[Footnote 138:  Instructions to Our Trusty and Well-beloved Robert Dinwiddie, Esq., 28 Aug. 1753.]

The order was easily given; but to obey it needed men and money, and for these Dinwiddie was dependent on his Assembly, or House of Burgesses.  He convoked them for the first of November, sending Washington at the same time with the summons to Saint-Pierre.  The burgesses met.  Dinwiddie exposed the danger, and asked for means to meet it.[139] They seemed more than willing to comply; but debates presently arose concerning the fee of a pistole, which the Governor had demanded on each patent of land issued by him.  The amount was trifling, but the principle was doubtful.  The aristocratic republic of Virginia was intensely jealous of the slightest encroachment on its rights by the Crown or its representative.  The Governor defended the fee.  The burgesses replied that “subjects cannot be deprived of the least part of their property without their consent,” declared the fee unlawful, and called on Dinwiddie to confess it to be so.  He still defended it.  They saw in his demand for supplies a means of bringing him to terms, and refused to grant money unless he would recede from his position.  Dinwiddie rebuked them for “disregarding the designs of the French, and disputing the rights of the Crown”; and he “prorogued them in some anger."[140]

[Footnote 139:  Address of Lieutenant-Governor Dinwiddie to the Council and Burgesses, 1 Nov. 1753.]

[Footnote 140:  Dinwiddie Papers.]

Thus he was unable to obey the instructions of the King.  As a temporary resource, he ventured to order a draft of two hundred men from the militia.  Washington was to have command, with the trader, William Trent, as his lieutenant.  His orders were to push with all speed to the forks of the Ohio, and there build a fort; “but in case any attempts are made to obstruct the works by any persons whatsoever, to restrain all such offenders, and, in case of resistance, to make prisoners of, or kill and destroy them."[141] The Governor next sent messengers to the Catawbas, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Iroquois of the Ohio, inviting them to take up the hatchet against the French, “who, under pretence of embracing you, mean to squeeze you to death.”  Then he wrote urgent letters to the governors of Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Maryland, and New Jersey, begging for contingents of men, to be at Wills Creeks in March at the latest.  But nothing could be done without money; and trusting for a change of heart on the part of the burgesses, he summoned them to meet again on the fourteenth of February.  “If they come in good temper,” he wrote to Lord Fairfax, a nobleman settled in the colony, “I hope they will lay a fund to qualify me to send four or five hundred men more to the Ohio, which, with the assistance of our neighboring colonies, may make some figure.”

[Footnote 141:  Ibid.  Instructions to Major George Washington, January, 1754.]