George and Augustine spent the next several months helping Nancy tidy up the loose ends of Lawrence’s affairs. The will was a confusing document, one stack of contingencies upon another. George, albeit in “consideration of [his] love and affection,” received only three lots in Fredericksburg; but, if he survived Nancy, and if little Sarah died without issue, George was to have Mount Vernon and its plentiful lands. By December the Washingtons knew that Lawrence’s wealth was not all it had appeared to be. Without adequate supervision for four years or more, Mount Vernon had produced only meager yields of tobacco; in addition, the expenses attending Lawrence’s quest for health had been extraordinary. Faced with indebtedness, his survivors were compelled to sell every item that could be sacrificed, including some of Lawrence’s personal effects. George, in fact, acquired several head of livestock during the auction.31 About the time of the sale, less than six months after Lawrence’s funeral, Nancy remarried, selecting George Lee, uncle of Lighthorse Harry Lee, and moved to his Westmoreland estate. For two years Mount Vernon was left to stand idle, a mute reminder of the joys and tragedies it had witnessed during the past decade.
Washington, too, was busy during these months, and not just running surveys. Driven by his acquisitive urge, he now even more assiduously pushed for wealth and status, and for recognition as well. A younger son who had taken a back seat to two older brothers, he hungered to be noticed, to be seen and respected. Even while Lawrence was on his deathbed, Washington had quietly initiated a campaign to secure the dying man’s position as adjutant general of Virginia, once even journeying to Williamsburg to speak directly with Dinwiddie. He did not permit the fact that he was barely twenty years old and without military experience to impede him. The position aroused his interest, for not only was it a sinecure worth £100 annually, it carried a modicum of prestige. In the end his efforts succeeded—to a point. The governor and his council decided to divide Virginia into four military districts. Washington was made adjutant of the least desirable territory, the southernmost borough that sprawled from the James to the North Carolina boundary, then west to the frontier. Obviously disappointed, Washington did not even visit the counties of his adjutancy during the first year and a half of his tenure, but he continued to press for the Northern Neck command, doggedly courting those who might be of assistance. In 1753 he got the post he coveted.32
To this point Washington had displayed no interest in the major political issues of the day, but it was a political matter that suddenly offered him a chance for renown. By mid-century the ceaseless western movement of English colonists verged on spilling over the mountains and into the Ohio Valley, a prospect that whetted the appetite of speculators in the middle colonies. Those in Virginia were among the first to act. In 1748 Lawrence Washington and several other planters had joined to form the Ohio Company and to apply to London for an official grant. The king obliged, investing the company with 200,000 acres along the Ohio River, and promising an additional 300,000 acres in seven years if the proprietors succeeded in erecting and maintaining a fort and in settling one hundred inhabitants. Its first step a success, the Ohio Company next hired Christopher Gist, a surveyor/explorer/Indian trader, to search the area for a site for a combination trading post and fortress; in addition, he was to mollify the Indians who might be uneasy at the sight of English settlers barging into their homeland. By 1750 the company had blazed a road through eighty miles of wilderness, and within another two or three years, thanks to a heavy personal investment by Virginia’s new governor, Robert Dinwiddie, company policy and government policy were indelicately intertwined.
All this frenetic activity might have gone more or less unnoticed, just another in the never-ending ploys of rich men to use their government to grow even richer, except that the stakes had become international in scope. Great Britain and France had been fighting one another for control of North America since 1689. Already they had fought three wars, and the most recent one, which had ended in 1748, had, like all its predecessors, been so inconclusive as to make yet a fourth conflict almost inevitable. The earlier wars had been waged over territory in the East, over islands in the Caribbean, and for the right of dominion over places like Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. But now that the population was about to burst over America’s mountain barrier, the Ohio Valley was very much on the minds of Frenchmen and Englishmen. To demonstrate its interest Versailles dispatched fifteen hundred troops south of Lake Erie in 1753, men whose orders were to remove every English trader from the territory; moreover, every few miles they were to plant iron tablets proclaiming France’s possession of this vast realm. When Governor Dinwiddie learned of this he realized that Virginia’s—and his—Ohio dreams were doomed unless he acted quickly. In June he wrote London of France’s actions, and in October he received his orders: send an emissary to the Ohio country, a messenger who would serve notice that the region belonged to Great Britain; if the French did not immediately withdraw, Virginia was to “drive them off by Force of Arms.”33
When news of London’s orders reached George Washington, restive in the isolation and obscurity of Ferry Farm, he made the decision that changed his life. He raced for Williamsburg to volunteer to bear the message to the French. For the third time in less than two years Dinwiddie greeted this enterprising young man.
Dinwiddie was old enough to be Washington’s grandfather, but he did not exhibit many avuncular or paternal ways. Short and fat, with a double chin that protruded beneath his puffy, ruddy face, he exuded an air of entrepreneurial lust. He had, in fact, grown wealthy through mercantile endeavors, accumulating a fortune that had enabled him to live and travel extensively on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, despite his education and his urbanity, an inescapable coarseness was visible through the noble front that he continually sought to maintain. Money and power were the drives that propelled him.34
He must have recognized a kindred spirit in the young man who was ushered into his elegant office that sunny autumn afternoon. But the governor also knew that the mission he had in mind would be arduous, possibly dangerous. The messenger that he chose would have to pass through Indian country, would have to dwell, in fact, in the midst of Native Americans whose friendship was being sought by the French. Nor could the French reaction be predicted. Indeed, Dinwiddie advised that already there had been several unpleasant incidents involving French soldiers and luckless English traders. The man who carried the governor’s message could not be just any young planter on the make.
Nationalistic lore has so canonized Washington that it is difficult to imagine the young man who was shown into the governor’s presence on that Indian Summer afternoon. The “real” Washington seems to have vanished for our age, replaced by an icon that too infrequently bears scant resemblance to a human being. But the youthful Washington that Dinwiddie officiously greeted that October day was very human.
The strapping young man easily met the physical prerequisites for the difficult mission which Dinwiddie had in mind. At age twenty-one George Washington was fully grown, and standing six feet and three inches tall he towered above almost every contemporary. He was broad-shouldered, with long muscular arms. His waist was small and flat, though he was rather wide across the hips. He tended to stand ramrod straight on long, solidly developed legs. He moved about in a fluid, agile manner, and word was that he was an excellent, graceful horseman. There was no hint of softness in the youngster’s appearance, particularly not in his face. He would not have been thought handsome, but he hardly was unattractive. Instead, people thought they saw a kind of steely toughness in his features. It was in his blue-grey eyes that this quality seemed most pronounced, for he had learned to stare at—almost through—anyone with whom he spoke. Then, too, he seldom spoke, as if to underscore that he was a man of action, not of words. Clearly, he was not an ignorant brute. He did not bear the looks of a violent person, nor did he convey a sense of viciousness. A little awkward socially, he nevertheless was courteous, and it was apparent that he was familiar with
the social code of the planter elite. Tough, yet cordial and with a bit of polish, Washington must also have struck Dinwiddie as being sensible and reliable.35
Still, the governor must have tried to learn something of the inner spirit that drove this quiet young man, anxious to learn why any person would be drawn to such a hazardous undertaking. In that endeavor, however, Dinwiddie surely must have been frustrated. George Washington already was a private man, one who carefully guarded his feelings from every intruder.
We cannot know exactly what Dinwiddie deduced about the character of his young caller, but whatever reservations he might have harbored would have been dispelled by the strong recommendation proffered by Washington’s powerful benefactor at Belvoir. In reality, Dinwiddie seems to have entertained few doubts about the young man. Sketchy though it is, the evidence hints that the governor’s reaction to Washington was based on an amalgam of emotion and instinct. Curiously, Dinwiddie’s response was not without precedent; nor would he be the last person to react in this manner to this complicated young man. The governor seemed moved by Washington. A man without a son—Dinwiddie had not married until he was past forty, then he had fathered two daughters—perhaps Washington had stirred some paternal sense within him, some nebulous feeling that transcended the normal relationship of officeholder and supplicant. Washington may have awakened the same subliminal feelings in Dinwiddie’s breast as he had in Fairfax’s. What is clear is that Washington possessed certain qualities, attributes that quickened the imagination of others, that inspired their confidence, that made some want to follow him, and that caused most men to trust in him, some obscure capacity that has vanished in the impassivity of time and that was never captured in the phlegmatic prose of his contemporaries. What also seems likely is that this young man who had labored so long and hard to improve himself would also have been capable of honing his skills at playing the role of surrogate son. Fairfax had advised as much, and in his aristocratic society—where merit was a virtue, though it was secondary in importance to one’s wealth and connections—ingratiating behavior was neither uncommon nor universally displeasing.
At any rate, when Washington left Dinwiddie’s office that afternoon he had been selected to bear the governor’s message. His orders: he was to depart immediately for Logstown, an Indian village on the Allegheny, where he was to procure an escort from among the Algonquins; he and his guardsmen then were to proceed north until they met the French commander, whereupon he was to present Dinwiddie’s letter; he was to wait no longer than one week for the French reply, during which time he was to keep his eyes open, gathering information on the strength, arms, intelligence, and plans of this potential adversary.36
Within two weeks the emissary was on his way, plunging deep into the lonely wilderness near the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. He had hired Jacob van Braam, once a lieutenant in the Dutch army, and his former fencing instructor, to be his translator. Christopher Gist came along too; middle-aged but still rugged, he was there to serve as a guide and to handle the diplomatic entreaties that were to be made to the Native Americans. Washington also hired four additional men to tend the horses and the supplies.
The party of seven set off from Gist’s residence near Wills Creek in mid-November, plodding up Laurel Hill, moving steadily in a north-by-northwest direction. Eleven days of toil lay between his cabin and Logstown, a trek made no easier by an almost uninterrupted rain that pelted the men. A few day’s hiking across intermittent Indian trails and through the defoliated late autumn wilderness brought the party to the Youghiogheny, muddy and swollen from the incessant storms. The men labored toward its junction with the Monongahela, skirting the confluence, marching along the eastern bank until, only a few miles further north, they forded the Allegheny. From there it was only about a dozen miles to the Indian village, and at sunset the next day the sight of smoke from rude lodgings told them they at last had arrived. Until then the only break in the band’s wearisome advance had come when Washington, having canoed to the junction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny, spent two days at the point, or the forks, reconnoitering for the best site for the Ohio Company’s fort.
The Virginia party stayed at Logstown for five days while the Indians procured the guides who would lead them to the French. Washington rested, and he spent a good portion of his time chatting with the Half King, a sachem of the Senacas. Washington omitted a great deal in his discussions with the chieftan, explaining only that he was on a mission to deliver a letter to the French leader. But the Half King probably guessed the real reason for the young man’s journey, even volunteering that his tribesmen already had threatened to drive the French from the region, a warning, he said, which the Gallic commander had only mocked, claiming the Indians were a mere annoyance, like flies and mosquitoes.
Finally the party, augmented now by its Indian guides, set out for French headquarters at Venango. A cold, dreary rain continued to torment the men during the five-day trek. On December 4 the small French outpost, located at the point where the French Creek fed the Allegheny, was spotted, a rain-soaked fleur-delis limply hanging above its gate. Captain Philippe Thomas Joncaire cordially received his visitors, but he advised them to proceed north another fifty miles or so to Fort Le Boeuf, where a French general was stationed. That evening the French entertained the Virginians and their Indian companions. Over wine—more than enough to “give license to their Tongues,” the abstemious young Washington recorded in his journal—Joncaire told his guests that the French planned to seize control of the entire transmontane West; his orders, he continued, were either to drive out all English settlers or to seize them and send them to Quebec as prisoners. Washington also noted with alarm that the Frenchman, the son of a French officer and a Seneca squaw, adroitly courted the Half King and his kinsmen, plying them with liquor and gifts.
Young Washington’s West
After a brief stay, Washington’s swelling party, which now included four French soldiers, pushed off. Four days of sloshing through rain, mingled now with occasional snow, brought them to the remote pallisade near Lake Erie. Again the French greeted the Virginians cordially, though behind his back these professional soldiers snickered at Washington as “the buckskin general.” The commander had been summoned, Washington was told, and should arrive late that afternoon. The young messenger whiled away the hours fraternizing with his hosts. Finally the commander arrived. He was Louis Le Gardeur de St Pierre de Repentigny, an old, one-eyed gentleman, a warrior who, to Washington’s way of thinking, comported himself with “much the Air of a Soldier.” Washington changed into his Virginia militia uniform for the meeting, and the business of his mission at last commenced. Major Washington presented Dinwiddie’s letter. A Frenchman translated the missive, then the general convened a council of war to debate his response. Forced to wait several more hours, Washington spent his time taking copious notes on the layout of the fort, and he ordered his men to count the number of Frenchmen present. Nearly twenty-four hours elapsed before the French were ready with a reply. Would Major Washington ride to Quebec and formally present the letter to the Governor of Canada? No! Such a trek was beyond the scope of his orders. Another wait ensued as the French officers once again conferred. That evening Washington finally was handed the written response of the general. The French officer promised only to forward Dinwiddie’s letter to higher-ups. At least Virginia’s ultimatum had been served, and that surely was as much as Dinwiddie had hoped for. The French, meanwhile, could not have been more friendly. Washington was fêted while he was at Le Boeuf, and when he was ready to depart the French, in the spirit of the season—Christmas was just a week away—provided their visitors with two canoes and a plentiful supply of liquor and food.37
Washington and his party set out almost immediately after receiving the French response. It was to be a treacherous return trip. For seven days the party canoed through icy streams, at times hampered by such jams that they were obliged to drag their crafts ashore and carry them overland; at other tim
es they were sped along by swollen, frenzied rivers, losing one canoe and its cargo of wine and meat to the furious surf. At Venango, north of present-day Pittsburgh, the Virginians divided into two groups: Gist and Washington donned buckskin garments and set out on foot, while the Dutch translator was placed in command of the other men and of the enervated horses. Trampling through deep snow in near zero temperatures, Washington and his partner walked eighteen miles the first day, lodging that night in the cabin of a hospitable Indian.
Along the way a day or two later they fell in with another Indian who offered to be their guide. He acted friendly enough, though there was something unsettling about him, some inscrutable air that aroused their suspicion. Still, Washington and Gist agreed that he could come along. By now Washington was having a hard time. Too exhausted to carry his pack, he let the Indian shoulder it for him. Then it was his feet. Blisters burst open, making each step sheer torture. Washington begged Gist to stop and make camp, even though it was only mid-afternoon. The Indian objected. There were dangerous Ottowa tribesmen preying in these woods, he cautioned. Besides, his cabin was nearby. Why not spend the night there? The two agreed, but two more miles of hiking still did not lead them to his dwelling. Now angry as well as debilitated, Washington decreed that they were stopping. Camp would be made right there. Suddenly, the Indian whirled about and fired at Gist, obviously the man he most feared and respected, since he aimed what would probably be his only shot at him. Somehow he missed. For an instant Gist and Washington stared blankly, frozen in shock. Then they sprang after their assailant, dragging him down. Gist would have killed him right there, but Washington protested. They disarmed the Indian and sent him north, while, under cover of darkness, they set out to the south, walking for twenty-four consecutive hours until they reached the Allegheny.
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