of respect. Basically saying hey the colonies are running themselves and getting themselves established. So we're not going to enforce all of these taxes. We're not we're gonna we're not going to enforce the trades exclusivity that you would normally have. So technically they were left alone. Yeah

there was technically a lot of smuggling going on that they just didn't bother to enforce. And there were taxes that they just they were on the books but they never once tried to collect. Things like that. So for a long time you know the American colonists got used to being left the fuck alone. So like the British the merchant class in England was super influential at the time. So they were making a lot of money. They're all the rich you know rich business owners are making money. So everything's going well. So so there's not a lot of reason for England to rock the boat by enforcing all these rules. So they were letting a lot go and the colonists were used to doing things their own way. Meanwhile the native peoples had endured you know the encroachment

of and displacement by all these European settlers for hundreds of years. So by the time we get to the are the mid 1700s there were already just tons of treaties alliances and trade agreements in place. So most of which weren't upheld. Yeah well there were you know after some time yeah it was very Darth Vader of them you know we have altered the deal. Pray we do not alter it further even though we're going to over and over again and fuck you over you know until the end of time. So but here there were there was some differences. So the French had all this land but not as many people. So they were they were much more reliant on the natives. So they worked really hard to have agreements that they actually held up there into the bargain more and they intermarried a lot.

So like the French tended to drop their racial prejudices and enter into these highly profitable marriage. They sell their daughters into marriage. That's you know that's pretty par for the course. You know the chief you know marries off his daughter to this French Canadian business and meanwhile so his tribe can suddenly help with their because the the French Canadians were doing their main source was the fur trade. So there's tons of trapping of animals in which the natives were really good at helping with all that. So everybody's making some cash and so the French you know dudes were like I don't I will marry your daughter. I am highly in love with all of the money we are about to make because you know whatever it's it's not like wives aren't

disposable anyway. Beaver pelts work for good money. So Beaver pelts. It's like you just traded your daughter for a beaver pelts. That's no that's no for all of the beaver pelts for a beaver cash guns and booze you get for selling your daughter to get beaver pelts to white people on the other side of the world. But that was just like you know so the French were had much stronger native alliances than the British who would make a treaty and then violate it whenever it was convenient. Even though it's not to defend the French it's just they were less of them so they were kind of forced into this situation. So both sides start far apart on the map but colonizers be colonizing and as both sides are expanding their territory it was like a pressure

cooker you know eventually it was gonna explode. Both France and England were claiming areas such as Nova Scotia and Acadia in the north and Acadia as a side note is you know as a result of all the shit that we're about to talk about the Acadian people were forced out and told to march south into what's now Louisiana and that's where Cajun people come from. But at first we're just talking about settlers in small numbers. So like our great great great great grandfather we were talking about earlier in his family so they would you know move over the other side of the Appalachian Mountains because it was just amazing farmland you know in Ohio. I mean always has been always will be probably. Yeah you can grow some shit there. Yeah mostly corn. Lots and lots of corn.

And it was kind of a ballsy thing to be an English settler in the Ohio River Valley because it was claimed by France there was a disputed territory and it was also home to all these native tribes who were allied and intermarried as fuck with all of the French people. So to the natives raiding and burning these homesteads was both getting rid of more white people and doing a solid for their French allies. But on the British side they had their own treaty negotiated by a Native American leader named Tanagreson and I probably completely butchered that guy's name. So I'll just use the kind of cool nickname that the white people gave him the Half King. The Half King. The Half King. In colonial history there was a few people

they nicknamed the Half King and it's basically the racist version of respect because he this guy was the chief of the Mingo people who were it's kind of like a blend of other tribes that were displaced or half wiped out and he was kind of the he was a leader among them. So a not white guy can't be a king. So he's a half king. So yes this is racism even in his nickname but still you know Half King still half a cool nickname. So he's gonna come back into this story a couple of times but for now just know that the Half King had come to an agreement on behalf of like a whole tribal council representing a number of different groups of Native Americans including the Iroquois Confederacy. I was about to say I wondered if the Iroquois League was gonna

Oh yeah the Iroquois are all a part of this. In fact at the moment he's been given kind of the blessing to speak on their behalf even though sometimes they got their own people in there and once again I'm kind of having to super simplify some of this stuff because we're doing a short podcast and not like a 400 level American history class. So it's already kind of warm in our pressure cooker when the colonial powers turn up the knob by building military forts to project power directly into the wilderness. There had been previous scuffles there have been some treaties and more tension building and then the the old governor general of New France died and his eventual replacement was a guy named the Marquis Duquesne. At this point

French start to get a little bit more picky about enforcing their treaties with their own tribal allies like for example the Miami people are not supposed to trade with the British they have an exclusive deal with the French and there and so the French tell the Miami people to knock it off the Miami people ignore them yeah because fuck you and so the French decide to call up some of their own Ottawa tribal allies and send in some troops with muskets to straighten the Miami people out because once again as cozy as the French were with the natives it only goes so far if you still fuck with the money you go and get shot well yeah because again it's it's really the bottom line don't fuck with white people's money do not fuck with with people's money it's

it's our hard line but in this case they were simply just trading with everybody and not just the French and then they got shot so by the time we get into 1753 it becomes clear that in order to protect this really important region that everybody knows is going to be covered with the best farms in colonial America the French will need to keep armed men in the region at all times so up goes some forts and you can probably imagine what these 18th century wilderness forts look like they're completely made out of wood from local timber there'll be a few central buildings surrounded by a palisade which is like sharpened tree trunks in a fence all the way around so uh but yeah the the the forts were not the coziest of accommodations but were a hell of a

lot better than being camped in the middle of a forest filled with Native Americans who are really good at killing you in that said forest the French expanded south and they were kicking out any British squatters along the way and then that caused more heated conversations to go back in the colonial capitals but what's going on you know more and more French are moving into the area and and then the native allies that were the natives of the British were saying uh what the fuck and the half king he absolutely hated the French the guy told stories to anyone who would listen that the French had killed had killed cooked and eaten his father I mean and if that's true legit reason I mean yeah I'm even if you even just think that's true it's a legit reason to hate

fuck those strong eating human eating motherfuckers I have no yeah once you get the to the they ate my dad you can see some some not nice thing so the half king actually um marches up to the I also think scalp mom is on that was too also pretty rough yeah so um so the half king marches right up to the gates of Fort LeBouf and yes like Shia LeBouf translates literally the beef oh so he goes to Fort LeBouf and and just and just yells at them that he that the French need to leave this area uh or he threatens military action and you can imagine you know the French the other side uh you're going all multi-pipe oh my ha ha ha your mother smells of elderberries go away all right well don't you a second time

so uh so the half king goes off in a huff having accomplished you know fuck all other than being like horribly mocked he was rebuffed rebuffed at LeBouf so runners were dispatched to the to the important British colonial leaders to let them know about the French troop presence in the Ohio River Valley and not only did the British have their own claims to protect but there were important business contracts writing it because once again there's always money history books often don't like to talk about all the money and oh well that's a thing I mean money is at the root of all of it all evil I mean and we're about to get into some evil all of it so the half king sent his people the the chief of the Mohawk uh showed up on behalf of their

tribal council like representing a whole another group of Native Americans who were all allied with the British and demanded that the British live up to their obligations to keep the French out of the area and when the governor of New York didn't immediately just call up troops and I'm like get this shit started they they took off pissed off and that was the point where they say that the cozy relationship between the British and the Iroquois Confederacy took a hit like it wasn't completely broken down at this point but I was about to say because that came later yeah so the the French have really strong alliances with their native allies and the British just weakened their ones with the most important because in this in this area the Iroquois

are the ones you need the most now the Cherokee they're kind of in the background of this story and through the course of the war they switched sides like four times and just like whichever is the most expedient whichever way the wind blows yeah no no they're like all of them were just trying to do the best they could in a shitty situation as they were slowly losing land and having to I mean we live on Cherokee land I mean we are recording this from occupied Cherokee land so believe it or not we're that was all just the prelude to our real story yep it's time to introduce our main character for the rest of this this talk today there are plenty of important figures we could we could have picked in some different angles we could have looked at but

but as Americans and especially thinking of this from a you know quote unquote family point of view there's only one choice the father figure of us all I speak of course of George motherfucking Washington uh he's a complicated dude yeah he's all kinds of full of good things and bad things rolled into one and extraordinarily complicated human man but this is young George Washington oh so was he less complicated and more of a dick I'm well I'm gonna be interested to see like where you are at the beginning of this and then once we get to the end of the second part or actually all of it just say your opinion will shift but just think back for a moment and think of yourself just like in grade school like you know we all think of George Washington

in the Revolutionary War and as president first president of the United States some kid that chopped down a cherry tree which turns out was complete and total utter bullshit and didn't even really happen or have any kind of relevance in life and yet we still learn that yeah even I'm pretty sure that even halfway through high school I was convinced George Washington had a homicidal hatred of cherry trees and like a psychotic inability to lie and then you were like no that motherfucker lied all the time none of those things were true it turns out cherry trees were perfectly safe around him and he lied his ass off when necessary however while being uh you know a relatively forthright dude but as we're about to see so this is not the white haired figure in

the hall of presidents at Disneyland in 1752 little Georgie was only 20 years old the age of your nephew so that's you got to think about Xander yeah at your head in terms of like that's how old this guy is when the story starts 20 year old punk ass kid this kid even though of course in the 1700s even children are considered little adults expected to just do what they're needed to be done but um he was very ambitious but he had no idea the incredible place he would take in the world in all of history but let's get out like a visual picture of young George Washington at this point he's six feet tall which is you know in mid-1700s is so pretty big guy so he's little shorter than Xander right but yeah but if you grade him on a curve he would be more like six three or four

yeah because because people were average guys were more like five three to five four back then so he was a pretty big guy and in fact he was strong as hell and his hands were so big he had to have custom made gloves for the size of his just oven mitts big meat tennis racket size hands so he's got reddish brown hair that's like tied back in a tight tail or sometimes fitted in a silk bag and though we're a long way from his like denture years even at 20 years old George had like Austin powers like teeth that dentistry is important children he had like terrible tooth decay and so even at this age it was bad enough that like a friend from this time in his life wrote a letter about how fucked up his teeth were and so he so he even at this young man he had this very tight

lipped expression that you see in all of the paintings and statues because he just his whole life he was super self-conscious about his teeth interesting enough though he did not have like the booming commanding voice you would expect from a George Washington though he was physically strong George kept getting sick because this of course the era of just all kinds of disease because it's like on one hand it's like before any real like actual medicine but it's also when world travel was a thing and diseases were truly traveling the globe at its speeds never dreamt before this this time like it literally took years for the black death to move from China all the way to like Western Europe but now shit can just move in the matter of months

because of all these ships going all over the world thank you imperialism so George you know I can't I like traveling so yeah no travel is good just so I mean not traveling on a boat for months so our vaccines getting lied to about you know how awesome this place is that's so just yeah again despite being physically strong George kept getting sick by the time he was 20 he'd already had malaria smallpox and a nasty bout of pleuriscine his lungs which left him with kind of a weak breathy voice that didn't seem to match his like you know super imposing things so I guess he talked kind of like original Dumbledore from Harry Potter with a kind of a wheezy voice I'm George Washington that would be amazing uh so think about that for the rest of

this story just this kind of like kick-ass looking guy I cannot think it's Dumbledore George Washington just got really fucked up in my head especially now like and then make him 20 20 years old wheezy wheezy George wheezy George and unfortunately like all later in life it's it's pneumonia that he caught that killed him so his lungs got him in the end as they do yeah so young George was an interesting guy kind of a study in contradictions his temper was absolutely terrifying so he worked at keeping a tight lid in his emotions he tried he developed self-control because if he lost his shit it was bad and he was a big strong dude with you know massive hands well I mean you know self-awareness um he was a bit of a romantic but you know especially when he was like writing

love letters to his various you know young lady friends um but he was always deadly serious and he was like for a young man he was not the life of the party he was the guy who would be like even when everybody else is trying to relax and have a drink he'd be the guy talking about politics and current affairs even when you're just trying to have a good time dude I'm staying off social media asshole I already told you I'm in my media bubble so George wanted very much to be part of Virginia high society but he didn't have the money or the family name back from England to carry him kind of a fancy boy he loved fashionable clothes and and enjoyed dancing like he learned the latest courtly dances so if you imagine like jane young wheezy George Washington doing jane austin style

you know dancing it was fine it was just that you don't really when you think of George Washington you don't think of him really working hard to be this fancy boy he ordered his clothes from London every year if you will yeah now he orders clothes from London every year so he was this fancy boy but the flip side because it's always about these contradictions he was a natural outdoorsman who adapted easily to life in the rough country I mean he was a brave and badass guy but what he wanted though was to be part of this you know high-end society he wanted to be an important person well I would say then he accomplished his goal so and here's the sort of another ironic thing so once he did set his sights on military service what he wanted more than anything else was a royal

commission in the proper British army because in the colonies there was no standing army they just called up militias when they needed them which were you know only got paid for the time they did work and it was a lot less and there was a lot less prestige and so it was sort of like and you had to abandon your your farm and your bullshit at a moment's notice whereas if you actually get a commission in the British army that is a full-time gig that comes with a lot of prestige and honor and can lead to the kind of political career that George is already looking for so what he wants to do is fight for the British more than anything else but it's but if it was whole life for the British well isn't that ironic he wants to be a redcoat and but he never manages to achieve this

however to be fair he also goes on to defeat that very army and become president of a whole new country so I think he wins I would say so I mean considering you know he's the father of our country not just some nameless faceless British soldier that's long dead and it will make anybody who's been a fuck up feel better when you hear this story because it's not just all in one straight direction upward for George he has some setbacks um and but it starts though and I think this helps you understand too um I'm gonna reference Alexander Hamilton and even the musical Hamilton a few times but if you learn about young George Washington and then you know a bit about young Alexander Hamilton later on you really get the sense of why George Washington saw a lot of himself in

Hamilton because they were both men who had something to prove like Alexander Hamilton was the son of a Scottish nobleman but he was a bastard in theory yeah in theory that's a whole another story but uh but in theory he had that name but he was desperately poor and he always was trying to prove himself he was always trying and and Hamilton tried to fit in with fancy society and dressed himself up and all that shit you know George there was a lot in common with these two guys even though George was not a bastard uh he was however this the oldest son in a second marriage so it's like he had there was an original batch of washington's and then the mom died and then several years later his dad Gus married another woman and then George was the oldest of the second

batch kids so that could go either way depending on how his father would have how he liked his wives or children right and it's kind of the this thing basically was because no one was really protected they they were a landowning family the washington's has held land in virginia going generations back even before for uh augustine which is you know Gus was his nickname uh Gus washington's family history but the same time like this older batch of children got all of the best stuff they got they inherited the early property and cash and got all this extra stuff they all got to go to paid primary school and college George washington had no formal schooling his entire life so and he was you could always tell that was sort of a not only jealousy but kind of

like a a shortcoming and he always felt the absence of that because like his brothers learned how to speak french and could read latin and got all this advanced stuff and probably learned all those fancy dances in college yeah George is having to you know go and learn all this stuff himself but George so he he was you know kind of equivalent basically homeschooled and he did learn you know certainly could read write and do math and solid so he just didn't have the classical education that you get back the formal education that he would get so his mother had to have made up right and actually his education and apparently you know he seems like he was a pretty educated dude and not just his well not just his mother his mother was actually a bit crude and half

illiterate uh so George was on i don't mention her much but George had a complicated relationship with his mother don't we all yeah i know right uh it's that's a whole other interesting story a whole other he had some mommy issues to for sure and she kept fucking with his life at different points so he had mommy issues and some daddy issues daddy issues uh however his daddy issues were cut short because his dad died before he was 12 years old so it's like on one hand he was well off by the like by the standards of actual of the time by the standards of the time and actual working class poor people he was well off but in terms of the Virginia high society that he aspired to be he was far he was down and he would he felt like he was a loser but he was very good at

math and and it came in really handy because by the time he was 17 years old he got himself a gig as an apprentice for a land surveyor and then eventually completed that and like went on by the time he was 19 years old he had a career going surveying okay so he would run off into the country you know you know taking measurements and you know making meticulous notes for people for all these rich people to come and occupy this land and to the point where he not only was had plenty of his own freelance work but he got named the county surveyor of one of the counties in Virginia so he had like okay yeah because i mean that was a surveying was a huge when yeah yeah colonizing literally no maps yeah and so they had to do it and these are people who are wanting to establish

farms and build buildings and you gotta you have to have a skilled surveyor so you can make all your plans and know we're gonna build your shit and george was reputedly very good at it and in fact he could have just done that and been successful and then have been the end and probably maybe no america well that would have been a shorter story yeah for sure the end roll credits uh more than anyone else george looked up to his older brother lorenz uh the oldest living washington he was a soldier and businessman landowner and politician that sound familiar yeah okay but lorenz came down with tuberculosis i think in his early to mid forties if i remember correctly and it was not doing so great having tv in the mid 1700s yeah i mean i mean having tv now sucks oh it sucks

period but in this case when your doctor says you're probably gonna die but that maybe if you go move to barbados you're the the tropical climate might help you restore you i mean which is it won't hurt i would rather move to barbados although i guess at that point too it's like well unless you get malaria because having tv and malaria but the good news is they'd already have everybody in virginia had malaria by that point oh well there you go then so george dropped everything in accompanying his brother to barbados that was george's one and only time out of the continental you know americas and he got a little taste of that kind of island life and saw a little bit more of the greater world but guess what it's where lilert it didn't work and lorenz returned to

virginia to die at his home and mount vernin where this seems to yeah so he named his younger brother george as the heir to his estate in the event his own children didn't survive you can probably guess how that turned out so i guess they didn't survive uh yeah unfortunately poor lorenz had four children all of them died before the age of five years old most of them as babies which was common and unfortunately his little girl who survived him only lasted to like four and a half and then she got sick of some childhood illness like unfortunately it's like one of those things one of the most common misconceptions is this idea that that well the average age people died was in their 40s or early 50s or whatever but what they don't understand is almost everybody died

before they were five years old and so like you know babies dying or a childhood illness wiping a kid out at like three years old that was super common or just accidents which is dangerous to be a kid back then but if you lived if you made it to like a teenager you were probably gonna have a normal life expectancy even by our standards you're probably gonna live to your 60s to maybe even 80s if you're really lucky so it's just math that makes it where you you know that average age and that's a major misconception children die and i mean you know it's like you have eight children and you have two surviving children that was pretty common fucks up the math and that's why you also have all those kids fucks up your vagina so yeah then this poor and once again this poor

woman uh she had had four children by laurence watching and none of them survived like imagine i mean to bury four kids and then he dies then she goes and remarry so that instantly means mount vernon goes to george and interestingly enough total side note but uh mount vernon was named for a british admiral named edward vernon who was laurence watching's commanding officer when he'd been in the british military so the most like super famous american historical sites named after a british admiral well you know nothing's perfect so uh 1752 washington's hit this point where he wants to own property not just be a surveyor for a bunch of other people and you get the really get the sense that he wants to follow his dead brother's lead and kind of like achieve

the things that laurence could have if he had lived long enough like political clout right yeah now that he can be that's he can have the social standing that he wants yeah laurence washington he'd held a position on the house of burgesses which was like a high ranking like it was a sort of a legislature type position okay and so and washington wanted to have a similar thing so he had political goals he wanted to own money he wanted to have business deals he wanted to wear fancy shoes and dance is that all of the above and marrying well so we're saying yeah george is trying to live up to his to what laurence might have done if he'd have survived but tuberculosis took out laurence so that meant the net the thing missing on george's resume next was military

service and this is just as our pressure cooker in north america is heating up so one of the things that's not brought up much like i said earlier is how much money and business interest factor into the lead up to the french and indian war the british government had awarded a huge land grant to the ohio company this collection of these business of these land speculators and if if the french held on to all this land in the ohio river valley they stand to lose a fortune okay the ohio company made a recommendation to build a fort at the forks of the ohio river so it's like the perfect spot where the rivers branch off to establish control of the area the fort forks the the fort at the forks uh and so like right here would be a perfect spot you know have a fort with a bunch of troops

stationed that way they can protect settlers and you know you always have people in the area to establish control one of the major investors in the ohio company was none other than laurence washington so who died this same year when this is going on but he had been part of this like he drafted this recommendation like we should build a fort here please virginia government do that um so when the governor general dukeane of new france learned of the the british proposed forts he's like well we got our own forts we will build our own forts from lake eerie all the way down to the ohio river and probably had both middle fingers raised while he was doing it so like so the british announced that they want to build forts and he's like well i'm gonna build our own forts directly

opposing your forts so they can taunt each other from across the river so once again the temperature is going up we're not we're not there at war yet so so now now it's just like the insults and the antics ensue right so on the british side the awesomely named robert den witty was lieutenant governor den witty he is a major player in this story not dim witty but den den witty den witty is a very like jk rowling kind of name so he is a is the lieutenant governor of virginia also a major investor in the ohio company along with laurence washington but as as the lieutenant governor he was also in a position to do something about it he petitioned the british crown for permission to build the proposed forts in the contested land took an entire year but orders came back

from london build the forts and send an envoy to inform the french that their presence in the ohio river valley was no longer welcome george saw his opportunity and went for it requesting the appointment as the envoy i'm gonna guess that didn't go well well that's what we're about to talk about now you might wonder why the hell anyone would appoint a 21 year old kid with zero military experience in charge of an important expedition that like with diplomatic implications across the globe yeah yeah but then you remember that george was known because he was working so hard to fit in with all these folks and was out there surveying all this land so they knew he had experience going out into the woods and dealing with shit and you also remember george's older brother was a major

investor in this company that's the whole reason we're doing this and then so now he's a major sharehold so you can make you can probably guess that the governor den witty felt better that somebody with the company's interest in mind was the guy leading this expedition and in fact george through the rest of his life was accused of representing the company the ohio company not necessarily the the british government and the virginian colonists that tracks it's hard to really say however it's hard to really say however that sounds like a track but once you see how this all goes it's like so george is a complicated guy you'll have to tell me how you feel about him after the end of all this shit so uh oh lord i don't know how i feel about him now i doubt any more information is going to

help that the orders were simple enough uh ron chernel writes in his biography of washington quote if the french were found to be building forts on english soil they should be peacefully asked to depart if they failed to comply however we do strictly charge and command you to drive them off by force of alms this order was signed by none other than king george the second the father of the father i was about to say so this is daddy of our king george from our story of the american revolution because all king george's you know so at this point the george washington is acting under direct orders from king george himself so the newly minted major george washington and yes that's right he goes from never having served any military experience to now he's a major in

charge of this expedition by means of money wasted no time in recruiting his team even though however it to be to be fair one of the things he does he is not given any upfront cash he has to fund all this shit himself and get paid on the back end but that's what you do because he's he's wanting to fit in with all these rich folk and that's how this is done well i mean that's a lot of that that tracks as well i mean especially if you're a history of america yeah if you're a gentleman and you're going to serve your your country you're expected to fund it and then you know you come back and then we'll pay you and hope that they actually live up to that agreement because the u.s congress doesn't like to do that either yep we're gonna get to that because that's a thing they sucked her from

before inception yeah but there was no they weren't even a thing and they fucked this up somehow so uh he so so george go waste no time in recruiting his team making sure to get several people who are very familiar with the western country and the local natives and one thing george knows how to do is go off for months into the country at this point because he's been doing it in the wilderness he's been doing it for years now as part of his job as a surveyor so they made their way through the untamed wilderness dealt with some shitty weather and there's this one point where this is pennsylvania in the middle of winter so it's cold as fuck there's snow icy rivers everywhere and so they get to a river crossing and there's this like it's like ice flows you know

flowing down the river they're all putting the their stuff in canoes or rafts and going to you know easier crossings and george decides you know to swing his dick a little bit and show everybody how cool he is he rides his horse directly into the water and the horse swims across and he's like high in the saddle just looking every inch the total badass as the horse just cuts through this icy water and then the horse gets hypothermia and dies not this r.i.p. horse now we're not we're not to the point where horses die yet not yet we have multiple horse deaths in this story but we're not there at this point to be fair this is just a baller move he just looks cool everybody's just like oh look at that guy's dick people tell the stories of this guy as he rides his horse straight

into the water and you know through his entire life george is is an incredible horseman this is like one of the things he's very good at he's an accomplished rider and he does this scene even in the revolutionary war later on middle age george washington rides his horse across rivers and everybody was like damn so it's just one of his signature moves just to show how cool he is he knows how to do this i've trained my horses bitches so then it was like once they cross this is where they get to that the forks in the ohio that that his brother had prized this spot so they they make a camp and then george starts taking you know doing his surveying thing and taking great notes first thing okay this is where we need to build this fort uh for his report so then he dispatches

messengers to the local tribal leaders because he needs information about french activity and he wants an escort to fort the beef so that's when tenagreson i think that's what he's called the half king comes back into the story and even though this guy's twice george's age they say that they got along like george earned some respect from this guy because once again he may be he may be a little bit of a fancy boy but he he's a fair is tough and brave so uh and that's another thing too where george and his if you if you read his journals and letters he's kind of a mixed bag when it comes like he's not as instantly racist as some of the people of his time like he's respect instantly racist he's as he's respectful for what the natives are good at but he also

he essentially calls them all mercenary and money-grubbing and and questions are loyalty which if you read the rest of this well i mean that could be fair though if he's questioning loyalties they didn't have a whole lot of them like if you hear the rest of this story and look at it purely from his point of view you can see where he's coming from but if you look at it from their point of view you can totally understand why they're just trying to make the best of you know they got they're like oh excuse me can you please help me with this land i'm stealing from you so this was still the age of genteel war and diplomacy so george reaches this like little french trading post and they immediately invite him to dinner as their guests they all they the wine is flowing

freely at this dinner french are getting all completely wine drunk and george is just sitting there listening while they just say the quiet part out loud they're like oh yes well the french will dominate this region and kick the british out and he's just like oh okay i see how this is and he's quietly taking notes for his entire life george is not much of a drinker and he also thinks that people serving the military shouldn't drink at all and once again there's a couple points in this story he's like okay i get why he has this opinion this is one of them where it's like he's there as this diplomat and they're literally saying his his mission is doomed to fail i mean he's just doing the courtesy of handing them a note that they're gonna ignore and then telling them

telling him to his face but then they they provide him an escort so this one he's got a french escort and in his native escort taking him all the way to fort shia labouf he delivers the message on behalf of the british crown and then they ask him you know can you hang out for a few days while we send word back and to governor ducane we got to find out you know we got to give you a message to send back to your guys so he walks around and takes this shitload of notes about where all the where all the people were going all the things are it's like oh there's a guard tower here there's this many dudes this is the most it was it was very nice of them to give him a grand tour of their facilities yeah and he wasn't being dishonest like everybody knew he was doing he's walking around

taking what are you doing i'm serving it's like i'm just counting the guards up there in that that tower so the friend the trip back home was difficult they decided you know this is the middle of winter the horses are not doing well so they abandoned their horses so this is the force her horse death maybe the horses are okay i don't think the horses are okay i don't think they made it uh you don't know that they're resilient creatures they are they ditch the horses uh and george actually dressed up like a native american he actually put on like buckskin walking leathers he and maybe even moccasins so a little cultural appropriation well he was like i gotta hike through central pennsylvania these clothes are way better than my fancy boy officer

uniform probably yeah he he winterized yes he winterized and and so they are hiking back the rest of the way and it was quite an little adventure so um at one point george he'd gotten ill again he was so tired and exhausted and malnourished that he actually had one of their native guides holding his backpack and then in the middle they're walking through a field and suddenly this guy just runs out in front of them whips out his horse pistol and just tries to shoot these guys pulp fiction style oh my god and so the guy misses the bull just whizzes behind the two like holy fuck so george like immediately like are you shot no you shot no so george's friend runs over beats the shit out of this guy whips as he should whips out his musket and is

about to blow his brains out and george's like no no no stops out don't kill him just because he tried to kill us doesn't mean we need to kill him um well i mean that's that's debatable that's so that's a conversation i guess so the next move they decided to tie the guy up to a tree and then release him at night and so then they're like terrified that guy's gonna go get friends and come back and finish them off so george's friend because it's just the two of them at this point are just running for it in the opposite direction trying to lose you know trying to lose this guy in case it gets guy and they're just terrible and there's other guys just so pissed he's like why didn't you let me shoot him we're gonna die because of you so so the next day they get to

another river crossing and the river is almost completely frozen over there's just like a chunk in the middle of that's just not frozen over and so they spend all day constructing a crude ass raft to float their way across and so while george has a bit has made a makeshift pole he's just kind of pulling through the water suddenly an ice float goes loose hits his pole and knocks him into 10 feet of like freezing ass water hey the thermion yeah so so he uh so george scrambles back up to the raft and they make it over to this tiny little island where there's no fire they just hover shivering in this island all night long in the middle of this is february in pennsylvania i believe so i guess it's advantageous for america that he didn't just die there yeah and funny enough

it was his friend who ended up getting frostbite not george because once again he was a tough bastard oh goodness he made his way back to williamsburg and delivered the sealed fuck you letter from the french to governor denwitte and then uh the governor gave him one entire night to turn his like seven thousand words worth of notes into one concise report and didn't tell him that it would be published all over the world but george he stayed up all night did it and that put his name out there for the first time and definitely not the last so this was george's first adventure into the wilderness which was just for governor denwitte for governor denwitte and it was just a formality it was just to tell the french you have to leave and the french saying

no no how about no i thought you the second time so uh what really pissed george off was he got a measly 50 pounds for his trip which would be the equivalent of about 30 000 in modern dollars but you also have to remember he had to pay for all of it up front so he basically got his expenses covered comes back and doesn't have like really jack to show for it other than he almost died of pneumonia died and of getting shot pneumonia and however he was given orders to raise up and train a hundred militia for you know what was going to be the next move and so george decides a little political calculus he's like okay i'll do this but um and george has this this thing where he always combines like humility with a bit of ego and so he's like yes and i humbly ask the that i should

be promoted to lieutenant colonel and it was granted lieutenant colonel george washington 22 years old so at this point in washington's life you have to kind of understand that it's like on one hand he had some land he had some things going on but they were all kind of self-sustaining and weren't giving him a lot of money to work with so he actually needed a job it wasn't like he was independently wealthy like he didn't have fuck you money he still had to work and this paycheck versus pride thing was kind of a recurring theme with him so you know officers in the colonial militia got paid a lot less than those royal appointed ones we were talking i was about to say that paycheck versus pride thing that sounds very hamilton yeah and so more than once george actually

turned down a paycheck and he volunteered his services rather than be paid less than what he believed he was worth and that was really once again kind of a political calculus because if he just took this short-term job in the colonial militia people could always say he was doing it for money or because of his connections to the ohio company but by by volunteering and not accepting the salary he was able to say well i was just wanting to serve my country i was just doing my part but he but the thing was political clout instead of actual capital but he couldn't afford it there was a point where he had to borrow money from other people and that also sounds about right that that's a very uh white male thing to do he wants to be proud he wants to everybody to think he's

this yeah everyone wants him to think that he's a bigger he has a bigger dick than he does that sounds about right and washington has some serious he's both ambitious and he has some pride he has some dick swinging to do yet and it may be that he that he borrowed money from his like one of his best friend's fathers while he was flirting heavily with that guy's wife so i'm gonna have to learn how to not audibly size so much if i'm ever gonna make this work so but getting back to the military career as you can imagine george's 100 militia volunteers weren't exactly the cream of the crop oh you don't say so these are all guys who decided his inbred farmers yeah they didn't have proper clothing weapons or gear they were drunk half the time and he was that sounds very

america though he was constantly pissed off too that under the english system he was forced to obey the orders of a low ranking officer if said officer had a royal british commission so that means even as a lieutenant colonel he'd have to obey a captain even though he technically outranked because british so this is one of the british outranked americans just by being british this just stung at george's pride oh i'm fucking sure inside he was wanting to take his massive hands and just crush the skulls of these assholes but he couldn't so he just tried to make the best of things and make his ragtag troops ready for their second mission into the wilderness meanwhile governor denwitte sent a guy named william trint with 40 men out to the forks of the

ohio in early 1754 that spot that george had surveyed out to begin construction of a small fort the french however sent over 500 soldiers with additional support to secure the area but once again we're still in gentlemanly time so the french officer not only allowed the british workers to leave peacefully but he actually purchased their their tools and construction equipment for a fair market price so he gave them cash and then sent them on their way i know right well we were already here however while they were leaving essentially flipping the two middle fingers because they tore down everything the british made and built a much more grand larger series of structures uh that they named after their recently promoted governor general of new

france fort dukeine sounds douchey yeah there's douches aplenty in this story our cup overfloweth let's say i don't think this is it's all douche it is nothing but a big squeegee of vinegar water yeah so denwitte sent washington and his men into the wilderness to secure and assist with the construction of what was supposed to be fort trint but on the way the guys are coming back the other direction with none of their equipment and they're like uh about that fort so he's like learning this on the way he's only got a hundred guys with him so then his tribal allies show up including once again the half king who looks at these hundred assholes and is immediately not thrilled with the situation yeah well you know i'm not thrilled with this situation because he had just been out

there in the ohio country and he knows how many french soldiers are there and he's like and you show up with these guys um but george is like he assures everyone he's like no no no this is the tip of the spear we're just the vanguard of this huge british host with canons and and all kinds of guys so he bullshitted them yes he was 100 talking out of his ass at this time i mean sometimes a bunch of bullshit you can if you can get away with it it's like he's not going to get barely into this trip and immediately turn around and run back to governor denwitte and said uh there's there's too many of these guys man he's not going to do that he's got he's trying to prove himself and he's got dicks to swing he's 22 years old and i can tell you as a guy who was once a 22 year old male

you are convinced you're invincible and you can just pull off any impossible task that you set for yourself so after clearing out an area and establishing a temporary base they got word of a small french scouting force not far away and then that night they're they're camped and everybody is hearing people skulking around they're convinced that there are french spies creeping around their camp they don't catch anybody but they're like their nerves are shot and they're convinced they're all about to be murdered in their sleep paranoid yeah they're they're all freaked out the the scouts find a small group of french canadians and camped nearby and kind of a hidden glen so george decides they're going to go after these guys because they said they're convinced that they were the ones

that they were in their camp they're the french spy right the half king scouted the enemy's location found out where these guys were encamped and so they decided to march through the night to prep their first engagement with the enemy now i've seen photographs and watched a video of a guy walking around the location that this this happened in george's story is that they they sort of completely surrounded the glen but were spotted by the french who immediately opened fire on them so the battle immediately ensued and that may be true i have no way of knowing what happened for sure but if you look at the terrain it was an ambush it sounds like a bunch of bulls it was an ambush because it's like it's like there's there's like a high ridge with a bunch of tree cover and

that's where george and his guys were positioned and he sent all the natives on the back side to cut off any possibility of retreat so all the french are literally like asleep in their bed rolls and then if you look at the numbers uh you know 10 french soldiers were shot dead and more were wounded almost nobody gets hurt on the british side and so that like the whole thing was over in like 15 minutes so what happened next is also debated to this very day the french commanding officer was named joseph coulon de jumeauville and he was bearing diplomatic papers on his person that means if the french forces had simply been on a diplomatic mission and if george had fired on them unprovoked then he'd have committed a no-no in this age of genteel gentlemanly warfare

that we've been talking about so obviously there's no way he would have done that so there are three versions of this story we'll see what we'll see what you think might have happened after you hear all of them this is a very clue moment so one version of this story and maybe the most dramatic is that uh that this guy jumeauville was wounded during the skirmish but then he started waving his papers around in the air like i am a diplomat i am a diplomat do not shoot and then started reading his own message from the french government declaring that all british were ordered to leave the ohio river valley so the half king walks right up to the officer and splits his face open with a tomahawk in front of god and everybody uh that tracks like i really hated

the french remember the whole yeah i mean it's my father thing he yeah i'm you ate my father prepared to die if that wasn't enough he dipped his hands in the officer's brains and then scalped him now the second version of the story says that jumeauville was just simply shot and killed in the short in the middle of the battle and that's just all there was to it either way he's dead and then what happens next isn't up for debate the native americans descended on the wounded french soldiers braining just smashing in the skulls of all of them and scalping all of them so like the ones who just simply surrendered were allowed to live but all of the wounded were just massacred right then in there the natives just finish off and scalp the wounded

french so george washington was the commanding officer during an ambush that included atrocities that were a bit foreign to the european sensibilities though to be fair uh if he was too hard on his native allies they would abandon the british and he'd be up to chic creek without even a paddle or a canoe so while the george claimed the french fired first and reason that they were on a diplomatic mission he was like well if these guys wouldn't have picked such a hidden spot for their camp if they were truly diplomats they just walked right up and handed us a note and they were sneaking around our camp the night before which means they're spies and it was totally cool every we did everything right you guys it's totally kosher it's fine and you know so george always maintained

this to the day he died that this was a legit fight and the other guys fired first which is a smart thing to say because most historians consider the battle of jumeauville glenn the first shots fired in the french and indian war and which also means that depending on how you look at that this may be one of the opening skirmishes of an entire world war that span five entire continents thanks george now the french version the third version of the story you would basically know that the you know the revolution was just two guys named george swinging their dicks around indeed but at this point the georges are all lined up against the french their dicks are swinging in the same direction so the third french version of the story paints the

british as dishonorable ambushers who shot jumeauville in the head while he was reading his papers and they actually said that the native americans prevented a total massacre they even said that the natives actually rushed forward and put their bodies in harm's way to prevent all of the prisoners from being executed and once again if you remember how the french are trying to make their allies happy painting natives as heroes once again is makes sense so everybody has reasons to lie about all this so there's no way to know the truth the truth is everyone was wrong and everyone was terrible and they probably just it could have literally been anything but as far as the french go george washington is a war criminal and that may be fair so he sends the message back to governor

denwitte who's stuck with okay what do we do now but remember there was direct orders from the crown if the french don't leave you're supposed to shoot at them so so denwitte's like okay so he sends strings of wampum which i don't know if you remember what wampum but that was sort of like the the beads made of seashells and and oysters and stuff like that that was used as as currency and trade between tribes it was sort of like the native de facto trading thing so sends wampum and barrels of rum for quote indian diplomacy while writing letters back to london and making it sound like the british troops were just minor partners we had to help them out we were allies after all we were there to shoot them yeah you know and you know the french got shot so

either way the consequences of these actions spiraled far beyond the colonies and contributed to the whole global seven years world war thing or 22 as as ron churnow puts it while the folks at home embraced him as an improbable hero washington was denigrated in england as a reckless young warrior and in france as an outright assassin so again way to go george i can't think of george washington as an assassin though i mean he's i mean i my knowing how he presented so often as i've been reading a lot about young george washington i don't think ambusher i don't think he knowingly shot the guy waving around diplomatic papers either it's true that one of the natives killed the guy because if he was wounded they did

kill all the wounded people or they just he just got shot in the battle and he just died as a result that but i don't think he intentionally build up pulled that move because even for once again that wouldn't have gone with the reputation he was going for but he was but it happened but he was stuck with what happened now accounts of george's command style over the years always point to his homicidal bravery i mean he was always willing to put himself an incredible danger and over the course of his life had multiple horses shot out from under him or would go back and find just bullet holes in his coat and he just acted like he was invincible and frankly there's no evidence to say that he wasn't bulletproof because he never got shot his entire life despite putting

himself in many situations where he was getting shot at and he always led from the front like he was not a deflected them just now during around this time in his early 20s he wrote to his brother jack quote i have heard the bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound which again he was writing to his brother trying to sound tough and cool like he was the patrick swazy of the day very very you know very macho oh wow and funny enough this this the word of that got out and at one point king george was like he may perhaps he changes mind if he hears a few more uh yeah i mean so george pulls his men back several miles to a defensive position and begin construction on a little emergency fort so they could dig in and not because george

does not want to run away all the way back to virginia he wants to hold the ground that they well of course because he's you know swing still swinging his giant he's invincible bullet deflecting dig but he knows that he's not in a great position he so he's smart you can get an idea of his mindset by the name he gives this little fort fort necessity fort necessity i mean which is the mother of all invention when the tribal allies took stock of the situation they realized the british were incredibly outnumbered and they decided to peace out making them making the british even more vulnerable actually virginians the half king described fort necessity as that little thing upon the meadow oh what that can't possibly i mean that's not good for george's

giant dick no so they got deserted the natives were like oh fuck this we have zero out no reason to die here for you guys no thank you so one thing i'm completely skipping over is all the road building that's been going on this whole time and throughout the war so you can pretty much assume that whenever we're not talking about building a fort or a battle there are people working on roads full time because they need them in order to get supply wagons and to get troops in faster roads are important roads are a big deal everybody you know they learned that lesson well from the roman empire the good roads mean you can get things and people around fast so they're doing all that so while they're working on this fort and getting everything ready they're

also building roads so that the people and cannons and they do get a little bit of reinforcements from virginia so they they're out to 300 men in fort necessity um and so in june 28 george calls everyone back into the fort from road building and such to brace for an upcoming french attack he realized a couple things quite quickly his men were exhausted malnourished and he didn't have nearly enough fighting men to defend the flimsy fort you can almost say they were out gunned out manned out numbered out planned and well that's that's a prequel for his entire career as a military commander i mean that was you just described the entire like american army he was used to being behind the eight ball but like the spartan warriors of the bronze age george was convinced

his 300 men could hold out against a much larger force despite the fact that shabby fort necessity was a very badly placed it was too small and it was in a meadow surrounded by woods and higher ground oh ew yeah so george defends this the rest of his life like uh no i was not an idiot when i picked this spot for this fort but the truth is it was like the perfect place the worst spot to have a fort right you give the french yeah sharpshooters an elevated position where they can use trees as cover i don't know jack about shit but i know you want the high ground and again i know jack about shit when it comes to like any kind of hunting military even just wilderness granting the enemy a raised position to fire on you from cover isn't the best planning my 10 year old with

a nerf gun can can strategize better so but george once again his his pride forces him to defend this decision for the rest of his life he's lucky that he didn't have to defend that fort for the rest right well his life would have been short if he fought to the death so on the way the french forces found the the site of jumanville glenn and the and the body's just laying out there and were decidedly pissed off it probably didn't help that the commander of the french forces was jumanville's older brother looking for some very personal payback yeah that tracks so i keep bringing up hamilton but if you remember in the musical there's a line washington does and i'll try to sing that line acapello he goes i was younger than you are now when i was given my first command i led my men

straight into a massacre i witnessed their deaths firsthand this is what he was talking about this moment right here at fort necessity the colonial troops were already surrounded by constant gunfire when god decided to make things worse and a heavy rain began and this is back in the days when keeping your powder dry was like an actual thing you had to worry about so suddenly their muskets are completely useless went from bad to worse yep to ultimately just stupid and because the the fort was so small and they had 300 guys they had to dig trenches all the way around and just position some guys just in the trenches so these guys were literally just getting shot at and there there's like and they're filling up with mud and blood and then meanwhile because they couldn't fit any of the animals that

they had with them as part of their you know a roving supplies they just were all left out in this open meadow so the french and natives just butchered all the horses cattle and dogs to deprive the colonials everything everything because so they're inside they're around there they have like a little bit of flour and bacon left a hundred of the virginians have already been killed by gunfire but if you want to know how bad it is one-sided the french suffered only three dead and seventeen wounded so 20 total casualties even though they're more of them good job george good job so that night the french decided they signaled they would be willing to you know negotiate surrender like they knew they that the british were fucked inside fort necessity the virginian

mission militiamen had had about enough of this so they busted out the room that was meant for indian diplomacy and got shitfaced drunk and as one does because they were all yeah you're either looking at death or imprisonment a third of them were already dead you're looking at starvation death they hadn't been there there was there was there was nowhere for them to go but drunk they were out of food they couldn't even shoot their fucking guns they couldn't shoot themselves so we're getting fucked y'all yep so so we they had an epic death party so george realizes that necessity that his men basically just they were just getting trashed and so he had to wave the proverbial white flag which could have actually been a physical white flag oh yeah they did that

back yeah but it wasn't it might not have even been in this point it still had to come like the sad part was like it still came from the french side firstly hey do you guys want to surrender because we don't really want to kill all of you an interpreter went back and forth between the two sides uh george yeah uh interpreter went back and forth between the two sides and the guy finally coming back with the with the terms written the all the terms of surrender written in french the ink running from the rain so when george signed the surrender agreement he didn't realize it included a confession for the assassination of schumannville so he accidentally confessed he accidentally convinced he was accidentally confessed to the political assassination of a french diplomat

you know in any other story this would be the sad end of george for being a political assassin so this naturally provided plenty of justification for further french support of the war was a total black eye on the diplomatic reputation of england who had treated george himself so honorably like like already the newspapers all over the world had learned about what george had done so if that wasn't bad enough they seized george's diary and passed it back to governor general ducane oh that's terrible who made fun of washington and then and then published the entire thing in paris that's such a dick move i mean it's kind of glorious look at this asshole yeah so this is a low point in george's career i was going to say i've never heard this so this is like so george

so poor george was defeated having been humiliated george and his men are allowed to march back they're not taken as prisoners are just ordered to leave and fort necessities torn down george is defeated his reputation has been curb stonked and then his brothers laurence's last surviving child dies and george inherits mount vernon he resigns his commission in the virginia militia and decides to set about preparing his first planting of tobacco and that's where we're going to end part one on young george washington and the french and india part one next time when we get together i'm going to tell you about george's third and final uh expedition and where he has to take a subservient role this time because now some things are going to get shaking the war

is going to heat up um the the british are going to decide they want to they're going to fund a much more aggressive campaign they're going to send in regular british troops the guy george wants to be part of that he wishes he was an officer of and unfortunately george is forced to serve under a very traditional stuffy british general named braddock well i mean after being publicly humiliated to the entire world with the reading of one's diary so this is george's chance this is when he this is now salty george if he is he has to suck up his pride but if he wants to to salvage his military reputation he's got to go do this one more time and braddock is one of these guys who thinks that you should like that you fight like you do in the old country you

you march your dudes in red coats and you put them in a field and you line them up all next to each other and you you signal that it's time to start shooting each other yeah that's dumb yeah the french don't fight that way in the colin you know in the american colonies so that's gonna go badly and uh and george is gonna have to be there to to pick up the pieces when it does oh george yeah so then we'll we'll get on to what his and we'll talk about how all of the fallout from from all of this directly contributes to a bunch of pissed off americans who decide to shake off bunch of colonists yeah and they're fucking taxes and they're bullshit yeah and even though we'll get into this too this is also interestingly a period where when this war heats up is the first

time that there is a meeting between representatives from all 13 colonies so it's it's established as this precedent so the idea is do we do we join together as colonies to support the war effort to fight the french because the colonies had all they were just all independent of each other they didn't other than some trade had nothing to do with each other up to this point so they came up with uh the the chief architect of what they called the albany playing because it was done in albany york was none other than benjamin franklin and he published a very famous political cartoon of a snake in 13 segments and underneath it it says join or die which even though it didn't work the albany plan was approved by the the little convention they called but the state not states

yet but the colonies didn't approve it back home so it got rejected but it laid the groundwork and that slogan and even the image of a snake representing the colonies which will be used later in the revolution with the don't tread on me which is now used by douchebags okay so signing off i will just simply say if you want to follow me any of the crap that i do on the internet i have a website called jamiechambers.net that will take you to the other stuff if you want to financially support the stuff that we're doing with this you can check out uh my patreon at patreon.com slash jamiechambers and that's it for me bambi probably wants to avoid all contact yeah please don't don't look don't find her don't look for her if you see her in public don't

acknowledge her maybe wave it depends on what kind of day i'm having inside her yeah you will never find me on twitter ever um you possibly can find me on facebook but good luck with that i post never yeah it's i have zero online presence and i intend to keep it that way somewhat well except for now we're except well again this is very limited this is more like your online presence not mine you get to listen you to listen to bambi share her opinions and you can completely leave her yeah exactly so you know what you don't you don't have to even like my opinions i give no fox at all so i'm not even saying i'm right so forward your sexist and harassing emails to me your misogynist bullshit directly to jamie because i i will deal with it on her behalf

no interest so next time we will talk about george washington and the end of all this bullshit and some more douche baggery you