he
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._]

The session began. Again, somewhat oddly, yet forcibly, the Governor set
before the Assembly the peril of the situation, and begged them to
postpone less pressing questions to the exigency of the hour.[142] This
time they listened; and voted ten thousand pounds in Virginia currency
to defend the frontier. The grant was frugal, and they jealously placed
its expenditure in the hands of a committee of their own.[143]
Dinwiddie, writing to the Lords of Trade, pleads necessity as his excuse
for submitting to their terms. "I am sorry," he says, "to find them too
much in a republican way of thinking." What vexed him still more was
their sending an agent to England to complain against him on the
irrepressible question of the pistole fee; and he writes to his London
friend, the merchant Hanbury: "I have had a great deal of trouble from
the factious disputes and violent heats of a most impudent, troublesome
party here in regard to that silly fee of a pistole. Surely every
thinking man will make a distinction between a fee and a tax. Poor
people! I pity their ignorance and narrow, ill-natured spirits. But, my
friend, consider that I could by no mean