John Forbes: Scotland, Flanders and the Seven Years’ War, 1707–1759 by John Oliphant (review)

London-based historian John Oliphant has written the first full-length biography of John Forbes, the British general who drove the French from Pennsylvania and founded Pittsburgh. While the victorious 1758 campaign that built Forbes’s reputation has been much studied, Oliphant examines Forbes more broadly in the context of character, relationships, identity, and professionalism as experienced on both sides of the Atlantic.

Forbes, born in Edinburgh in 1707, the same year as the formal union of England and Scotland to form the British state, was a posthumous son of a Scottish army officer who had been the unwitting bearer of the orders that triggered the infamous 1691 massacre of Glencoe. The Forbes family were lesser gentry among a Scottish warrior elite who made up about a quarter of officers in the eighteenth-century British army (24). Forbes joined the Royal North British Dragoons (Scots Greys) in 1729, where he served for the next twenty-eight years, diligently advancing in an army that operated on personal association via an impressive list of patrons that included Sir John Ligonier, John Campbell (4th Earl of Loudon), and Prince William Augustus (Duke of Cumberland).

Forbes was initially the Greys’ regimental surgeon, the only commission he could afford to purchase (a practice ended by the Cardwell Reforms of 1871). In 1735 he entered the command track by purchasing a cornet’s commission (equivalent to a second lieutenant). The War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) embroiled Britain and soldiers like Forbes in Flanders allied with Dutch and Austrian forces to defend what is now Belgium from invading French armies. Forbes purchased a lieutenancy and a captaincy in the Greys in 1742 and 1744, respectively, and also served as deputy quartermaster general under Ligonier from 1745. He saw combat in major battles, including the victory at Dettington (1743), with King George II in personal command, and defeat at Fontenoy (1745).

Following renewed war with France, Edward Braddock, the first British commander in chief of North America, perished in 1755 with much of his command at Monongahela in western Pennsylvania near Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh). Forbes’s friends Sir Peter Halkett and son James were among the slain, whose bones remained unburied and unavenged where they had fallen. Shortly thereafter, another Forbes associate, Loudon, succeeded Braddock while the dynamic William Pitt the Elder took direction of the floundering war effort. Forbes, who had become lieutenant-colonel some years before, left the Greys in 1757 to become Colonel commanding the 17th Regiment of Foot and soon joined Loudon in Halifax, part of an abortive attack on French Canada.

Forbes was influenced by the 1754 French military treatise Essai sur L’art De La Guerre, by Turpin de Crisse, on the value of woodcraft and irregular warfare and impressed by Robert Rogers and his rangers fighting in that manner. Forbes was soon ordered with his 17th Regiment to upstate New York to stabilize the frontier after the fall of Fort William Henry at Lake George. He met Sir William Johnson, crown agent for the Indians, whom he disliked, but learned to value Indians as both foes and allies. Thereafter, he was in New York City, increasingly ill, most likely stomach cancer that would eventually kill him. Loudon was recalled in December 1757, replaced by another Scot, James Abercrombie, tasked to capture Fort Carillion (Ticonderoga) on Lake Champlain. Additionally, Jeffrey Amherst and James Wolfe were to conquer French Canada while Forbes (now brigadier-general) would take Fort Duquesne in western Pennsylvania.

Forbes, was given the fewest resources, two regiments of regulars, the 77th (Highlanders) and the 60th (Royal Americans), plus colonial troops from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and the Lower Counties (Delaware). Burdened with ill health and crushing debt, well aware this was his last chance for distinction, he tactfully coordinated contending colonial politicians to push a disparate force, with its supply system, on a road cut through 150...