But he did not shun the environment that made him uncomfortable, nor, as others might, did he rebel against that which he did not understand. Instead, he labored tirelessly to overcome his deficiencies. His fragile self-esteem under siege, he sought to capture the attention of these older men by making himself over in their image. His tactics were simple: he read, studied, attended, and imitated. He fell into the habit of quiescence, watching, listening, seldom speaking, and all the while discreetly preparing and polishing his behavior and expression into an accommodating style. He quietly took music and fencing lessons back in Fredericksburg. He developed a passion for fashionable clothing. And he completed his education through a methodical study of The Young Man’s Companion, another self-help book. It delved into etiquette, arithmetic, and surveying, the latter a tool that he might put to good use since Colonel Fairfax already had begun to make plans for charting the family’s domain.14
Like Lawrence and George William, Colonel Fairfax also exerted a profound influence upon young George, becoming, in fact, a surrogate father to the youngster. The colonel discovered many similarities in George’s background and his own, for he too had received little assistance from his parents. Moreover, the colonel, a forceful and enterprising man, was disappointed with George William, a son he regarded as reticent and uninspiring. Young Washington possessed the qualities that the colonel admired: he was strong and reserved, an excellent horseman, intelligent, and quick tempered. The boy wanted to get ahead; in fact, he seemed to be impelled by a compulsive need to improve himself and his status. Fairfax took the unsure youngster under his wing, instilling in him the lessons that had led to his own success: observation and hard work were the virtues displayed by those who succeeded, he advised, although it did not hurt to find and pander to a powerful potential benefactor.15 George was not unwilling to follow the advice.
The colonel, of course, became that benefactor, offering assistance and opening doors that in only a decade led George to a plateau he otherwise could never have reached. His patron first offered support when George was just fourteen years old. The colonel procured an offer of a commission in the Royal Navy for the youngster; within a couple days, if he chose to do so, George could become a midshipman aboard a vessel docked in a Virginia harbor. Lawrence thought it the best option facing George. If he refused the commission, Lawrence told him, he probably faced nothing better than Ferry Farm for the remainder of his life, and there he could anticipate only a long struggle with both unexceptional soil and his intractable mother. On the other hand, a naval career offered the lures of travel and adventure, not to mention advancement to a higher social level in England than he ever was likely to attain in Virginia. Lawrence reminded George that this was how the colonel himself had begun his career, for his parents had placed him in the Royal Navy when he was about the same age. Trusting Lawrence’s wisdom, George quickly agreed to join, if he could gain his mother’s consent.16
Mary Washington agreed, then disagreed, then decided to seek the advice of her half brother in England. That put the final decision in limbo for more than nine months. She and her son, both of them tenacious and headstrong, probably clashed vehemently while they awaited Uncle Joseph Ball’s counsel. It is likely too that she and Lawrence also discussed the matter acrimoniously. Finally, word arrived from Stratford by Bow: George’s uncle denounced the idea. The youth, he wrote, would be better served as an apprentice to a tinker, for a sailor’s pay was inconsequential and his liberties were virtually nonexistent. “And as for any considerable preferment in the Navy,” he added, “it is not to be expected [as] there are always too many grasping for it here, who have interest and he has none.” That decided the issue. Mary Washington ruled against her son’s enlistment, and he, not yet fifteen, complied.17
Whatever George’s feelings about the final decision, he remained at home for the next year, working on the farm and continuing his self-education, especially his persistent attempts to unravel the mysteries of surveying. His growing knowledge soon stood him in good stead. In 1747 Thomas Lord Fairfax, legal title to his millions of frontier acres at last safely in his possession, arrived at Belvoir. He was in America to oversee the surveying and selling of a chunk of his domain, beginning with a tract that lay across the mountains, along the South Branch of the Potomac.
A surveying party was being assembled. George William was named to the team, and sixteen-year-old George Washington was invited to come along. He could serve as a chainman, and if time permitted he could even survey a bit. Besides, he would be paid a modest salary. To this activity his mother agreed.18
When the men left Mount Vernon the jonquils and the golden brillance of the forsythia already had heralded the arrival of spring. They rode west, climbing steadily upward into the mountains, past patches of unmelted snow and across streams whose thin ice coverlets resembled glass table tops, on and on through an unending forest yet in the thrall of the last lingering clutches of winter, then back down the other side of the Blue Ridge and into the long rolling meadows of the valley, which, as if by magic, already luxuriated in a new season’s flowers, bathed in the warm sunlight of spring. At first the team had paused each night at the plantations and farms of hospitable backcountry settlers, but once it reached the South Branch the men slept outdoors for seventeen consecutive nights. By the fourth afternoon the party was running surveys. Long, exhausting days of labor followed. Hour after hour the men clambered through the wilderness thickets, groping for footing on the slick, leaf-covered forest floor, as they felled trees so that a line could be sighted. All the while they stayed alert for evidence of the presence of rattlesnakes and other uncompanionable forest creatures. Once the work was interrupted when they ran into a band of thirty Indians returning from a war party, likely the first sizable batch of Native Americans that Washington had encountered. The Virginians entertained their new acquaintances by sharing their liquor, and the Indians, who seemed friendly enough, reciprocated with a dance and a concert. Washington’s only brush with danger came one night near the end of the expedition when the straw on which he was sleeping caught fire; luckily, one of the men awakened and doused the flames before any harm was done. Shortly after that incident, George William and Washington, both lonely and tired, and lately—because of a breakdown in their victualing network—rather hungry, decided to return home ahead of the rest of the party. They rode on alone. Although they managed to lose their way once, going twenty miles in the wrong direction, the two weary, homesick young men arrived at Belvoir, home at last a little more than a month after the foray had begun.19
George William had an especially good reason to hurry home. On the eve of the expedition he had met Sally Cary. The two were engaged and planned a late autumn wedding. His fiancee was from Ceelys, a mansion along the lower James River near Hampton. She had grown up dividing her time between that pastoral environment and Williamsburg, the lively little hub of Virginia culture during the few weeks each year when the Burgesses was in session. George must have believed immediately that Mr. Fairfax, as he still deferentially called George William, had made a good catch. Slender and long-necked, her enchanting oval face was dominated by wide, dark, alluring eyes and set off by her long, cascading black hair; her manner was lively, and witty, and coquettish.20
George returned to Ferry Farm following his first western adventure. The next fifteen months were to be the last he would spend as the dependent of his mother. With some money in his pockets for the first time, he occasionally took the ferry across to Fredericksburg to purchase new items for his growing wardrobe. In September he enrolled under a dance instructor, this to refine his talents for the approaching wedding ball. He slipped off to visit his cousins at Chotank that summer, spent a few pleasant days at the downstream estate of a family friend, and, of course, he occasionally rode over to Mount Vernon and Belvoir. Mostly, though, he helped with the management of Ferry Farm, and he looked after his self-improvement. He read the Spectator, perused a biography of Frederick the Great, a
nd read a translated edition of the principal dialogues of Seneca, each a source for the many witty and profound comments that Lawrence and George William made about the dinner table or before the hearth in the drawing room. But Washington was enough of a pragmatist to spend most of his time working on his surveying books, and those efforts paid immediate dividends. In July 1749 he was commissioned a county surveyor in Culpepper County, a post that paid £15 annually.21 More importantly, the license was his badge of independence from Ferry Farm and his mother.
Within two days of receiving his commission Washington was at work, and for several weeks during each of the next three years he led his own surveying teams into the west. Virtually all of his work was undertaken in the Shenandoah and Cacapon valleys of Frederick County, tracts that fell within the Fairfax proprietary domain. Washington’s fee was steep, about £1 per thousand acres above the rate set by the colony’s assembly, but it does not seem to have adversely affected the volume of his business. Operating out of an office that he opened in Winchester, he undertook two hundred or more surveys in this period, averaging about £125 in earnings each year, an income roughly equal to that of a skilled artisan. But he also occasionally received land in lieu of cash payments, a kind of deferred salary that offered the potential for spectacular payoffs far beyond those to which any craftsman could aspire.
A rugged existence was imposed on anyone intrepid enough to undertake one of these expeditions. A surveyor wore the same clothing for days on end, “like a Negro,” Washington told a friend. The surveying team normally slept outdoors, bedeviled, it must have seemed, by every species of vermin in North America, and buffeted by the chill mountain rains of spring and the raw, icy blasts of late autumn. The men subsisted on adequate, but monotonous, diets of salt pork and dried beef, although if they were lucky they might have a catch of wild turkey or fish to roast over hot coals, gourmet fare washed down by the brandy and rum they carefully hauled along.22
Soon the sound of money jingling in his pockets brought out the gambler in Washington’s character, and he too joined in the western speculative fever. He was just eighteen when he purchased his first western tract, over 450 acres in the Shenandoah Valley, a place known as Dutch George’s. Soon thereafter he acquired another parcel, over 1000 acres along Bullskin Creek, a tributary of the Shenandoah River that meanders near the present boundary of Virginia and West Virginia.23
If he was exhilarated at his new-found freedom, Washington was greeted with ominous news shortly after his initial western expedition. Lawrence had sailed for London. Plagued by a chronic cough symptomatic of tuberculosis, the most dreaded degenerative disease of the age, he had been examined by physicians at Mount Vernon and at Williamsburg, but the medicines they prescribed—worthless compounds of herbs—were unavailing. Now quite ill, he requested a leave of absence from the Burgesses. Anxious and exasperated, he sailed that summer for the British capital, hoping that more skilled physicians there might better treat his affliction. But he was no better when he returned to Virginia in the fall, and by the next summer his condition had only deteriorated further. Desperate for succor, he persuaded George to accompany him to Berkeley Springs, a highly acclaimed spa across the Blue Ridge Mountains. They made two difficult trips to the springs, but the waters were of no help, and, in fact, Lawrence found the damp and chilly climate in the mountains to be more of a danger than a palliative. Only one hope remained. Perhaps a winter in the mild Caribbean might be rejuvenating. Besides, a commercial friend of Lord Fairfax had spoken highly of a physician in Barbados, one with a good record in treating the victims of consumption. Moreover, as if his luck had finally turned for the better, his wife, Nancy, gave birth to a little girl, Sarah, not long after his return from Berkeley Springs. And Sarah survived, the first of their four offspring to live beyond infancy. Maybe little Sarah’s survival would prove to be a harbinger of good fortune. At any rate, he now had something else to live for. Lawrence induced George to accompany him on this trip too, and the young men sailed for Bridgetown in September 1751.24
The voyage, the only extended cruise George ever took, was typical of those in the age of sailing. The vessel was out for thirty-seven days. It was a reasonably uneventful, if lengthy, trip. The vessel was assaulted by strong gales and incessant rain for half a dozen days, and, added to the occasional dangers and the prolonged monotony of the trip, there was a shortage of biscuit, a condition that occurred when the ship’s bread was afflicted by weevils and maggots. But Washington seemed to handle matters like an old salt, occupying much of his spare time conversing with the crew, powerful, coarse men with whom he quickly established a rapport.25
The two Virginians disembarked early in November. The next day Lawrence was examined by the physician who had been so highly recommended. His diagnosis sparked a ray of hope. While he too concluded that Lawrence suffered from tuberculosis, he did not regard the disease as incurable, and he merely prescribed rest in the bucolic countryside outside Bridgetown. Lawrence quickly found the climate too harsh to venture out, except in the cool evenings. George, however, spent his first two weeks on the island at the theater, or attending a bewildering succession of dinner parties, or simply sightseeing. Then, suddenly, on his fifteenth day in Bridgetown, he was roused from his sleep with a blinding headache and a burning fever. Not long thereafter pustules appeared over his body, and it was evident that he had the smallpox, perhaps the most dangerous of the febrile viruses then prevalent. In a strange environment, hundreds of miles from his relatives—save for Lawrence, who was too weak to offer any real assistance—George was bedfast for nearly four weeks, some of the time languishing in great agony, always realizing that death might come soon. But by mid-December he felt better, and soon his doctor pronounced him well, both cured and now, of course, immune forever to the disease. Aside from the temporary loss of a few pounds, he had only a slightly pockmarked face, hardly an oddity in the eighteenth century, to show for his travail.26
During the last few days of George’s illness, while he still was confined to his bedchamber, the brothers reached important decisions. Lawrence already had concluded that the trip was a failure. He decided to sail as soon as possible for Bermuda, forlornly hoping that its climate might prove a restorative. George, undoubtedly more homesick than ever after his brush with death, and anxious to get in one surveying expedition before the spring foliage burst out and obscured the countryside, longed to return home. The brothers, thus, decided to split up. Just ten days after he was allowed once again to venture outside, George booked passage on a ship bound for Virginia.27
Washington was hardly at sea before he fell prey to seasickness, a precursor, it turned out, to a thoroughly unpleasant return voyage. For days on end his vessel, the Industry, was tormented by rain squalls and thrashing winds. After two weeks at sea, moreover, he discovered that a thief had broken into his chest and made off with £10 of his hard-earned surveyor’s wages. Finally, thirty-six days out of Barbados, land was sighted, and three days later George debarked near the mouth of the York River. Having brought ashore some letters for the governor of Virginia, he rented a horse and rode to “ye great ... polis” of Williamsburg, as he referred to the provincial capital. The governor, Robert Dinwiddie, sixty, wealthy, a graduate of the University of Glasgow, a resident of the Caribbean most of his adult life, greeted the young man cordially, and invited him to stay for dinner. One can only guess at that evening’s table talk between the eighteen-year-old and his eminent, stately host. That the governor was impressed by the young man’s initiative and fintiness, however, soon would be evident. The following morning George rode to Yorktown to attend a cockfighting tournament, then he rested for a few days at a distant relative’s plantation. Early in February, nearly four and a half months following his departure, he returned to Mount Vernon.28
George spent several hours with Nancy Washington describing Lawrence’s condition. It was a mixed report that brought his anxious sister-in-law some dim hope, but no joy. Thereafter, George
did not remain idle for long. He visited with his mother briefly, then, barely a month after his return to Virginia, he sped to the frontier and another surveying job. He clambered over and through the wilderness for nearly two months on this trip, but he pocketed enough money to purchase—for £115—an additional 552 acres for his growing Bullskin Creek realm.29
Washington’s homecoming from this expedition in May was blighted by various calamities. He had no more than reached Ferry Farm before he fell victim to a debilitating pleurisy. While he was still bedfast, moreover, distressing news arrived from Bermuda. Lawrence had reached the islands early in April, but upon his arrival his illness had taken a turn for the worse. While a new physician promised a cure if he abided by a strict regimen—a vegetarian diet, no alcoholic beverages, and rigorous daily exercise—the melancholy tone of Lawrence’s letters left little doubt that he had all but abandoned hope. He spoke of staying on the island for the next several months, then of returning to Barbados or perhaps even of sailing to southern France for the winter. Knowing that another winter in Virginia “will most certainly destroy me,” he implored Nancy to come to him, speculating that perhaps George would accompany her. “If I grow worse, I shall hurry home to my grave; if better, I shall be induced to stay longer here to complete a cure,” he disconsolately concluded in his last letter. When Lawrence suddenly returned to Mount Vernon in mid-June there was no longer any doubt that he was doomed. He hastily put his affairs in order, and six weeks later his agony ended.30
First of Men Page 3