k had reached Alexandria, and crawled
towards the scene of action with thin ranks, bad discipline, thirty
women and children, no tents, no blankets, no knapsacks, and for
munitions one barrel of spoiled gunpowder.[161] The case was still worse
with the regiment from North Carolina. It was commanded by Colonel
Innes, a countryman and friend of Dinwiddie, who wrote to him: "Dear
James, I now wish that we had none from your colony but yourself, for I
foresee nothing but confusion among them." The men were, in fact,
utterly unmanageable. They had been promised three shillings a day,
while the Virginians had only eightpence; and when they heard on the
march that their pay was to be reduced, they mutinied, disbanded, and
went home.

[Footnote 161: _Dinwiddie to the Lords of Trade, 24 July, 1754. Ibid. to
Delancey, 20 June, 1754._]

"You may easily guess," says Dinwiddie to a London correspondent, "the
great fatigue and trouble I have had, which is more than I ever went
through in my life." He rested his hopes on the session of his Assembly,
which was to take place in August; for he thought that the late disaster
would move them to give him money for defending the colony. These
meetings of the burgesses were the great social as well as political
event of the Old Dominion, and gave a gathering signal to the Virginian
gentry scattered far and wide on their lonely plantations. The capital
of the province was Williamsburg, a village of about a thousand
inhabitants, traversed by a straight and very wide street, and adorned
with various public buildings, conspicuous among which was William and
Mary College, a respectable structure, unjustly likened by Jefferson to
a brick kiln with a roof. The capitol, at the other end of the town, had
been burned some years before, and had just risen from its ashes. Not
far distant was the so-called Governor's Palace, where Dinwiddie with
his wife and two daughters exercised such official hospitality as his
moderate salary and Scottish thrift would permit.[162]

[Footnote 162: For a contemporary account of Williamsburg, Burnaby,
_Travels in North America_, 6. Smyth, _Tour in America_, I. 17,
describes it some years later.]

In these seasons of festivity the dull and quiet village was
transfigured. The broad, sandy street, scorching under a southern sun,
was thronged with coaches and chariots brought over from London at heavy
cost in tobacco, though soon to be bedimmed by Virginia roads and negr