by Ron Chernow
Ann Fairfax grew up on the family estate, Belvoir, which shimmered like a radiant mirage on the Potomac River, four miles downstream from Mount Vernon. This luxurious realm encapsulated the youthful fantasies of George Washington, who later described it thus: “Within full view of Mount Vernon, separated therefrom by water only, [it] is one of the most beautiful seats on the river . . . there are near 2,000 acres of land belonging to the tract, surrounded in a manner by water.” Of the two-story Georgian brick mansion that stood as its stately centerpiece, Washington recalled that it “stood on high and commanding ground.”3 The house was approached by a circular drive and a huge courtyard, with formal grounds, stables, a coach house, and lavish gardens laid out with the full grandeur of an opulent British country house.
By marrying Ann Fairfax, Lawrence Washington crossed a social chasm that segregated the merely comfortable from the fabulously rich, making George a welcome visitor at Belvoir at the impressionable age of eleven. When Lawrence and Ann lost four children in infancy, it only fortified their bond with George. Ushered into the rarefied milieu of Belvoir, George befriended the colonel’s son, George William Fairfax, who was eight years his senior and rather snobbish; the latter faintly praised Belvoir as a “tolerable cottage” in a “wooded world.”4 A portrait of the fastidiously dressed George William shows a man with a long, narrow face and an alert, slightly suspicious glance. The Fairfax connection opened up a world of extraordinary magnificence for young Washington, who must have felt a rough country bumpkin in comparison. His amazing career would never have unfolded had his fortunes not meshed so neatly with the interests of this ruling clan.
George won more than grudging entree to the Fairfax estate, for Colonel Fairfax spied unusual potential in this capable youth, invited him on foxhunts, and took an active interest in furthering his career. The colonial world revolved around such pivotal connections. To secure a powerful patron was an indispensable prerequisite to advancement for a boy born outside the upper gentry. In the mid-1750s, while coaching his younger brother Jack, George exhorted him to spend more time at Belvoir: “I should be glad to hear that you live in perfect harmony and good fellowship with the family at Belvoir, as it is in their power to be serviceable upon many occasions to us as young beginners . . . to that family I am under many obligations, particularly to the old gentleman.”5 That old gentleman, Colonel Fairfax, seemed to dote on Washington and signed his letters to him “your assured and loving friend.”6 The Fairfax sponsorship lifted George above the mass of Virginia commoners and made the world of the highborn seem tantalizingly within reach. Perhaps he relived his own youth when he later instructed a young relative, “It is therefore absolutely necessary, if you mean to make any figure upon the stage, that you should take the first steps right.”7 From their letters, we can also tell that George and Colonel Fairfax shared copies of Caesar’s Commentaries and a life of Alexander the Great and frequently swapped views on military heroes from antiquity. Since the colonel once boasted that he had trained himself to make no “outward show” of emotion, he may also have provided a model of restrained behavior for George as well.8 Colonel Fairfax knew George thoroughly enough that, in writing to Mary Washington, he pinpointed her son’s outstanding flaw, which he must correct: “I wish I could say that he governs his temper.”9 It should be said that the authenticity of this letter has been questioned.
In September 1746 Lawrence Washington and Colonel Fairfax concocted a plan to spring fourteen-year-old George from his mother’s domination and launch him on a promising career in the Royal Navy. At a confidential meeting in Fredericksburg, designed to keep Mary Washington securely in the dark, Fairfax transmitted to George a letter from Lawrence telling of an open position for a midshipman aboard a royal frigate then anchored in Virginia. When George acquiesced in the idea, Fairfax reported back to Lawrence that his brother vowed to “be steady and thankfully follow your advice as his best friend.”10 As George later acknowledged, it was “the wish of my eldest brother . . . that this should take place.”11 From Lawrence, George received a letter endorsing the plan, which he was then to deliver to his mother, whose approval was hardly taken for granted.
At first, Mary Washington gave qualified approval to the move. Perhaps eager to flee from Ferry Farm, George indicated that he had his “baggage prepared for embarkation.” 12 Then Mary consulted a family friend, Robert Jackson, who supported the plan, but she seized on passing statements that he made to confirm her growing reservations. As Jackson informed Lawrence, “She offers several trifling objections such as fond and unthinking mothers naturally suggest and I find that one word against his going has more weight than ten for it.”13 Mary also consulted her rich half brother in England, Joseph Ball, who sent back a canny analysis about naval discrimination against colonials. Advising that George be apprenticed instead to a tinker (a vendor of household utensils), Joseph noted that “a common sailor before the mast has by no means the common liberty of the subject; for they will press him from a ship where he has 50 shillings a month . . . and use him like a Negro, or rather, like a dog.”14 That his uncle wanted George to train as a tinker bespeaks low family expectations that would have struck terror into this upwardly bound young man. Mary finally vetoed the idea of George joining the navy and thereby performed a major service in American history, saving her son for a future army career.
Whether Mary was persuaded by reasonable arguments, or simply didn’t wish to part with her robust eldest son around the farm, is impossible to know. One can say with certainty that it was the first of many times she seemed to measure her son’s worth not by what he might accomplish elsewhere but by what he could do for her, even if it meant thwarting his career. She would always be strangely indifferent toward his ambitions, making decisions about him from a purely self-interested standpoint. On the other hand, she was a single mother, clearly valued George’s abilities as the eldest son, and deemed him a necessary substitute for the missing father.
The following year, when George was fifteen, his family underwent a period of extreme financial stringency that ended his education. During a severe cash crunch in later life, he wrote that “with much truth I can say, I never felt the want of money so sensibly since I was a boy of 15 years old.”15 With his mother having ruled out a seaman’s life, George opted to become a surveyor. Throughout his career, he would cherish real estate as an almost foolproof investment that always appreciated in value. Indeed, he could already see that most, if not all, of the major Virginia fortunes had arisen from rampant land speculation. Surveying was a well-trodden path for rising young men, and not only because surveyors could book rich fees as settlers sprawled into the western wilderness. While acting as agents for others, young surveyors with an eye on the main chance could scout choice properties for themselves. Such work could eventually elevate young men hampered by meager capital into the elite club of well-off planters.
Surveying suited Washington’s talents perfectly. He was proficient in math, exacting in approaching problems, and fond of the outdoors. His father had left behind a complete set of surveying instruments, and George ran his first lines at Ferry Farm. By October 1747 he had netted three pounds and two shillings by apprenticing himself to a local surveyor, and he initiated the habit of recording his expenses and revenues with scrupulous care. George Washington was always a man who monitored his every move. He regarded his knowledge of math and surveying as preliminary steps toward becoming a top-notch planter, observing that nothing was more “necessary to any person possessed of a large landed estate, the bounds or some part or other of which are always in controversy.”16 For the rest of his life, Washington was stamped by his practical experience as a surveyor. At Mount Vernon, he had an irresistible penchant for carrying a compass and performing his own measurements. Even when he toured the thirteen states as first president, he methodically recorded the topographical features of places, as if he remained a working surveyor. Whether as planter or president, his study was liberally supplied wit
h maps and charts.
Young Washington’s emergence as a surveyor had a fortuitous start. In 1746 Baron Fairfax, the absentee proprietor of the Northern Neck, visited Virginia to canvass his vast domain and stayed at Belvoir. Portraits show a shrewd, worldly man with a jowly face and intelligent eyes. He had the ultimate power to sell and lease all lands in the Northern Neck. Apparently pleased by what he saw, this veteran foxhunter decided to erect a hunting lodge for himself, known as Greenway Court, in the Shenandoah Valley. This quickened the development of his western lands, producing a windfall for the surveyors he employed. George Washington was splendidly poised to benefit from this development. His stalwart patron, Colonel Fairfax—now head of the King’s Council, the upper house of the Virginia legislature—hired the surveyors, and his son, George William, was assigned to sell the leaseholds.
Thus in March 1748 sixteen-year-old George Washington saddled his horse and joined his friend George William Fairfax on a surveying expedition across the Blue Ridge Mountains, plunging into the wilds of the Shenandoah Valley. Their mission was to carve up Lord Fairfax’s acreage into salable leaseholds. To mark this rite of passage, George Washington set quill to paper and began a travel diary entitled “A Journal of My Journey over the Mountains.” It represents his earliest piece of writing of any length. Here, beyond the pale of Virginia society, he told of pounding rains that swelled rivers and mountain winds that played havoc with his belongings. Overflowing waterways had to be forded, primitive roads traversed. Washington navigated canoes down whitewater streams in driving rain, shot wild turkey, and slept on bearskins under the stars or in smoky tents. This was a raw, violent world such as Washington had never experienced before, but he adapted to it with remarkable speed and aplomb and quickly grew inured to hardship.
This fastidious young man learned to deal with the many earthy surprises presented by frontier life. Early in the trip, when the group stayed with a Captain Isaac Pennington, George made the mistake of expecting clean, comfortable quarters. After he stripped off his clothes and climbed into the rustic bed, he found it to be “nothing but a little straw, matted together without sheets or anything else, but only one threadbare blanket with double its weight of vermin, such as lice, fleas, etc.” He promptly got up and put back on his clothes. Worn out from a day of riding, he managed to fall asleep, but resolved henceforth “to sleep in the open air before a fire.”17 The next night at Fredericktown, he got a feather bed with fresh sheets and fumigated the lice he had picked up the previous night.
On March 23 Washington registered his first encounter with Native Americans, depicting his party as “agreeably surprised” by meeting thirty Indians fresh from battle who were dismayed to be bearing only a single scalp. Washington and his group plied the Indians with liquor, which prompted them to form a circle and leap about in a war dance, accompanied by a deerskin drum and the dry rattle of a gourd. George described how the “best dancer jumps up as one awaked out of a sleep and runs and jumps about the ring in a most comical manner.”18 Despite the martial nature of the dance, the gory detail of the scalp, and the fact that they had goaded the Indians into getting drunk, the young surveyor only saw something picturesque and outlandish in the spectacle. Still insular in his reactions, he chided one group of Dutch settlers as “ignorant” because they “would never speak English, but when spoken to, they speak all Dutch.”19 A patronizing streak in George later emerged when he derided some settlers as “a parcel of barbarians and an uncouth set of people.”20 Whatever his inner reservations about the frontier folk, George succeeded in handling them with uncommon finesse.
That George, tutored by Lawrence and the Fairfax family, was already a well-bred young man is reflected in his disdain for the crude existence he confronted. Yet a rugged side of his nature gloried in this unruly world. Possessed of unusual equanimity, he showed that he could shuttle gracefully between worlds of extreme gentility and roughness. He became accustomed to roasting food on sharpened sticks over open fires and dining on wooden chips instead of plates. Nothing appeared to faze him. One windy night in early April, George awoke to discover that the straw mat he was sleeping on had caught fire; luckily, one of the men woke up and stamped it out. The next night was even more blustery. “We had our tent carried quite off with the wind and was obliged to lie the latter part of the night without covering.”21 All this he took in stride.
On April 13, 1748, toughened by a month of adventures, Washington finished his surveying trip. He had shown sporadic traces of an aesthetic sense, rhapsodizing about the “beautiful groves of sugar trees” and the “richness of the land,” but the trip had mainly alerted him to the extraordinary business opportunities that abounded in these virgin lands, commencing a lifelong fascination with westward expansion.22 With extensive knowledge of these frontier outposts, Washington would emerge as the founder best able to visualize the ample contours of the American future, making the notion of a continental empire more than a mere abstraction.
Lawrence Washington helped to spark George’s interest in distant settlements, having joined with Thomas and William Fairfax in a land venture called the Ohio Company that ultimately gained the right to half a million acres of frontier land. The locus of settlement would be the so-called Ohio Country, west of the Allegheny Mountains, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers flowed together to form the headwaters of the Ohio River; the place was widely known as the Forks of the Ohio. It would be the competing claims of England and France to this bountiful territory that would shortly thrust George Washington into his first military confrontations and chart a direction for his future life.
BY THE LATE 1740S George Washington had his feet solidly planted in two worlds: while burnishing his social skills for polite Virginia society, he also readied himself for wilderness service. Now that he had found a professional footing, he needed to dress the part. He had already acquired a respectable wardrobe, taking along on one trip nine shirts, six linen waistcoats, four neckcloths, and seven caps.23 Sometime in 1749-50 he jotted down, with impressive exactitude, a 152-word description of a frock coat he wanted made, which was to have “a lapel breast, the lapel to contain on each side six button holes and to be about 5 or 6 inches wide, all the way equal, and to turn as the breast on the coat does; to have it made very long-waisted and in length to come down to or below the bent of the knee, the waist from the armpit to the fold to be exactly as long or longer than from thence to the bottom, not to have more than one fold in the skirt etc. etc.”24 No tailor could have requested more specific instructions: Washington was designing his coat down to the smallest detail. Throughout his life, he exhibited a faultless precision in dress, regarding a person’s apparel as the outward sign of inner order.
Still rather awkward in society—“He was a very bashful young man,” one matron later recalled. “I used often to wish that he would talk more”—Washington was trying to acquire other social habits of the Virginia gentry.25 He learned to dance, an activity in which he sparkled, and gambled at whist and loo, card games then voguish among the British aristocracy. But he remained trapped in an adolescent dependence on his mother, which cramped his social style, and he suffered from the spartan life at Ferry Farm. In one letter to Lawrence, he regretted that he could not join him on a trip to the colonial capital at Williamsburg: “My horse is in very poor order to undertake such a journey and is in no likelihood of mending for want of corn sufficient to support him.”26
The young man was highly responsive to female charms. In December 1748 his friend George William Fairfax, twenty-four, had married eighteen-year-old Sarah Cary, who was to be immortalized under her married name of Sally Fairfax. The alluring daughter of Wilson Cary, an eminence in the House of Burgesses, Sally had grown up in a mansion on the James River near Hampton Roads. Her family was rich and cultured, boasting a well-stocked library, and Sally was fluent in French. A photograph of a lost portrait shows a comely young woman with smooth, creamy shoulders and a long neck, wearing a simple but glamorous
décolleté dress that discloses an ample expanse of bosom. A woman of obvious beauty and sensuality, she has bright, sprightly eyes and an alluring personality. For an inexperienced youth like George, Sally, two years his senior, must have exuded a bewitching air of mystery. If his attraction to her blossomed into a full-blown infatuation, it probably started innocently enough.
Sometime around 1749-50 George became smitten with a young woman he coyly referred to as the “Low Land Beauty” and dallied with another he referred to as “very agreeable,” who was likely Mary Cary, Sally’s younger sister.27 George found solace by copying out two banal poems about a man spurned by his lady love. In one poem, the poet is tortured by secret love: “Ah! woe’s me, that I should Love and conceal, / Long have I wish’d, but never dare reveal.”28 In the second poem, the poet stands helpless beford his ardor. “Oh Ye Gods why should my Poor Resistless Heart / Stand to oppose thy might and Power / At Last surrender to cupids feather’d Dart / and now lays Bleeding every Hour / For her that’s Pityless of my grief and Woes / And will not on me Pity take.”29 But Washington was not born to pine away as an idle, lovesick youth.
In the spring of 1749 he again profited from his connection with brother Lawrence when he helped to survey the new Potomac port of Alexandria, north of Mount Vernon; Lawrence served as a trustee of the town. A more momentous change occurred in July 1749, when George was appointed surveyor of Culpeper County. Even though the College of William and Mary, under a 1693 charter, retained the power to name the county surveyor, it proved susceptible to the blandishments of influential men. When seventeen-year-old George Washington captured this lucrative sinecure, becoming the youngest official surveyor in Virginia history, it reflected his privileged friendship with the omnipotent Lord Fairfax. Instead of starting out as a lowly, obscure apprentice, the young man was enabled by patronage to skip the preliminary steps. As Marcus Cunliffe has noted, the young Washington “was not an intellectual genius or the heir to a great fortune,” but “he was evidently energetic, reliable, and canny.”30