1755

Braddock

“I have the pleasure to acquaint you that General Braddock came to my house last Sunday night,” writes Dinwiddie, at the end of February, to Governor Dobbs of North Carolina.  Braddock had landed at Hampton from the ship “Centurion,” along with young Commodore Keppel, who commanded the American squadron.  “I am mighty glad,” again writes Dinwiddie, “that the General is arrived, which I hope will give me some ease; for these twelve months past I have been a perfect slave.”  He conceived golden opinions of his guest.  “He is, I think, a very fine officer, and a sensible, considerate gentleman.  He and I live in great harmony.”

Had he known him better, he might have praised him less.  William Shirley, son of the Governor of Massachusetts, was Braddock’s secretary; and after an acquaintance of some months wrote to his friend Governor Morris:  “We have a general most judiciously chosen for being disqualified for the service he is employed in in almost every respect.  He may be brave for aught I know, and he is honest in pecuniary matters."[192] The astute Franklin, who also had good opportunity of knowing him, says:  “This general was, I think, a brave man, and might probably have made a good figure in some European war.  But he had too much self-confidence; too high an opinion of the validity of regular troops; too mean a one of both Americans and Indians."[193] Horace Walpole, in his function of gathering and immortalizing the gossip of his time, has left a sharply drawn sketch of Braddock in two letters to Sir Horace Mann, written in the summer of this year:  “I love to give you an idea of our characters as they rise upon the stage of history.  Braddock is a very Iroquois in disposition.  He had a sister who, having gamed away all her little fortune at Bath, hanged herself with a truly English deliberation, leaving only a note upon the table with those lines:  ‘To die is landing on some silent shore,’ etc.  When Braddock was told of it, he only said:  ’Poor Fanny!  I always thought she would play till she would be forced to tuck herself up.’” Under the name of Miss Sylvia S——­, Goldsmith, in his life of Nash, tells the story of this unhappy woman.  She was a rash but warm-hearted creature, reduced to penury and dependence, not so much by a passion for cards as by her lavish generosity to a lover ruined by his own follies, and with whom her relations are said to have been entirely innocent.  Walpole continues:  “But a more ridiculous story of Braddock, and which is recorded in heroics by Fielding in his Covent Garden Tragedy, was an amorous discussion he had formerly with a Mrs. Upton, who kept him.  He had gone the greatest lengths with her pin-money, and was still craving.  One day, that he was very pressing, she pulled out her purse and showed him that she had but twelve or fourteen shillings left.  He twitched it from her:  ‘Let me see that.’  Tied up at the other end he found five guineas.  He took them, tossed the empty purse in her face, saying:  ’Did you mean to cheat me?’ and never went near her more.  Now you are acquainted with General Braddock.”