A Quincy Family’s Connection to the Beginning of the Nation

This is the tenth year that volunteer
authors for the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County have written history
columns for the op-ed page of the

Herald-Whig’s

Sunday newspaper. And if
there is one thing that those more than 500 columns have demonstrated, it is
that Quincy and Adams County have been connected to some of the nation’s most
important historical events. This is the
first of two cases in point.

Fifty-nine years ago, Dr. Alcee Joseph
Jumonville III and wife Betty brought their young family with them to Quincy from
Louisiana after he had earned his doctorate in medicine from Louisiana State
University. Jumonville specialized in internal medicine and practiced for 42
years as a physician at Quincy Clinic. In 1994 he founded the Community
Outreach Clinic at Blessing Hospital. He and Betty also were active in American
Red Cross disaster services. Dr. Jumonville’s last disaster relief service assignment was in January 2002 when he
assisted in providing health services after 9/11 in New York City. Dr. Alcee
Jumonville III died on October 24, 2002, and is buried in Quincy’s Calvary
Cemetery.

The Jumonvilles five children, Alcee
Joseph IV, Louis Joseph, James Earl, Lucie Marie and Andrew Crouchet, who is a
highly regarded artist. He created the
bronze statue, Convergence of Purpose, which depicts Abraham Lincoln with
McLean County friends Jesse Fell, once a fruit farmer near Payson, and Judge
David Davis.

The Jumonvilles’ legacy in history pre-dates
the American Revolution. In fact, the death of a direct ancestor of the
Jumonvilles was its proximate cause. Here is the story:

On July 1, 1852, the French Marquis
Duquesne, arrived in Quebec as the French
governor general of New France, French-claimed territory that included today’s
Ohio, western Pennsylvania, northwestern West Virginia, and southeastern
Indiana. The British, too, claimed much of the same region, also known as the
Ohio Valley. Duquesne moved quickly to establish the French claim, ordering the
construction of four forts in the Upper Ohio Valley, today’s Pennsylvania. The
insurgency was not only a diplomatic insult to the British. It was a personal
problem for the Virginia colony’s Lt. Gov. Robert Dinwiddie and for 21-year-old
British Major George Washington. Along with Washington’s older brother Lawrence,
they had invested in the Ohio Company, to which the British King had granted
territory there.

In the summer of 1753, Dinwiddie ordered Major
Washington to assemble a company of militiamen and proceed to the Upper Ohio
Valley to evict the French. Washington recruited 159 Virginia militiamen, most
of them farmers untrained in military arts and sciences, to carry out Dinwiddie’s
order. If the French refused, the British volunteers were to force their evacuation.
Dinwiddie’s order gave Washington the authority to kill any French inhabitant
who refused to leave.

Along the way, Washington picked up a band
of Ohio Indians led by Iroquois chief Tanaghrisson. The British doubted his
tribal authority and thus called him “Half King.” On May 27, 1754, Indian
scouts reported that a French force of 50 men was hunting the British
volunteers. Washington dispatched half his troops to seek out the French
contingent. On the following morning, leaving other troops at an encampment, Washington
and 40 volunteers spread out in a U formation above a hollow where the Indians
had discovered the French. Half King’s warriors were positioned at the opening
of the hollow.

After a few days of rain, drizzle greeted
the French soldiers as they emerged from bark-covered wigwams that had
sheltered them. In his diary, Washington reported that the French discovered
his force and fired first, “whereupon I ordered my company to fire.” The fight
lasted 15 minutes. Washington reported one of his men killed and three wounded.
On the French side, ten had been killed and three wounded.

Among the French wounded was the
35-year-old French commander, Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville,
who had been hit by a Virginian’s musket ball. This direct ancestor of the Quincy Jumonville family was
from a large military family that descended from French nobility. Ensign Jumonville
was no stranger to battlefields. At the age of 15, he had served under his
father’s command at Baie des Puants (Green Bay), and he had clashed with the
British almost constantly ever since. Now, his fight was with the British
Virginia colony’s officer, George Washington.

Through
an interpreter, the wounded Jumonville tried to explain that he and his troops
had been sent by the commander of Fort Duquesne to request the peaceful
withdrawal of the British from the lands of the King of France. The interpreter
did not complete Jumonville’s remarks. The Half King rushed from the hollow’s
opening and interceded.

“Thou are not yet dead, my father,” the Indian
said. He brought down his tomahawk again and again on Jumonville’s head. The assault
split the French officer’s skull. Half King
reached into the splayed skull and pulled out the gray mass of Jumonville’s
brain and squeezed it between his fingers as if squeezing out the essence of
the French ensign itself. The Half King’s warriors then fell to scalping the other
dead and wounded French marines.

Major Washington was credited—and
blamed—for what followed. Horace Walpole,
an eighteenth century British
commentator, wrote “The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of
America set the world on fire.”

The murder of Ensign Jumonville ignited
the French and Indian War, a conflict that lasted seven years. The cost of aid
to its American colony during this war emptied the pockets of the British
crown, which was also occupied by its broader fight with France in Europe. This
financial condition greatly weakened Britain, which now required its American
colonists to help by paying more taxes.

The young ancestor of the Quincy
Jumonville family had not started just one war. The war’s effects would cause
the British American colony’s revolt.

The next article in this series will
be about a Quincy family ancestor who helped start the American Revolution.

Sources

Anderson, Fred. (2005).

The War that Made America:
A Short History of the French and Indian

War.

New
York: Penguin Books, 46.

Arthur, Stanley Clisby. (1971)

Old Families of
Louisiana.

Baton Rouge: Claitor’s
Publishing, 225.

Clary, David.

(2011). George Washington’s First
War.

New York: Simon and Schuster, 85.

Dinwiddie, Robert. Retrieved from

“Dr. Alcee J.
‘A.J.’ Jumonville, October 24, 2002.” Retrieved from

“Fort
Necessity, National Battlefield.” National Park Service, Retrieved from

Freeman, Douglas Southall. (1948).

George
Washington: A Biography, Young Washington

. Volume
1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 267-268.

Stark, Peter. (2018).

Young Washington: How
Wilderness and War Forged America’s Founding

Father.

New
York: Harper Collins, 41.