From late March through late April 1755, General Edward Braddock made John Carlyle’s newly completed stone mansion his headquarters. On April 14 and 15 he convened five colonial governors there: Dinwiddie of Virginia, Sharpe of Maryland, Morris of Pennsylvania, DeLancey of New York, and Shirley of Massachusetts. Their task was to plan the campaign against the French at Fort Duquesne. The governors told Braddock their assemblies would never fund a common war chest and recommended that Parliament raise the money by taxing the colonies directly. That recommendation traveled to London and resurfaced a decade later as the Stamp Act, the first in the chain of grievances that ended in revolution. George Washington, who had volunteered as Braddock’s aide, emerged from the disaster on the Monongahela that July as Virginia’s most prominent soldier.
Carlyle, for his part, grumbled about how the general’s staff treated his house, even as he called the gathering the grandest congress the continent had ever seen. Willing host or not, his home made Alexandria the setting for decisions that shaped American and world history. John Carlyle died in 1780 and is buried in the Presbyterian Meeting House burial ground on South Fairfax Street.
Carlyle’s grave is a stop on the Rebellious Scoundrels walking tour.
