George Washington in his French and Indian War uniform, carrying both a sword and a rifle. The gilt, crescent-shaped badge suspended around his neck is a gorget, indicating that he is an officer. This, the only portrait of Washington executed before the Revolution, was done by Charles Willson Peale at Mount Vernon in 1772 (Courtesy of Washington and Lee University)
Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, painted by Charles Willson Peale at Mount Vernon in 1772, when she was forty-one (Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union)
Washington, who had had almost no experience of any way of life not grounded on slavery, had not yet questioned the institution in its fundamentals. He merely felt it his duty to be kind to his slaves. Most important to their feelings, he believed, was that they should not be separated from their families and companions, sent to strange places where they were not at home. This meant that he was unwilling to move a slave from Mount Vernon unless the slave agreed, which almost never happened. It also meant that he became unwilling to sell slaves, although natural increase, building on his earlier purchases, gave him a larger work force to feed and clothe than he needed, particularly since he had abandoned the cultivation of tobacco.
One of the causes in which Washington often found himself engaged was trying to circumvent avaricious husbands who, taking advantage of the unfair Virginia laws, tried to defraud women of their property. Concerning one such legal campaign that went on for years, an observer wrote Washington, “Charity with us is common, but steady friendship founded on that principle almost without a precedent.”
Despite his complaints and his attempts at refusal, Washington was entrusted with managing the estates—and often becoming guardian to the children—of many a dying neighbor.
Within his own area, Washington followed his ideal of “cultivating the affections of good men” and practicing “domestic virtues.” The fiercely aggressive part of his nature found outlet in his efforts to amass wilderness acres. There was a strangeness about this obsession. Since much of what he sought and sometimes did acquire would be made valuable only by advances in settlement which he could hardly expect in his lifetime, this was of all his pursuits the one with the greatest dynastic implications. Yet he was not discouraged in his efforts by his continuing lack of an heir. Perhaps his passion was motivated (at least in part) by a possessive worship of the continent across which his dreams spread.
The type of real estate speculation Washington most enjoyed was not for the faint in heart. The laws dealing with land grants in the wilderness were self-contradictory, endlessly complicated, and subject to change without notice. Finding and marking out the best land beyond the reaches of settlement—flat and fertile acres accessible to rivers, potential mill sites, and the like—required geographically arduous exploration. And there was no lack of human hazards. Indians were not gentle to encroachers on land they considered their own; the employees of rival speculators carried both legal documents and rifles; squatters were devoid of documents but often forceful in numbers. And in the end, no title could be considered final until it was approved by a governmental body often open to influence and bribery. Washington referred to the whole operation as a “lottery,” explaining, “No man can lay off a foot of land and be sure of holding it.”
He accepted as part of the process the unscrupulousness that was created by a combination of great potential rewards with utter confusion in areas almost beyond the law. He ordered secret surveys on land reserved by royal proclamation to the Indians; was not adverse to engrossing a larger percentage of river front than the law allowed. He was, on the whole, successful. No other man in all Virginia combined considerable influence with public bodies and considerable financial assets with personal prowess as a backwoodsman that made it unnecessary to rely on agents for even the most dangerous explorations. While others tried to reach out from their manors or countinghouses, he tramped wild places himself.
His most extensive adventure grew out of his personal efforts as a lobbyist. He secured confirmation of a confused promise of land made by Dinwiddie to those who had early enlisted in the Virginia Regiment. The area involved was so large it could only be found in the outer wilderness. Washington traveled in the autumn of 1770 again to the Forks of the Ohio—where he had previously seen emptiness there was now a settlement of some twenty cabins called Pittsburgh—and then drifted down the river for eleven days. His objective was the confluence of the Ohio with the Great Kanawha, where he had heard that the land was fine. This journey deep into the almost unexplored wilderness was in some ways a replay of the embassy northward which had opened his public career. There was danger—reports of Indian hostilities and ticklish meetings with braves in war or perhaps hunting dress; there was hardship—snow fell—but this time the impediments were not truly lethal. They added spice to lyricism.
Keeping notes of the appearance of the shores along which they passed, Washington saw an identity of beauty and utility: the taller the trees and the fairer the meadows, the more fertile the land. Deer, buffalo, and wild turkeys abounded. Eventually Washington found and marked out a paradise of rich meadows, towering vegetation, mill sites, vast reaches, boundless skies, where he eventually secured title to thirty thousand acres, most of the tracts “beautifully bordered” by the rivers.
EIGHT
A New Call to Arms
(1765–1775)
Washington, who in his youth called England “home,” had moved to the conclusion that the Americans could not remain forever under the domination of the British. Having become a different people, they would have to find their own destiny in their own way. Yet he hoped that the issue could be postponed “for posterity to determine.” However, there rose in the mid-1760’s an argument over taxation. The resulting controversy summoned up all the misunderstandings and profound differences of attitude that had been developing during the more than two centuries when Americans had been forced to serve their own needs in a land so different from the British Isles.
Because the colonists had profited from various Crown expenditures, including the winning of the French and Indian War, Parliament decided that they should be subject to taxation voted in London. The colonists responded that since they were not represented in Parliament they would not be taxed from there. This incited Parliament to repressive legislation, which excited stronger American opposition, which incited England to increase her military force in America.
Washington’s reactions in the early stages of this build-up were moderate. When, trying to strike at British pocketbooks, Americans agreed not to import British goods, Washington welcomed this development only partly as a method of retaliation. He hoped that the experience of selling and buying at home would persuade his fellow planters of what he had individually worked out: that they would be better off if they were not economically dependent on England. He stepped up the household manufactures at Mount Vernon so that he could sell more goods and services to his neighbors.
By April, 1769, Washington had become so worried about the suppression of American liberties that he visualized the possibility of an armed rebellion—but only as the very last resort. He still hoped that some rational line could be drawn between the rights of the mother country and the rights of the colonies. “For my own part,” he added, “I shall not undertake to say where.”
Washington was glad to admit he was not a political expert. He had concluded, he was to explain, that the British measures were “repugnant to every principle of natural justice” before “abler heads than my own” had convinced him that the measures were also contrary to the legal rights Americans had inherited as Britons. His modesty was undoubtedly due in part to his memory of how he had made a fool of himself during Forbes’s campaign by pontificating from a local view on matters of international import.
In the current situation, Washington’s desire to move only on sure ground was strengthened by his realization of extreme danger. He gave it as his “opinion that more blood will be spilt on this occasion,
if the [British] ministry are determined to push matters to the extremity, than history has yet furnished in the annals of North America.”
Washington saw as the fundamental issue the question whether the British acts were random results of stupid misadministration or whether they were proofs “of a fixed and uniform plan to tax us.” He was shocked to read of the Boston Tea Party because he believed it would encourage the British to further excesses. It was the extremity of those excesses that finally forced him to make up his mind. The “intolerable acts” which closed the port of Boston and abrogated the charter of Massachusetts “exhibited,” he believed, “an unexampled testimony of the most despotic system of tyranny that was ever practiced in a free government.” Opposition had become an absolute duty.
Although Washington, as a member of the House of Burgesses and a neighborhood leader in Fairfax County, had played his role in Virginia’s various acts of protest and commercial retaliation, he had not been one of the firebrands of the revolutionary movement. Yet when the Burgesses elected seven delegates to the First Continental Congress, he received the third largest vote. Patrick Henry was far behind him and the young Thomas Jefferson failed of election.
At the official sessions held in Philadelphia during September and October, 1774, Washington was mostly silent. However, his endless conviviality kept him so much on the go that he dined in his lodgings only seven times in fifty-three days, and usually had a second engagement during the evening. In the meeting room and over tavern tables he was, whether he realized it or not, an object of anxious observation to his fellow delegates. The distant clang of arms was in the air and his reputation as a soldier had not been forgotten. Silas Deane of Connecticut was surprised to find that the hero of Braddock’s defeat was still in his prime. (Washington was forty-two.)
The Congress voted, with Washington’s agreement, further commercial reprisals, gave no hint of a willingness to compromise, and indicated that the colonies would unite in meeting force with force. This strong stand brought no exhilaration to the tall Virginian. He rode home sick at heart. Seventeen years before, he had turned his back on the military life. He was happy on his plantation and as a neighborhood patriarch. Now all that he had created was endangered.
There were opening up, of course, new opportunities for glory. How brightly they would have shone in his imagination when, as a younger man, he had written that his “inclinations” were “strongly bent to arms.” Now, when the Royal Governor of Virginia seized the colony’s gunpowder, Washington used all his influence to keep armed militiamen from interfering with the peaceful negotiation which finally elicited a return of the powder. But he was also drilling the militia in preparation for the worst.
By the time Washington attended the Second Continental Congress in May, 1775, fighting at Lexington and Concord had released “the shot heard round the world.” A numerous army of New Englanders was encamped around British-held Boston. Not being introspective, Washington undoubtedly did not probe his motives for wearing to the Congressional sessions his military uniform. His conscious intention was to testify that Virginia was willing to fight. He seems to have expected that he would become, as he had been during the French and Indian War, the commander in chief of Virginia forces. When, after the Congress had convened, the rumor circulated that he might be made commander in chief of a continental army, he urged some of his fellow Virginians to try to block the move.
Washington’s memories of his activities during the French and Indian War did not encourage any confidence in his military gifts, and the task ahead seemed to call for genius. At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, it was known (so he later wrote) that “the expense in comparison with our circumstances as colonists must be enormous, the struggle protracted, dubious, and severe. It was known that the resources of Britain were, in a manner, inexhaustible, that her fleets covered the ocean, and that her troops had harvested laurels in every quarter of the globe. Not then organized as a nation … we had no preparation. Money, the nerve of war, was wanting. The sword was to be forged on the anvil of necessity.”
In this retrospective account, Washington defined the colonists’ “secret resource” as “the unconquerable resolution of our citizens.” However, no such “unconquerable resolution” was manifested by the debates Washington listened to in the Congress. The prevailing policy was to evince as much loyalty to the Crown as was under the circumstances possible. If the colonies initiated no hostilities, if the colonies only defended themselves when attacked, surely George III, as the sovereign of America as well as England, would curb Parliament and his ministers. The Congress still hoped that the whole trouble would blow over. This teetering was far from satisfactory to Massachusetts, which had on its hands an actual war.
As John Adams, the chief of the Massachusetts delegation, puzzled over how to lead the continent into an alliance, his vision fixed on the uniformed figure of Washington. Washington was the most celebrated veteran of the French and Indian War who was still young enough to lead a new contest. He possessed charm combined with manifest physical and nervous power, a clear gift for leadership which Adams recognized, even if he resented it in a giant he considered unintellectual. And, thank heaven, Washington was from Virginia!
It was a principle as old as all efforts at American unity that leadership had to be divided between the Northeast and the South. What better way to get the Congress and through them the continent entangled in the actual hostilities than to have them elect the magnetic and experienced Virginia warrior as commander in chief of what was otherwise a purely New England army.
Adams lobbied actively for Washington’s election. Washington kept away from the session at which the ballot was to be taken. His election was unanimous.
When Washington appeared before the Congress on June 16, 1775, he made no spread-eagle speech promising bloody success. He had accepted the “momentous duty” because Congress desired it, “but, lest some unlucky event should happen … I beg it may be remembered, by every gentleman in this room, that I, this day, declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with.” Having expressed a desire to receive no salary, being paid only for his expenses of which he would keep “an exact account,” Washington sat down.
The new Commander in Chief was the first and only member of the Continental Army. If the Congress changed mood and policy, he might be left standing alone with a sword in his hand, to triumphant British power the most conspicuous of traitors. Although the delegates were not yet ready formally to adopt the New England army, they did resolve unanimously: “This Congress doth now declare that they will maintain and assist and adhere to him, the said George Washington, with their lives and fortunes.”
John Adams, who had helped engineer this vote, was worried by it. However politically necessary the move, there was grave danger in setting up a man as the symbol of a cause which might create an independent nation. Adams’s reading of history had persuaded him that strong men invariably grasp all power within their reach. This George Washington was obviously a strong man. He would be a prodigy if he did not try to make himself king.
NINE
A Virginian in Yankee-Land
(1775)
Once Washington had been firmly designated the leader of armed resistance against the British, anxiety took over. The congressmen who had reluctantly taken so dangerous a step needed reassurance, but the Virginian on whom they had staked their “lives and fortunes” refused to be reassuring. He remembered what he had seen during the French and Indian War of the sophistication which the British regular army brought to the type of fighting (not wilderness warfare) that now lay ahead. He continued to insist that the command he had been given was “too boundless for my abilities and far, very far beyond my experience.” The congressmen had to comfort themselves with the thought that Washington’s diffidence would encourage him to take advice, do nothing rash.
But where was Washington himself to find comfort? He postponed for three
days notifying his wife of his election, and then begged her not to add to his perturbation with her own. She should force herself to be as content as she could. “I should enjoy more real happiness in one month with you at home than I have the most distant prospect of finding abroad, if my stay were to be seven times seven years. But, as it has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this service, I shall hope that my undertaking it is designed to answer some good purpose.”
Without any consciousness that he was sowing future trouble, Washington begged help from four grasping men, each of whom concluded that the new Commander in Chief was too incompetent to get on without the help each condescendingly promised. Two of these first advisers were soldiers, two politically important businessmen.
Charles Lee had the reputation of being a military genius. Many patriots regretted that, because he was a recent immigrant from England (and was so eccentric), he could not be commander in chief instead of Washington. After distinguished service in the British regular army, Lee had adventured to Poland, where he was a major general and accompanied a Russian army against the Turks. Having, on his return to England, written radical pamphlets, and insulted George III to his face, he had settled in America. He was tall and emaciated, dirty of clothes and body, voluble, foulmouthed, seemingly brilliant, best characterized by his Indian name, “Boiling Water.” He felt that he was making perhaps too great a sacrifice in agreeing to be commanded by the amateur Washington.
Another English officer, Horatio Gates, had at Washington’s request been given the major staff post of adjutant general. The son of a duke’s housekeeper and presumably the duke, Gates had risen in the British regular army to the rank of major and then discovered that, despite his superior ability, his equivocal birth blocked any further advancement. Washington, who had served with him in the previous war, had persuaded him to emigrate to Virginia. Gates was stocky, stubborn, extremely competent, ambitious, unsure, a little cringing.
Washington- The Indispensable Man Page 7