The campaign was over; but not its effects.  It remains to see what befell from the rout of Braddock and the unpardonable retreat of Dunbar from the frontier which it was his duty to defend.  Dumas had replaced Contrecoeur in the command of Fort Duquesne; and his first care was to set on the Western tribes to attack the border settlements.  His success was triumphant.  The Delawares and Shawanoes, old friends of the English, but for years past tending to alienation through neglect and ill-usage, now took the lead against them.  Many of the Mingoes, or Five Nation Indians on the Ohio, also took up the hatchet, as did various remoter tribes.  The West rose like a nest of hornets, and swarmed in fury against the English frontier.  Such was the consequence of the defeat of Braddock aided by the skilful devices of the French commander.  “It is by means such as I have mentioned,” says Dumas, “varied in every form to suit the occasion, that I have succeeded in ruining the three adjacent provinces, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, driving off the inhabitants, and totally destroying the settlements over a tract of country thirty leagues wide, reckoning from the line of Fort Cumberland.  M. de Contrecoeur had not been gone a week before I had six or seven different war-parties in the field at once, always accompanied by Frenchmen.  Thus far, we have lost only two officers and a few soldiers; but the Indian villages are full of prisoners of every age and sex.  The enemy has lost far more since the battle than on the day of his defeat."[332]

[Footnote 332:  Dumas au Ministre, 24 Juillet, 1756.]

Dumas, required by the orders of his superiors to wage a detestable warfare against helpless settlers and their families, did what he could to temper its horrors, and enjoined the officers who went with the Indians to spare no effort to prevent them from torturing prisoners.[333] The attempt should be set down to his honor; but it did not avail much.  In the record of cruelties committed this year on the borders, we find repeated instances of children scalped alive.  “They kill all they meet,” writes a French priest; “and after having abused the women and maidens, they slaughter or burn them."[334]

[Footnote 333:  Memoires de Famille de l’Abbe Casgrain, cited in Le Foyer Canadien, III. 26, where an extract is given from an order of Dumas to Baby, a Canadian officer.  Orders of Contrecoeur and Ligneris to the same effect are also given.  A similar order, signed by Dumas, was found in the pocket of Douville, an officer killed by the English on the Frontier. Writings of Washington, II. 137, note.]

[Footnote 334:  Rec.  Claude Godefroy Cocquard, S.J., a son Frere, Mars (?), 1757.]