d were ordered to proceed up the Potomac to
Alexandria, where a camp was to be formed. Thither, towards the end of
March, went Braddock himself, along with Keppel and Dinwiddie, in the
Governor's coach; while his aide-de-camp, Orme, his secretary, Shirley,
and the servants of the party followed on horseback. Braddock had sent
for the elder Shirley and other provincial governors to meet him in
council; and on the fourteenth of April they assembled in a tent of the
newly formed encampment. Here was Dinwiddie, who thought his troubles at
an end, and saw in the red-coated soldiery the near fruition of his
hopes. Here, too, was his friend and ally, Dobbs of North Carolina; with
Morris of Pennsylvania, fresh from Assembly quarrels; Sharpe of
Maryland, who, having once been a soldier, had been made a sort of
provisional commander-in-chief before the arrival of Braddock; and the
ambitious Delancey of New York, who had lately led the opposition
against the Governor of that province, and now filled the office
himself,--a position that needed all his manifold adroitness. But, next
to Braddock, the most noteworthy man present was Shirley, governor of
Massachusetts. There was a fountain of youth in this old lawyer. A few
years before, when he was boundary commissioner in Paris, he had had the
indiscretion to marry a young Catholic French girl, the daughter of his
landlord; and now, when more than sixty years old, he thirsted for
military honors, and delighted in contriving operations of war. He was
one of a very few in the colonies who at this time entertained the idea
of expelling the French from the continent. He held that Carthage must
be destroyed; and, in spite of his Parisian marriage, was the foremost
advocate of the root-and-branch policy. He and Lawrence, governor of
Nova Scotia, had concerted an attack on the French fort of Beausejour;
and, jointly with others in New England, he had planned the capture of
Crown Point, the key of Lake Champlain. By these two strokes and by
fortifying the portage between the Kennebec and the Chaudiere, he
thought that the northern colonies would be saved from invasion, and
placed in a position to become themselves invaders. Then, by driving the
enemy from Niagara, securing that important pass, and thus cutting off
the communication between Canada and her interior dependencies, all the
French posts in the West would die of inanition.[197] In order to
commend these schemes to the Home Government