With one third of his men killed or wounded, in a heavy downpour as darkness fell, Washington agreed to surrender the fort. When the French attacked in early July, Washington’s detachment was badly overmatched. But the wooden palisades proved no match for the larger French force. Rightly predicting that the main body of French troops would soon descend on them, Washington and his small band of Virginia militia had proceeded to construct makeshift fortifications, which Washington named Fort Necessity. But on a rainy night two months later, Washington committed an error that would haunt him for years to come. Washington’s complicity in the Jumonville affair might have been left shrouded forever in the fog of war. Tanacharison’s warriors fell upon the remaining wounded Frenchmen and killed them, too. In full view of Washington and the British, Tanacharison said, “You are not yet dead, my father,” whereupon he drove his tomahawk into the defenseless Frenchman’s skull. In another version, Washington’s Indian ally, the Iroquois leader Tanacharison, did the deed. In one version of the French story, the British executed Jumonville with a musket shot to the head. And the French insisted that the attackers had murdered Jumonville in cold blood-that they had assassinated him after the fighting had stopped. The French commander, they said, had not resisted the British attack, but had called for a cease-fire. Jumonville, they said, had not been a combatant but an ambassador delivering a message, much like Washington the year before. According to the French, the entire attack was an outrage. But in French accounts, Jumonville was alive when the French company surrendered. In his official report of the engagement Washington would later write that the French commander, Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, was killed in the initial shooting. What happened next, however, has been obscured by controversy for two and a half centuries. That much is clear, or as clear as such things can be. Firing the first shots of what would become the Seven Years’ War, Washington and his men killed ten Frenchmen and took twenty-one prisoners in less than fifteen minutes. At a boulder-strewn glen between the Allegheny Mountains and the junction of the three rivers that form the Ohio Valley’s eastern end, Washington encircled and attacked an unsuspecting French encampment. Now, as rumors flew of further French incursions along the Ohio River, Washington went once again into the woods, this time with 160 members of the Virginia militia and a party of Iroquois warriors. The officer, a twenty-two-year-old named George Washington, had come to public attention a year before when he made his way through a barely mapped wilderness to deliver a defiant message to the encroaching French. IN 1754, a rash young officer in the Virginia militia became for a short while the world’s most notorious violator of the laws and usages of war. The authorized maxims and practices of war are the satire of human nature. Lincoln’s Code Chapter 1 The Rights of Humanity It is a compelling story of ideals under pressure and a landmark contribution to our understanding of the American experience. Lincoln’s Code reveals that the heated controversies of twenty-first-century warfare have roots going back to the beginnings of American history. Witt’s engrossing exploration of the dilemmas at the heart of the laws of war is a prehistory of our own era. In this deeply original book, John Fabian Witt tells the fascinating history of the laws of war and its eminent cast of characters-Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Lincoln-as they crafted the articles that would change the course of world history. By the twentieth century, Lincoln’s code would be incorporated into the Geneva Conventions and form the basis of a new international law of war. It announced standards of conduct in wartime-concerning torture, prisoners of war, civilians, spies, and slaves-that shaped the course of the Civil War. In the closing days of 1862, just three weeks before Emancipation, the administration of Abraham Lincoln commissioned a code setting forth the laws of war for US armies. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
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