by Ron Chernow
As he set up camp at Fort Dinwiddie in Winchester, Virginia, Washington ran into such a chaotic situation that he threatened to resign less than two months after taking the post. He told Dinwiddie that he couldn’t commandeer a single horse in the area without threatening the inhabitants. The House of Burgesses had exempted property owners from the draft, leaving poor men to bear the common burden. Washington had a dreadful time raising troops in this rough, brawling area, where settlers resented coercive recruiting methods. In one letter, he gave a sharp tongue-lashing to a recruiting officer who had resorted to terror to collar men, chiding him for “forcibly taking, confining and torturing those who would not voluntarily enlist” and noting that this “not only cast a slur upon your own character, but reflect[ed] dishonour upon mine.”7 Despite such warnings, Washington inspired considerable fear in the region, although he vowed to Dinwiddie that he would persevere until the inhabitants “execute what they threaten, i.e. ‘to blow out my brains.’”8 When one captain informed Washington that, contrary to regimental rules, his company included two blacks and two mulattoes, the short-handed Washington allowed them to remain in an auxiliary capacity.
Once herded into service, the men deserted in droves, taking clothing and arms with them. Washington responded by clapping deserters into chains, throwing them into a “dark room,” and flogging them vigorously. The only way to avert costly desertions, Washington avowed, was to “terrify the soldiers from such practices.”9 In October 1755 he and Dinwiddie lobbied the Virginia assembly for a bill to permit the death sentence for mutiny, desertion, and willful disobedience. Although Washington wasn’t a martinet, neither was he squeamish about meting out harsh punishment. His policy was to be tough but scrupulously fair, and his inflexible sense of justice didn’t shrink from applying lashes to deserters. In 1756 he decreed the death penalty for one Henry Campbell, whom he labeled “a most atrocious villain” who “richly merits an ignominious death.”10 Campbell had not only deserted but encouraged seven others to do so. Washington made a point of hanging people in public to deter others. His frontier experience only darkened his view of human nature, and he saw people as motivated more by force than by kindness. “Lenity, so far from producing its desired effects, rather emboldens them in these villainous undertakings,” he told Dinwiddie.11 Washington’s methods, seemingly cruel to modern eyes, were standard practice in the British Army of his day.
Washington remained a stickler for discipline, which he identified as “the soul of an army,” and he encouraged military discipline even in private matters.12 Scornful of Virginia’s licentious culture of gambling, whoring, and drinking, which was especially disruptive in an army, he set down strict moral standards for his men, and his use of corporal punishment gradually expanded. Unwilling to tolerate swearing, he warned that offenders would receive twenty-five lashes for uttering an oath, with more severe punishment reserved for second offenses. He was so upset by men “incessantly drunk and unfit for service” that he ordered fifty lashes for any man caught drinking in Winchester gin shops.13 As an antidote to such behavior, Washington lobbied for the appointment of a regimental chaplain. “Common decency, sir, in a camp calls for the services of a divine,” Washington informed the Governor’s Council, stating that such an appointment “ought not to be dispensed with, although the world should be so uncharitable as to think us void of religion and incapable of good instructions.”14
With a sovereign faith in leadership by example, Washington believed that courage and cowardice originated from the top of an army. As he wrote during the American Revolution: “This is the true secret . . . that wherever a regiment is well officered, the men have behaved well—when otherwise, ill—the [misconduct] or cowardly behavior always originating with the officers, who have set the example.”15 Like his mother, Washington tended to stint on praise, reflecting his stoic belief that officers didn’t need encouragement since they were simply doing their duty. When he offered praise, he was careful to direct it not at individuals, but at the regiment as a whole.
In his correspondence at the time, Washington comes across as a young man who couldn’t step back, laugh at himself, or leaven responsibility with humor. Nevertheless he proved popular among his officers, who valued his courage, dignity, and even-handed treatment. “Our colonel is an example of fortitude in either danger or hardships and by his easy, polite behavior has gained not only the regard but affection of both officers and soldiers,” wrote one officer.16 At the same time Washington’s code of leadership stipulated that, for maximum effect, the commander should be cordial but not too familiar, producing respect instead of affection. As one writer later summed up this strategy: “Power required distance, he seems to have reasoned, familiarity and intimacy eroded it.”17 This view of leadership unfortunately had a way of distancing Washington from his subordinates and preventing relaxed camaraderie.
From a strategic standpoint, Washington was frustrated by the wartime role that the assembly had assigned to his regiment. While he advocated an offensive posture to end frontier raids by marching on Fort Duquesne, the assembly opted for a purely defensive stance, creating a string of frontier outposts. This, Washington noted cynically, was done “more with a view to quiet the fears of the inhabitants than from any expectation of giving security on so extensive a line to the settlements.” 18 It thrust him into the untenable position of combating raids that never ended. In the meantime, the British shifted the major focus of the war to Canada and points north, leaving the Ohio Valley as a sideshow. This experience of being set up for failure, as he saw it, haunted Washington for the rest of his life.
While Washington was suffering from notoriety caused by tough recruiting methods, he stood for election to the House of Burgesses in Frederick County, which included Winchester. He was qualified to run there because his Bullskin Plantation lay in the region. Later in his career, the word defeat never appeared in the Washington lexicon, but he took a sound drubbing in this first election. His friends entered his name at the last minute, which may account for his poor showing. Already interested in running for office, Washington may not have known that his friends had placed him in contention. At the time it was thought unseemly for candidates to engage in electioneering, so they relied on proxies, professing all the while a saintly indifference to power. Luckily for Washington, the age frowned upon direct, backslapping politics, which would never have suited his reticent style.
At the time there were no secret ballots. While an open voting system was thought to prevent corruption, it enhanced the power of landowners who could personally monitor how their tenants voted. Voters stepped forward to announce their votes, which were then recorded by clerks seated at a table. At the election in Winchester on December 10, 1755, Washington was crushed by his two opponents; Hugh West received 271 votes, Thomas Swearingen 270, and Washington a mere 40. His friend and fellow officer Adam Stephen tried to soften the blow by blaming his eleventh-hour entry into the race. “I think your poll was not despicable, as the people were a stranger [to] your purpose until the election began,” he wrote.19 For future use, Washington pocketed a sheet with the voting tally, as if resolved to fare better next time.
As we recall, Washington had refrained from standing for election in Fairfax County because it would have pitted him against George William Fairfax, Sally’s husband. According to legend, Washington attended the Fairfax County election and ended up in a heated exchange about George William with one William Payne, who favored an opposing candidate. Their confrontation grew so angry that Payne struck Washington with a stick, knocking him to the ground. When Washington got to his feet, he had to be restrained from assaulting Payne. In the prevalent honor culture of the day, Washington might have been expected to issue an invitation to a duel. Instead, he sent Payne an apology forthwith. Whether true or apocryphal, the story squares with the fact that Washington never fought a duel and usually tried to harmonize differences after even the most withering arguments.
FROM HIS LOFTY P
ERCH atop the Virginia Regiment, Washington kept bucking for a royal commission. His frustration crested in late 1755, when he clashed with a man named John Dagworthy at Fort Cumberland on the Maryland frontier. As a colonial captain from Maryland, Dagworthy held a rank that seemed inferior to Washington’s, but he claimed superior authority based on an old royal commission. Writing to Dinwiddie, Washington threatened to resign if he had to truckle to the hated Dagworthy. Dinwiddie appealed to Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts, a barrister who had succeeded Braddock as supreme commander of British forces in North America. Aiming at deeper institutional change, Washington also wanted Shirley to absorb his regiment into the regular British Army, removing the two-tiered system that had bedeviled him. Governor Dinwiddie granted him permission to travel to Boston so that he could confront Shirley in person. When he set off for Boston in February 1756, Washington was accompanied by two aides and two slaves who sported the fine livery custom-made in London. In Philadelphia the young colonel, very dashing in his blue regimentals, enjoyed his first taste of a northern city and embarked on a shopping spree for clothing, hats, jewelry, and saddles. He was pleased by the clean, well-ordered town, which a friend was to tout to him as the peaceful home “of many nations and religions,” while expressing admiration for “that great man Mr. Penn.”20 Christopher Gist had already notified him that his fame had spread to the city. “Your name is more talked of in Philadelphia than that of any other person in the army,” he had written the previous fall .21
In New York, Washington socialized with his friend Beverley Robinson, son of the powerful speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and he may have entered into a romantic dalliance with Robinson’s sister-in-law, Mary “Polly” Philipse. The twenty-six-year-old Polly would have been a prime catch for an upwardly mobile young man: she was slim, dark-haired, beautiful, and heiress to a colossal fortune. Unsubstantiated legend claims that Washington proposed marriage; if so, he lost out to Major Roger Morris, son of an English architect, who had fought with Washington at Braddock’s defeat.
By the time he moved on to Boston, Washington’s triumphal journey attracted considerable interest. When he arrived, the Boston Gazette saluted him as “the Hon. Colonel Washington, a gentleman who has deservedly a high reputation of military skill, integrity, and valor, though success has not always attended his undertakings.” 22 Aside from Washington’s military renown, Governor Shirley may have had sentimental reasons for seeing him: his son had also acted as an aide to Braddock and was killed during the campaign. In presenting his grievances to the governor on March 5, 1756, Washington met with only mixed success. Although Shirley confirmed that he possessed superior rank to Dagworthy, he wouldn’t budge on other matters and rebuffed a petition signed by Washington’s officers for inclusion in the royal establishment. He also disappointed his young visitor by appointing Governor Sharpe of Maryland to lead the next campaign against Fort Duquesne—a military honor about which young George Washington already harbored a rich fund of fantasies. On his way home, the disappointed colonel stopped to confer with Sharpe, an interview that left him so dispirited that he “fully resolved to resign my commission.”23 Upon arriving in Williamsburg, he was somewhat assuaged by news that the assembly had decided to expand Virginia’s forces to fifteen hundred men.
In these dealings with powerful older men, Washington hadn’t yet developed the tact that would distinguish him in later life, and given his age, he seemed to bristle unduly at being assigned a subordinate position. His emotions were still raw, and he exhibited a naked, sometimes clumsy ambition that he later learned to cloak or conquer. This young careerist brooded interminably over the discrimination leveled against colonial officers and betrayed a heightened sense of personal injustice—feelings that would assume a more impressive and impersonal ideological form during the American Revolution. Nevertheless there was a gravitas about the young Washington, a seriousness of purpose and a fierce determination to succeed, that made him stand out in any crowd.
AS SOON AS WASHINGTON returned to Winchester in early April, he confronted a fresh crisis. Indians had sacked so many settlements and slain so many inhabitants that the dazed surviving families looked to Washington as their savior. At first he could barely scrape up a few dozen men to mount a spirited defense and despaired of waging an equal battle with the Indians, telling Governor Dinwiddie that “the cunning and craft” of the Indians “are not to be equalled . . . They prowl about like wolves and, like them, do their mischief by stealth.” He despaired of fighting them upon equal terms.24 Feeling embattled, Washington issued a plea for intercolonial union that foreshadowed his later stress on national unity. “Nothing I more sincerely wish than a union to the colonies in this time of eminent danger,” he told Pennsylvania governor Robert Hunter Morris.25
Even as a young man, the complex Washington seldom had a single reason for his actions. His pursuit of self-interest and selfless dedication to public service were often intermingled, sometimes making it hard to disentangle his true motives. Perhaps for this reason, he could always discern both the base and the noble sides of human nature. For Washington, the French and Indian War presented few elevating ideas beyond the moral superiority of the British side. Nevertheless, his indignation about the savagery he purported to see practiced by his French and Indian foes seems heartfelt. He began to view himself as the self-styled champion of the backwoods people and was moved by their piteous plight. In a remarkable letter to Robert Dinwiddie on April 22, 1756, he made an impassioned statement about the murder of frontier families and his desire to alleviate their suffering.
I am too little acquainted, sir, with pathetic language to attempt a description of the people’s distresses, though I have a generous soul, sensible of wrongs and swelling for redress. But what can I do? If bleeding, dying! would glut their insatiate revenge, I would be a willing offering to savage fury and die by inches to save a people! I see their situation, know their danger, and participate [in] their sufferings without having it in my power to give them further relief than uncertain promises . . . The supplicating tears of the women and moving petitions from the men melt me into such deadly sorrow that I solemnly declare . . . I could offer myself a willing sacrifice to the butchering enemy, provided that would contribute to the people’s ease.26
Here one can sense a flood of deep feeling welling up beneath the surface of Washington’s tightly buttoned personality. A spark of idealism began to flicker intermittently through his sulking about his personal status—a spark that would someday flare into a bright flame.
Faced with Indian raids that depopulated whole settlements, Dinwiddie issued orders calling up the militia in western counties, and Washington suddenly found himself at the head of a thousand temporary recruits who bridled at their treatment by highborn officers. Reflecting this resentment, the Virginia Gazette blasted Washington’s officers as “rank novices, rakes, spendthrifts, and bankrupts” who “browbeat and discouraged” the militia and gave them “an example of all manner of debauchery, vice, and idleness.”27 Livid over this bad publicity, Washington informed Dinwiddie of numerous warnings he had issued about these vices and promised to “act with a little more rigor than has hitherto been practiced, since I find it so absolutely necessary.”28 Washington presented the strange spectacle of a young man chastising dissolute behavior, and Dinwiddie stood solidly behind him. “He is a person much beloved here and has gone through many hardships in the service and I really think he has great merit.”29
Throughout the spring, Washington squawked about the fickle militia, who disappeared whenever an Indian threat materialized. Apparently concerned by the moods of his temperamental protégé, Colonel William Fairfax preached a stoic calm in the face of adversity and wrote two letters invoking the military heroes of antiquity. “Your good health and fortune is the toast of every table,” he reassured Washington. “Among the Romans such a general acclamation and public regard shown to any of their chieftains was always esteemed a high honor and g
ratefully accepted.” Holding up Caesar and Alexander the Great as models to emulate, Fairfax said that Washington shouldn’t be disturbed by unreliable militia but should bear such hardships “with equal magnanimity [as] those heroes remarkably did.”30
IN MID - AUGUST, Colonel Washington staged a small pageant in Winchester to mark the official start of the French and Indian War, announced in London three months earlier. Escorted by town worthies, he marched three companies to the parade ground and read aloud the declaration of war, urging his men to show “willing obedience to the best of kings and by a strict attachment to his royal commands [to] demonstrate the love and loyalty we bear to his sacred person.”31 With that, numerous toasts were drunk and muskets boomed. Nevertheless the absolute power of distant bureaucrats in London preyed on Washington’s mind. Three weeks earlier he had conveyed greetings to John Campbell, Earl of Loudoun, the new commander of His Majesty’s forces in North America. No longer a military novice, Washington touted himself as a war veteran and seasoned his welcome with self-promotion: “We humbly represent to your Lordship that we were the first troops in action on the continent on [the] occasion of the present broils and that by several engagements and continual skirmishes with the enemy, we have to our cost acquired a knowledge of them and of their crafty and cruel practices.”32
Eager to please his new commander, Washington struggled to make his new recruits presentable. He had long been troubled by an inability to clothe them, but in March he procured for each man “a suit of thin sleazy cloth without lining” and some waistcoats of “sorry flannel.”33 No sooner had he accomplished this than he found men selling the miserable clothing he had obtained. Indignant, he threatened them with five hundred lashes. Where his men had once deserted two or three at a time, sixteen absconded into the woods in August, and the shortage of men grew more perilous. When a portion of the Augusta County militia was summoned to duty that October, fewer than a tenth even bothered to show up. From these early experiences, Washington came to believe devoutly in the need for rigorously trained, professional armies rather than hastily summoned, short-term militia.