by Alexis Coe
Mary made sure that Washington was a frequent visitor at Mount Vernon, and thus also at Belvoir, where he could observe elite masculinity up close. Washington supplemented his fieldwork by studying Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation, a sixteenth-century book on etiquette.4 He likely copied down all 110 lessons merely to work on his penmanship, but what he managed to absorb didn’t hurt his reputation among the gentry.
THE ABRIDGED RULES OF CIVILITY
NUMBER
RULE
2
When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usualy Discovered.
7
Put not off your Cloths in the presence of Others, nor go out your Chambers half Drest.
24
Do not laugh too loud or too much at any Publick [Spectacle].
54
Play not the Peacock, looking every where about you, to See if you be well Deck’t, if your Shoes fit well if your Stockings sit neatly, and Cloths handsomely.
56
Associate yourself with Men of good Quality if you Esteem your own Reputation; for ’tis better to be alone than in bad Company.
73
Think before you Speak pronounce not imperfectly nor bring ou[t] your Words too hastily but orderly & distinctly.
82
Undertake not what you cannot Perform but be Carefull to keep your Promise.
90
Being Set at meal Scratch not neither Spit Cough or blow your Nose except there’s a Necessity for it.
92
Take no Salt or cut Bread with your Knife Greasy.
100
Cleanse not your teeth with the Table Cloth Napkin Fork or Knife but if Others do it let it be done wt. a Pick Tooth.
Washington understood his role. He moved with seeming ease between the sometimes desperate conditions of Ferry Farm and the genteel abundance of Mount Vernon. On one occasion, however, he could not make the two-day ride to visit Lawrence because there wasn’t enough corn to feed his horse. According to Washington, the animal was “in very poor order,” a startling admission in Virginia, where men who traveled even the shortest distances on foot were understood to be poor. If the animals were hungry, then the future president and his family—and most of all, their slaves—were likely suffering, too.5
The masters of Mount Vernon and Belvoir knew that Washington was not one of them, but they recognized that he was a quick study. His eagerness to be helped no doubt flattered their egos, and he became a kind of pet project. They decided that he was in need of travel and adventure, and that the only way to get it was by sea.6 But since Washington could not pay his own way, they concluded he would have to join the British Royal Navy as a midshipman. They then launched an almost conspiratorial campaign to achieve their goal.
* * *
Mary Washington was no fool. At first, she seemed open to the idea of Washington’s enlistment in the navy, but it didn’t take long for her to realize she was being set up. She had learned in her youth to view the world with a critical eye, and in her time running a small farm, that eye had sharpened. Would Washington really find opportunity at sea? Was it better than what he would find at home? And what were the risks to her fourteen-year-old son?
Mary had good reason to believe they were great. Lawrence’s own letters home from service had been full of tales of disease, deprivation, and death. His brother-in-law had lost his life in a naval battle with the French. And both had been officers; Washington would be a midshipman, one of the lowest-ranking, subjugated positions on a vessel. (As it happens, her instincts were right. Of the recruits who joined the navy at Washington’s age, about a third did not survive their first two years in the navy—and there was little chance of promotion before then.)7
It seems Mary tried to discuss these concerns with Lawrence’s co-conspirators, but they had no patience for them. Robert Jackson, the executor of her late husband’s will, dismissed them as “trifling objections such as fond and unthinking mothers naturally suggest.”8
Others, however, agreed with her. Joseph Ball, Mary’s half brother in England, thought the whole thing was a terrible idea:
I think he had better be put apprentice to a tinker, for a common sailor before the mast has by no means the common liberty of the subject; for they will press him from ship to ship where he has fifty shillings a month, and make him take twenty-three, and cut and slash and use him like a negro, or rather like a dog.9
And with that, the matter was settled. Whether Mary handed down her decision or she reached it in consultation with her son, we’ll never know. But in the aftermath, no one seemed at odds over it. Washington visited Mount Vernon just as often, and Lawrence called on Joseph Ball the next time he went to England. He even brought back presents for Mary.10
If Washington had ever truly wanted to become a midshipman, his interest was probably less about the experience than the twenty-three shillings a month he would have earned. The situation at Ferry Farm was increasingly dire. “With much truth I can say, I never felt the want of money so sensibly since I was a boy of 15 years old,” he would later write.11 But his mother wouldn’t sacrifice him to the navy, no matter how bad things got.
* * *
Mary’s children stayed at home with her until there was a good reason for them to leave. In 1750, Washington gave away his sister, Betty, age seventeen, to Fielding Lewis, the son of a respectable merchant in town. Like her mother and grandmother, she pushed the boundaries of wifehood in early America: Her mark and signature can be found alongside her husband’s on business transactions, from land purchases to tobacco shipments.12
Washington, meanwhile, was becoming Mary’s business partner more than her child. An appetite for land ran in his father’s family, a side he seemed eager to emulate, and so Mary encouraged him to become a surveyor. The job attracted young men precisely because it offered upward mobility; a surveyor might earn a hundred pounds annually, and he was first on the scene, able to buy the choicest properties for himself. The profession suited Washington’s personality: He liked the outdoors, he was good at math, and he could use his father’s surveying tools. (He later brought some of those tools on his presidential tours of the northern and southern states.)
Lawrence and the Fairfaxes were supportive, too. They hired Washington to look after their western holdings, allowing him to skip a long apprenticeship. They also talked him up among the local gentry. By age seventeen, he was the surveyor of Culpeper County, the youngest ever hired, and by eighteen he had purchased thousands of acres of land in the Shenandoah Valley. Thanks to him, there was finally steady money coming in at Ferry Farm.
CHAPTER 2
“Pleases My Taste”
While Washington was thriving, his half brother was failing. Lawrence’s misfortunes began in 1749 with a cough so bad that he had to sail to England for medical care. It was tuberculosis, which only worsened during the trip. Nor did his illness improve the following year when he traveled to the spa town of Warm Springs, Virginia, to bathe in its reputedly restorative waters. Facing another long, frigid Virginia winter, during which he would most likely be quarantined from his wife, who had just given birth to a baby girl and had already lost three newborns, Lawrence set his sights on the Caribbean.
He chose to risk hurricane season in the West Indies in hopes that a few warm months of rest and relaxation in Barbados would help. He invited Washington, who had never been outside of Virginia, and together they boarded the Success, a small trading ship. For six weeks, Washi
ngton distracted himself from the “fickle & Merciless Ocean” by recording the weather and by fishing for barracuda, mahi mahi, and shark.1 (He rarely caught anything.) Finally, at four o’clock in the morning on November 2, 1751, they arrived in Barbados, a diminutive land mass that had become the economic and political hub of the British Empire.
The nineteen-year-old Washington was immediately taken with the flora and fauna. He sampled avocados, guavas, and pineapples for the first time, writing “[N]one pleases my taste as dos the Pine.”2 But he was most interested in the people—though not the enslaved Africans who were brought there in chains to grow and harvest sugar. “[A] Man of oppulent fortune And infamous Charactar was indicted for committing a rape on his servant Maid,” he reported, “and was brought in Guiltless and sav’d by one single Evidence.”3 Washington watched the “not overzealously beloved” governor in action and dined with the island’s elite. They invited him to their “Beefsteak and Tripe Club,” where he met judges and admirals and listened to the concerns of wealthy merchants and commodores. It was a far more diverse and worldly set of men than Lawrence knew back home.
Washington hardly mentions Lawrence, then thirty-four, who was usually too weak to leave his quarters. Soon enough, illness came for Washington, too. “Was strongly attacked with the small Pox,” he wrote in his diary on November 16, 1751. Although he emerged with some scarring on his face, he also acquired the gift of immunity. Smallpox was rare in the Colonies, and his resistance to the virus would serve him well during the Revolution.
Washington recovered quickly. Lawrence did not. In late December 1751, they parted ways in Barbados. Lawrence boarded a ship for Bermuda, and Washington headed home on the Industry. He spent nearly the entire trip seasick and was at one point robbed by a fellow passenger, but he was a changed man. He had survived a great illness and traveled what would ultimately be the farthest distance of his life.
When Washington returned home, he delivered letters from the gentry of Barbados to Robert Dinwiddie, the British governor of Virginia, who welcomed him with a dinner invitation. He seemed to finally feel like a person of distinction, confident enough of his prospects to court one wealthy, unattainable young woman after another. When Elizabeth Fauntleroy rejected him, he wrote to her father, who owned a considerable amount of land, seeking a visit with “Miss Betcy, in hopes of a revocation of the former, cruel sentence and see if I can meet with any alteration in my favor.”4 During a visit to Belvoir, Washington wrote to a friend that he’d flirted with George Fairfax’s sister-in-law, Mary Cary. She’s “a very agreeable Young Lady,” he said, but one who “revives my former Passion for your Low Land Beauty.”5 (The identity of the Low Land Beauty has never been confirmed.) If Miss Betcy’s wary father wrote back, Washington did not keep the letter—but it is safe to assume that Fauntleroy, a member of the Richmond elite, was uninterested in a young man of no fortune or great estate.
Lawrence found no more relief in Bermuda than he had in Barbados, or Virginia, or England. Weakened and exhausted, he soon returned to Mount Vernon and wrote his will. He died in July 1752.
Washington was presumably saddened by the loss of his half brother, but his letters on the subject were strictly about estate and inheritance matters. Lawrence had named him executor and an inheritor. He received several parcels of land in Fredericksburg, along with the promise of Mount Vernon, should Lawrence’s widow and daughter die. But Ann was a young woman. Her daughter, Sarah, was younger still. And it was not lost on Washington that the men in his family died young. For all he knew, he had a decade left, maybe two.
He wasted neither time nor opportunity, immediately setting his sights on Lawrence’s now vacant position in the Virginia militia. Despite having no military experience, he worked his connections and ultimately got the job—along with its annual salary of one hundred pounds. Washington went into his twenty-first birthday with the title of major, a dependable income, a flourishing surveying business, and more land than his father had ever owned. And although he had no diplomatic or foreign-language skills to speak of, Governor Dinwiddie selected him for a mission into the wilds of the Ohio territory. He carried with him an order signed by King George’s own hand.
CHAPTER 3
“The World on Fire”
Tanacharison, the Seneca chief, knew just what to call the twenty-one-year-old upstart who summoned him in 1753. His Christian name might have been George Washington, but Tanacharison, known to Europeans as the “Half-King,” would call him “Conotocarious.” In English, it translated to Town Taker, or Devourer of Villages.
Earlier chiefs, in an earlier century, had bestowed the same name on John Washington, George’s great-grandfather. It was a fair comparison: Both men served in the Virginia militia, and both had lit out for the frontier to secure the crown’s holdings. But while George was allied with the Indians against the French, John had been sent to confront the tribes about their alleged crimes against British settlers. His great-grandfather earned the name of Conotocarious when negotiations with Susquehannock chiefs turned violent; chaos erupted in the region, and the chiefs were murdered by white settlers.
Washington was clearly pleased to have inherited the murderous nickname. Decades later, when he had a legacy to consider and thus doctored other aspects of his record from this time, he left the episode relatively unchanged, and Conotocarious untouched. By then, he would have even more in common with John: In 1779, he ordered several Indian villages in western New York be razed to avenge and deter attacks on white settlers along the frontier.1
But in 1753, Washington’s orders from Dinwiddie, the British governor, urged discretion and caution. First, he was to ask the Indians to escort him and his party—an assistant and four woodsmen—into the frontier. The Half-King, as Washington called him, and three other prominent chiefs signed on. Next, Washington was to determine how many “Forts the French have erected, & where; How they are Garrison’d & appointed, & what is their Distance from each other. . . . what gave Occasion to this Expedition of the French. How they are like to be supported, & what their Pretentions are.”2 If, as Dinwiddie suspected, those French forts were on territory claimed by the British, Washington would demand their immediate withdrawal. If the French refused, he would return with a small contingent of Virginia troops. It was a tricky mission: Although traveling with armed men, he was supposed to stick with diplomacy.
Washington didn’t trust the Half-King or his other chiefs. “The Indians are mercenary,” he later wrote. “[E]very service of theirs must be purchased; and they are easily offended, being thoroughly sensible of their own importance.”3
Yet Washington and the chiefs had one thing in common: an enmity toward the French. As he well knew, the Half-King believed they had captured, cooked, and eaten his father. He exploited this the first chance he got. When Christopher Gist, a British colonial frontiersman, arrived at Great Meadows (present-day Pennsylvania) with a message that the French had inquired after the Half-King, Washington greatly exaggerated it. “I did not fail to let the young Indians who were in our Camp know, that the French wanted to kill the Half King,” he wrote in late May 1754. The manipulation “had its desired effect.” 4
In return, Washington received his own bad translation. A runner named Silver Heels delivered him a startling reconnaissance report from the Half-King that said some fifty French soldiers had been spotted no more than fifteen miles away. Unsure of their intentions, Washington felt obliged to make a move.
“I set out with 40 Men before 10, and was from that time till near Sun rise before we reach’d the Indian’s Camp, havg Marched in small path, & heavy Rain, and a Night as Dark as it is possible to conceive,” he recounted in a letter to Dinwiddie. On the way to rendezvous with the Half-King, his men “were frequently tumbling one over another, and often so lost that 15 or 20 Minutes search would not find the path again.”5 When they finally made it to the Half-King’s camp, Washington was met with disappointment. Th
e Half-King had mustered fewer than a dozen warriors, a quarter as many as he’d hoped. Still, those men knew how to track the French, so they had the element of surprise on their side.
It took them until dawn to find the enemy camp. A few groggy French soldiers were lighting fires or heading into the woods to relieve themselves, but of the thirty-five men below, most were still asleep. The Virginians probably fired the first shots as the French scrambled in confusion, taking cover and grabbing their muskets. Their weapons, however, were of little use. It had rained the previous night, and the French hadn’t bothered to keep them dry. “I can with truth assure you, I heard Bulletts whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound,” Washington wrote to his brother John Augustine on May 31.6 The skirmish was over in fifteen minutes.
When the smoke cleared, it revealed ten French bodies, men killed by British guns and Indian tomahawks. “The Indians scalped the Dead, and took away the most Part of their Arms,” Washington wrote in his diary. A few got away, and the rest—twenty-one men—were taken prisoner.
Washington had no idea what he’d done. No better evidence of this exists than another letter he sent Dinwiddie after the bloodbath. In a staggering demonstration of priorities, he spent the first eight paragraphs of the letter complaining about his pay (it denied him “the pleasure of good Living,” he said) before getting to the news of the massacre. Washington noted matter-of-factly that “We killed Mr. de Jumonville, the Commander of that Party.” (John Shaw, an eyewitness with a flair for the dramatic, claimed that the Half-King had split de Jumonville’s skull open with his tomahawk, lifted out his brain, and squished it in his hands, saying, “Thou art not yet dead, my father.”) This was a diplomatic nightmare, and so, in a letter to his superiors in London, Dinwiddie passed the buck. “[T]his little Skirmish was by the Half-King & their Indians, we were as auxiliaries to them, as my Orders to the Commander of our Forces [were] to be on the Defensive,” he wrote.7