GEORGE WASHINGTON: FIRST IN WAR AND PEACE
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GEORGE WASHINGTON: FIRST IN WAR AND PEACE
In the normal course of events, George Washington would have become an Oxford don, following in the footsteps of his English ancestors. Instead, he never went to college and had the least formal schooling of any of America’s Founding Fathers. That deficiency made him self-conscious all his life.
Washington was robbed of a university education by a revolution in England a century before he was born. Had there been no English Civil War in the 1640s, his family would never have left England to come to the New World.
A descendant of King Edward III through his paternal grandmother, George Washington was the first of his old English family to oppose a king. His English and American ancestors had been staunch royalists, which put them on the losing side in the war. As the proctor of Oxford University, the Reverend Lawrence Washington, George’s great-great grandfather, carried out a thorough purge of Puritans from the faculty. When the Puritans defeated the royalists and beheaded King Charles I, Reverend Washington’s son, John, fled to Virginia. There, he bought land on which he grew tobacco that he traded to Denmark.
His great-grandson, the first president of the United States, showed few signs of being headed for greatness. Born in a small farmhouse known as Wakefield on Popes Creek in Westmoreland County, Virginia, he was the fourth of nine children of the towering Augustine Washington. Gus, as everyone called him, was a tobacco planter, a partner in an iron furnace, and county justice. He was a member of the cash-poor, land-rich gentry, harvesting a modest existence from 10,000 acres, much of it uncleared wilderness.
Gus had three children by the time his first wife died, and he quickly married again to Mary Ball. George was Mary’s first and favorite child. When he was three, his father moved the family to Prince William County, the future site of George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon. Growing up on a farm, George’s boyhood was filled with children, chickens, dogs, pigs, calves, and horses.
In 1738, when George was six, the family moved to Ferry Farm near the new settlement of Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock. By now, Gus owned some 50 slaves and had carved a niche in the upper-middle rank of Virginia society. He sent George’s two older brothers to the school he had attended in northern England, and George seemed destined to go there, too.
On Easter Sunday, in 1743, 11-year-old George’s world suddenly changed. While he was away from Ferry Farm visiting relatives, word came that his father was dying. His older stepbrother, Lawrence, rushed home to manage family affairs. Fourteen years George’s senior, Lawrence had been a captain during King George’s War and adjutant of the American regiment in Britain’s malaria-stricken sieges of Cartagena, Colombia, and other Spanish ports in the Caribbean.
An English-educated officer, Lawrence married Anne Fairfax, daughter of Colonel William Fairfax, one of the wealthiest landowners in Virginia. Colonel Fairfax was the land agent for his uncle, Lord Thomas Fairfax, who owned over 5 million acres. The marriage gave the Washingtons entree to the highest social and political ranks of Virginia. Impressive Lawrence and impressionable George became devoted to each other, with George moving into Lawrence’s home at Mount Vernon.
Though George would study with a series of private tutors off and on for four years at Mount Vernon, his father’s death cut short his formal education. Three surviving notebooks show that he learned some elementary Latin, a good deal of mathematics, and a little English literature. Unlike many of his class, however, George did not go on to The College of William and Mary in the provincial capital of Williamsburg. His lack of formal education later prompted John Adams to comment “that Washington was not a scholar,” adding acidly that “he was too illiterate, unlearned, and unread for his station and reputation.”
Washington’s teenage years were a time of dancing and hearty meals, of hunting for deer, duck, and bear, of wagering on horse and foot races and cockfights, of boxing and billiards, and of engaging in wrestling matches that the powerful young Washington usually won. But if he didn’t go to college, what would he do? Pursue a naval career, Lawrence counseled. George’s widowed mother would hear none of it. She would never give her consent for her oldest son to leave her and go to sea.
In Virginia drawing rooms in the 1740s, gentlemen talked incessantly of fortunes to be made by staking out unclaimed lands west of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Shenandoah Valley. Migrating Native Americans had agreed to bypass the lush valley, whose lands Lord Fairfax had come from England to settle. The opportunity for a young surveyor was unsurpassed - and 15-year-old George was ready to seize it.
He set off on a 33-day horseback expedition through the forests and mountains. His work party slept on the ground, in tents, and in vermin-infested taverns. They encountered Indian war parties. Fascinated, George spent two days and nights talking with the young warriors.
As a surveyor, he matured rapidly. He quickly learned that the secret to success was to scout the best lands along the frontier, buy them with earnings from one of the few cash-paying colonial occupations, and then rent them out for a handsome profit.
Less accomplished on the social front, George was stiff, awkward, and tongue-tied in the company of young women. At Lawrence’s plantation at Mount Vernon (named after the British admiral who had commanded Lawrence’s Caribbean expedition), George learned to play billiards and cards. He especially enjoyed fox hunting and long daily walks. But so shy was he around young women that he wrote dreadful doggerel about his plight:
Ah! Woe’s me, that I should love and conceal,
Long have I wish’d, but never dare reveal, Even though severely
Loves Pains I feel.
It was about this time that he met 18-year-old Sally Fairfax, his neighbor’s bride. George became infatuated with Sally’s graceful bearing, wit, and beauty. Their relationship may never have gotten beyond flirtation, but they had strong feelings for each other and corresponded for years.
His skill and reputation for dependability increasing, the 16-year-old George helped run the surveying lines that Thomas Jefferson’s father used to map the northern boundary of Virginia. When he was 17, George was appointed Culpeper County surveyor. In one month, he earned the equivalent of $3,500 today. At 18, he bought 1,459 acres of choice wilderness land. However, at 19, Washington had to set aside his surveyor’s tools to assume family responsibilities. George’s revered half-brother Lawrence was slowly dying of tuberculosis. In an attempt to regain his health, Lawrence left behind his wife and their newborn baby while he sailed to Barbados with George as his nurse.
It was the only time George Washington left mainland America, and it was a memorable trip. First, he was “grievously seasick” from the ocean voyage. Next, he contracted a near-fatal dose of smallpox that left his face and body permanently pitted with scars. Then came the first of six attacks of malaria. Lawrence went on to Bermuda and later came home to die. George reluctantly left Barbados’s pleasant society, its theater, and the love poems he wrote, but never mailed, to Sally Fairfax, going home to Virginia to recuperate.
Lawrence’s death left Mount Vernon abandoned and sent George back to Ferry Farm, the small plantation his father had left him. He now ambitiously pursued the adjutant’s post Lawrence’s death left vacant. Washington buttonholed influential friends in the House of Burgesses and on the royal governor’s council. He only partly succeeded because Virginia’s governor, Robert Dinwiddie, split the colony into four districts. At age 20, with no military experience, Washington was placed in charge of the southern district, given t
he rank of militia major, pay of a meager $5,000 a year in today’s money, and the honor he so craved.
To prove himself, Major Washington volunteered for a risky mission. France and Britain were vying for control of the rich Ohio River valley. Pushing down from Canada, French forces were wooing Native Americans and building forts on land England also claimed. Washington set off in icy weather, traveling through more than 1,000 miles of frozen wilderness in less than two months, to carry a warning to the French on Lake Erie and to spy on their forces. His ability to stay calm and sober while French officers drank and boasted, his tact in dealing with native leaders, and his narrow escapes from death created a stir in Virginia when Washington returned with warnings of French mobilization for war.
After five days’ rest and a new assignment from Governor Dinwiddie, Washington left to enlist men in a race to claim the spot in Pennsylvania where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers converge to create the Ohio River before the French could build a fort there. At 22, he was commissioned a lieutenant colonel and given command of a force of militia. Promised 3,000 men, he could only raise 150. Washington got his first taste of combat during a brief skirmish with a French party near Laurel Mountain that killed 10 men, including the French commander, and left 20 more taken prisoner. Calling it, “a most signal victory,” he earned promotion to full colonel, but the battle probably triggered the seven-year-long French and Indian War.
When the French reinforced and counterattacked, young Washington had to take refuge in a hastily built stockade that he christened Fort Necessity. That day, July 3, 1754, taught him many lessons. He had built his stockade at the bottom of a natural bowl that filled with water in a slashing all-day downpour. Surrounded by dense forests that gave cover to the enemy, the fort was raked by deadly French and Indian crossfire. After some of his men broke into the rum supply, Colonel Washington finally had to surrender.
It was a bitter defeat but one that made Washington famous. Even King George II knew his name. To his brother, Washington wrote, “I heard the bullets whistle and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.”
After a spat with Governor Dinwiddie over his pay and rank, Washington resigned his provincial post. But it wasn’t long before he was back in uniform. This time, he was an aide-de-camp to the newly arrived British General Edward Braddock, commander of a mixed force of 2,000 British regulars and American militia sent into the Ohio valley by London to drive out the French. Braddock’s ill-fated campaign against Fort Duquesne would cost him his life. Washington came to scorn the British officer class and regular troops - nearly half of whom were killed and scalped - and to respect the guerrilla warfare tactics used by the Indians.
“The English soldiers behaved with more cowardice than it is possible to conceive,” Washington wrote to his brother. “The Virginia troops showed a good deal of bravery and were near all killed. The dastardly behavior of those they call Regulars exposed all others that were inclined to do their duty to almost certain death.” Washington himself had two horses killed under him, his clothing was torn by four bullets, and another passed through his tricorne hat. The only uninjured officer, Washington commanded the rear guard and buried Braddock in an unmarked grave.
As commander-in-chief of Virginia militia during the next four years of border warfare, Washington became the best-known American soldier, although he felt neglected much of the time and tried unsuccessfully to win transfer to a more active command elsewhere. During this time, he became seriously ill with dysentery and went home, he thought, to die.
Though he was a Virginia hero, he was pestered by his mother as if he were still a boy and there were no war. “I am sorry it is not in my power to provide you either a Dutch man (servant) or the butter as you desire,” he wrote her from camp, “for we are quite out of that part of the country where either are to be had.” And when he was offered the highest commission in Virginia at age 23, she wanted him to refuse it and stay safely at home.
In 1758, after inheriting Mount Vernon, the distinguished young soldier - now owner of more than 5,000 prime acres and a handsome mansion - met the wealthy young widow, Martha Dandridge Custis. His marriage to her made him the stepfather of two small children, John (Jacky) Parke Custis and Martha (Patsy) Parke Custis. He also became an even wealthier man. The following year, he won election to the Virginia House of Burgesses on his third attempt.
In the next 15 years, before he returned to soldiering, Washington built Mount Vernon into one of the colonies’ most successful plantations. He speculated in numerous land companies and staked out 34,000 acres of western land. Having been left 10 slaves by his father, he owned 135 by the time of the Revolution. British historian Marcus Cunliffe, calling Washington “a man of his time and place,” said “he did only what he and his neighbors would have thought proper.”
He turned to manufacturing nearly everything his plantation needed. He fumed at the excessive prices and poor quality of goods shipped from England. The last straw may have come in 1768, when the family carriage broke down. Washington sent a lavish sum to a London carriage maker with instructions for building a new one “in the newest taste . . . to be made of the best seasoned wood and by a celebrated workman.” The gleaming, elegant coach that arrived lasted only two months. The wood hadn’t been seasoned and quickly fell apart.
Washington, who helped organize the first Virginia boycott of British goods, had developed a knack for summing up the American position in a few words. Delivering George Mason’s Plan of Association, the economic embargo against new British customs duties, he told fellow Burgesses, “They should not have their hands in our pockets.”
When nervous colonial leaders converged on Philadelphia at the opening of the Continental Congress in 1774, Washington left little doubt where he stood. He was the only delegate to bring along a uniform. In the risky, radical deliberations, when congressmen had prices on their heads, Washington sat coolly on a dozen committees, giving advice on military preparations. As events in Boston – the British had revoked self-government following the Boston Tea Party - made war inevitable, all eyes turned to the tall gentleman in powdered wig and Virginia colonel’s light-blue uniform to be their commander in chief. Yet Washington insisted he had not sought the post. His inner turmoil was reflected in this letter to his wife at Mount Vernon: “You will believe me, my dear Patsy, when I assure you, in the most solemn manner that, so far from seeking this appointment, I have used every endeavor in my power to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part with you and the family, but from a consciousness of its being too great a trust for my capacity.”
Washington brought all the lessons of his Indian-fighting days to bear in his new command. Instead of committing his raw recruits to open combat with a superior enemy force, he encircled the British garrison at Boston with a network of trenches and besieged it. When the surrounding hills were frozen solid and British officers lulled to sleep by the winter winds, Washington ordered his men to make portable fortifications of hay bales, cornstalks, and bundles of sticks. Then, in the middle of the night under a full moon, an army of carts hauled the strange barricades to Dorchester Heights. When the British awoke the next morning, heavy artillery - brought all the way from Fort Ticonderoga in northern New York, where it had been captured by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys - pointed down at them. The British were forced to abandon the city.
Yet, sometimes, Washington’s understanding of a situation arrived only belatedly. In a series of pitched battles on Long Island and in New York in 1776, he allowed his forces to be hopelessly outmaneuvered by fast-marching, well-disciplined troops who steadily drove the Americans across New Jersey.
In the last months of the crucial year 1776, a change had come over Washington. He complained bitterly when Congress refused to allow him to burn New York City as the British army approached. When New York caught fire mysteriously, he was delighted to report to his brother, Samuel: “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us th
an we were disposed to do ourselves, as near one fourth of the city is supposed to be consumed [by fire].”
Then, early in December 1776, with British brigades hot on his heels, Washington retreated across the Delaware River to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, seizing every boat and ferry along 80 miles of riverfront. He then resorted to a desperate surprise attack in hopes of shattering British morale.
On Christmas Day, as Hessian mercenaries were recovering from an alcohol-fueled spree in Trenton, New Jersey, Washington struck. Forty-foot-long Durham boats, used in peacetime to shuttle iron products from foundries on the Delaware River to Philadelphia, were loaded first with soldiers and then with artillery. They were rowed through ice packs by fishermen from Marblehead, Massachusetts, under Colonel John Glover.
As was his custom, Washington stayed ashore until the boats made their crossing. Then, with his aides and two horses - his white charger and a sorrel he used in combat - he crossed separately on a ferry. As the Hessians slept off their Christmas party hangovers, Washington’s men infiltrated the streets in what came to be known as the Battle of Trenton, slipping into houses to warm and dry their gunpowder while General Henry Knox and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton lined up men at the ends of the streets. The Hessians stumbled outside at dawn and were cut down in a bloody crossfire. Though the numbers were small, it may have been Washington’s most important victory.
George Washington: First In War And Peace Page 1