Throughout the fall of 1773, a tempestuous time when actions unfolded that would shape the nation’s course for years to come, George Washington, typically, had expressed no interest in the politics of the British Empire. For nearly fifteen years the management of his estate and varied business interests had been very nearly his sole concerns. Throughout that warm, pleasant Virginia autumn he evinced no desire to alter his way of life. But sometimes the most important changes in one’s life are neither planned nor anticipated.
4
Patrician Revolutionary
“Our lordly Masters in Great Britain”
January 19, 1774. London, bleak and sunless, lay in the grip of a damp winter’s chill. Early that morning, the Hayley, an American three-master owned by John Hancock of Boston, dropped anchor before the British capital. Before any of the crew disembarked, the vessel’s captain, pausing amidst the stack of bureaucratic papers that each entering ship’s master had to complete, described to the pilots and customs people who had routinely boarded his craft the demonstration known as the Boston Tea Party which had just taken place in his native town. Like a churning wildfire, the news raced through the city. By nightfall the prime minister and most of his cabinet had learned of the events of the previous month in Boston Harbor. Three days later a London newspaper published the story, and the news began to course its way through the English hinterland. Within another week London also knew that the incident in Boston had not been an isolated event. In Charleston, South Carolina, radicals had confiscated the dutied tea rather than permit its sale, while in Philadelphia and New York the captains of the tea ships, faced by angry mobs that threatened to hold their own “tea parties,” had turned for Great Britain without attempting to dock.
Ten days after the Hayley’s arrival the ministry, having now gotten enough information to sort out a fair semblance of what had occurred during the previous month in America, held its first meeting to deal with the crisis. Thereafter, the cabinet met frequently to consider the matter, often even reassembling in one another’s homes in the evenings to continue their deliberations. Slowly, they arrived at a plan of response, and by mid-March the administration had prepared four tough, unbending measures for Parliament to consider.
Frederick, Lord North, the prime minister, personally shepherded the bills through the legislature. It was hardly an exacting task. There was some opposition, of course, but North and his ministers pooh-poohed the gloomy talk of those who resisted the legislation. It was far more risky to do nothing than to act with resolve, they argued. By early spring the measures, known collectively as the Coercive Acts, were law. Despite the provocations elsewhere, only Massachusetts was to be affected. The most objectionable—intolerable, the colonists would say—portions of the acts concerned economic and political changes imposed in retaliation for the destruction of the tea. The Port Act closed Boston Harbor until restitution was made for the despoiled tea. The Massachusetts Government Act gave the provincial governor untrammeled powers to appoint members of the judiciary and the upper house of the assembly. By that act Parliament presumed to alter the charter of Massachusetts.
The North government did not want a war, but it knew that these acts raised the specter of conflict. The ministry had gambled. By singling out Massachusetts it had adopted a divide-and-conquer strategy, hoping thereby to force the other colonies into line. If the policy failed and war resulted, the government was wagering that it could win that war.1
Early that May, as Boston braced itself for Britain’s reaction to the “tea party,” George Washington, at home at Mount Vernon, was more immediately concerned with the weather than with political affairs. After a spate of warm, even sultry, days, northern Virginia suddenly had been belted by a late-season snowfall and a hard freeze. Washington had awakened on May 4 fearing the worst, and late that afternoon his suspicions were confirmed. The frost had destroyed nearly half of his one thousand acres of wheat, and it had been fatal for that year’s yield from his fruit trees. That very day he was scheduled to be in Williamsburg for the opening session of the House of Burgesses, a session likely to have to deal with Britain’s response to the Boston Tea Party. But he had postponed his journey until he could tend to the disaster at his farm. When he finally arrived in the capital, the legislature had been sitting for nearly two weeks.2
Washington’s behavior in this instance was not uncharacteristic. In the sixteen years since his first election to the Burgesses, he had displayed anything but an overwhelming interest in the issues that concerned the legislators. He had continued to be repeatedly reelected, first to the Frederick County seat, then after 1765 as one of the two delegates from Fairfax County. But his legislative performance had been lackluster at best. In fact, in some years he had not bothered to attend even a single assembly session.3
His disinterest should not come as a surprise. He had commenced his legislative service without ever having enunciated his views on any public issue save for those that affected him directly. There is not much evidence that he had experienced any transformation in this respect by the 1770s. What chiefly interested him was amassing and protecting his personal fortune. Western lands made up one part of that equation, but London and its colonial executives—not the House of Burgesses—largely were responsible for the policy that touched him in this realm. The legislators did deal with matters relating to slavery and farming and local taxation, but an assembly consisting almost solely of other planter-slaveowners hardly was likely to make laws inimical to his interest. The staple of a routine legislative session, the bills that proposed to tinker with county boundaries and those that licensed river pilots, held little fascination for him. More than anything else, his actions imply that he saw the legislative seat simply as another feather in the cap of the once middling planter who never tired of striving for additional confirmation of his aristocratic status, or of ways to enhance that position.
Besides, Washington must have felt like a fish out of water in this environment. He was always uncomfortable and anxious in the presence of men of learning, and there were enough college graduates and lawyers in the legislature to make him reluctant to speak out. He simply was not a loquacious person. Through his youthful experiences in the company of urbane men like Lawrence and the Fairfaxes, he had developed the custom of listening, pondering, but rarely expressing himself, so that if he did speak his utterance reflected his carefully considered best judgment. Thomas Jefferson, his colleague in the Virginia assembly for half a dozen years, once recalled that he could not remember Washington speaking on any issue for as long as ten minutes, although, he added, Washington always seemed to address “the main point which was to decide the question.” Moreover, Washington must have found parliamentary debate an alien format. He was used to the military system: collect intelligence, on rare occasions summon a council of war to deliberate collectively on strategy, then issue orders. It was an arrangement that suited his disposition.4
Washington was only one of more than one hundred assemblymen, and for more than a decade the leadership did not treat him as a preeminent figure. They seemed to regard him as a reserved, indifferent legislator, a backbencher, to whom they ladled out piddling committee assignments, delegating him chores like looking after stray animals or overseeing ferry service. His reputation for forbearance was deserved; during his initial fourteen assembly session he seldom introduced any legislation, and unfailingly the bills that he did sponsor were local or private in scope.5
Nevertheless, Washington’s presence in the legislature—listless as it customarily may have been—was of crucial importance. As historian Bernhard Knollenberg observed, the experience of those years taught him how to deal with men of a legislative mentality, a lesson of subsequent usefulness in dealing with the Continental Congress.6 Moreover, his very presence in the Virginia assembly put him in a crucial spot at a crucial time, for the Boston Tea Party and the Coercive Acts were about to transform a strained Anglo-American relationship into an armed confrontation.
As recently as a decade before there had been no hint of a conflict between the colonists and the British government. Certainly differences between the two had occurred from time to time in their 150-year relationship, but nothing approaching rebellion. Even as late as 1763 there was no sign of a revolt brewing in America. Indeed, Great Britain, at last triumphant over France and Spain, had never enjoyed a warmer, more friendly connection with its colonial subjects. Its government was widely regarded as the most benevolent in Europe, and many Americans took great pride in being part of the largest empire that had been seen in the western world since the collapse of Rome more than a thousand years earlier.
But beneath the glitter of success, problems nagged at this distended empire. Britain had acquired its vast domain through a staggering cost in blood and money; four wars had been fought in the space of seventy-five years to secure the dominion. Then, when the final triumphant march in the last victory parade had been played, Britain confronted reality. Its legacy from these chronic wars was a staggering indebtedness, running in excess of £137,000,000. Ironically, too, the last war and the splendid victory in 1763 only added to London’s mistrust of its New World subjects. For years paranoid officials in London had been plagued by the fear that the Americans yearned secretly to be independent of British domination. The conduct of many colonists in the French and Indian War had only intensified those suspicions, for few colonies had supplied their quota of troops, and some provinces even had persisted in trading with the enemy while their English brethren died on American battlefields. Moreover, the peace settlement, which transferred all French and Spanish possessions east of the Mississippi River to Britain, also removed the necessity for the American colonies to rely on Great Britain for protection against the traditional foes.
In addition to these woes another difficulty existed. According to the ancient precepts of mercantilism, the colonies were to exist for the benefit of the parent state. The notion had been a byword in London’s ruling circles since before Sir Walter Raleigh sent the first boatload of colonists to Roanoke Island two centuries before. Almost from the beginning of America’s settlement, Britain’s rulers, when permitted the luxury of peace, had tinkered with their kingdom, endeavoring to make it run as the mercantile treatises declared it should; they had meddled with crop production, sought to regulate manufacturing, tampered with trade, scrutinized the currency, pried into the operations of the provincial governments. And yet by 1763 British hegemony over its mainland colonies in America had never seemed weaker. Hence the ink was hardly dry on the Treaty of Paris before there was open talk in London of reforming the imperial relationship, fine-tuning it once again so that Britain could not only secure greater economic benefits but also tighten its grip on these allegedly recalcitrant, separatist colonists. Some printed tracts appeared in which notions like the creation of an American nobility, or the royalization of all the provinces, or even the merger of the separate colonies into one “GRAND MARITIME PROVINCE” were bruited about. More than anything else, however, the matter of the imperial indebtedness preyed on the mind of articulate Londoners, and more than one writer suggested that the debit be eliminated by taxing the colonists.
The open talk in London in 1763 only reflected what had been said there in private for two decades. As early as the 1740s the government quietly had begun to shift from a permissive to a more restrictive imperial policy, although before the new colonial policy could proceed very far King George’s War had been declared in 1745, and the plans for reform had been suspended. What followed after 1763, therefore, was the crystallization of a policy that had been envisioned for years.7
The new colonial policy fell into three broad categories: tightening the execution of the existing trade laws; taxing the colonists; and managing the newly acquired territories. While George Washington was distracted by his recurrent vexations with tobacco production at Mount Vernon, the news of the initial measures reached the colonies. Neither the Proclamation of 1763 nor the Sugar Act of 1764 (which sought to raise a revenue from placing low duties on imported foreign sugar) produced much of a ripple in Virginia. In the northern colonies there were some minor demurrings, though nothing of the stuff of rebellion.
Then came the Stamp Act. The ministry had announced its inclination for such a tax in 1764, but the measure’s final terms were deferred for a year until the colonists could be heard from. By early in 1765 they indeed had spoken. Several assemblies, including the House of Burgesses in Virginia, passed resolutions decrying the proposition, and a number of pamphlets appeared which excoriated Parliament’s right to tax Americans. But the colonists had not proposed an alternative levy. Without hearing the colonists’ petitions, Parliament easily passed the tax early in 1765. The duties, something like a sales tax though far more encompassing, fell on much that was sold, as well as on nearly all publicly issued documents and licenses.8
The ministry anticipated some colonial opposition, but nothing like that which occurred. The tone of the American protest was set in Williamsburg. The Burgesses was in session attending other business when news of the levy reached the little capital. Supposedly moved to act by the fiery rhetoric of Patrick Henry, the assembly wasted no time in responding. No one really knows what Henry said, but it is clear that George Washington said nothing on the subject. He had been in Williamsburg for a few days, then two weeks before the news of the Stamp Act arrived, he had returned to Mount Vernon. In fact, on the day the assembly acted he was at home hiring a gardener and, thus, was unable to vote on the Virginia Resolves, four resolutions that maintained that only the colonial assemblies possessed the constitutional right to impose levies upon the colonists.9
Had Washington remained in town he undoubtedly would have voted to support the resolves. However, he seems not to have been deeply troubled by the British legislation, seeing it as simply a mistake, an anomalous enactment, and not as the product of any conspiracy against colonial liberties. He spoke out on the act only once—in two letters penned on the same morning—and then he cast his thoughts in the language of an impartial observer. He did not portray all colonists as aggrieved by the tax; only the “speculative part of the Colonists,” he suggested, looked upon the act as “a direful attack upon their liberties.” The most immediate result of the legislation, he added, was that the colonists, with less money left in their pockets, would disdain British products and purchase American goods.10
But Washington was too busy with his farm to pay much heed to what he had referred to as this “ill judged” legislation. Elsewhere, however, a protest movement formed. Several assemblies adopted resolutions strikingly similar to the Virginia Resolves, and that autumn an intercolonial congress met in New York and protested in the same vein. In Philadelphia and Boston more violent protests occurred; in August mobs assembled in Boston, attacking the property of the stamp collectors and of those who sympathized with the act, and nearly destroying the home of Massachusetts’s lieutenant governor. (At the height of these disturbances, Washington’s daily diary entries read: “Sowed Turneps. . . . Began to seperate the Male from the Female hemp. . . . [P]ut some Hemp in the Rivr. to Rot. . . . Seperated my Ewes & Rams. . . . Finish’d Sowing Wheat. . . .”) Sporadic boycotts of English goods also occurred, making Washington’s remark that ultimately the “merchants of Great Britain trading to the Colonies will not be among the last to wish for a repeal” of the Stamp Act seem prescient. The next spring Parliament rescinded the act.11
Britain’s imperial problems remained, however, and in 1767 a new ministry imposed still another tax. The Townshend Duties were a different sort of levy—indirect taxes placed on imports of glass, lead, paper, and tea. But these were taxes, nonetheless, and if the government had expected the colonials to acquiesce in the legislation, it once again was mistaken. Newspaper essays and pamphlets attacking the measures appeared before the end of that year. A Philadelphian, John Dickinson, a London-educated barrister, penned the most influential tract, the Letters from a Pennsylvania Farme
r (a pamphlet that Washington purchased two years after its publication). The “Farmer’s” argument was one from which the colonial radicals never deviated. The only bodies which could impose taxes on the colonists, he asserted, were the American assemblies; therefore, Parliament’s taxes—whether direct or indirect assessments—were unconstitutional. Early the following year Massachusetts appealed to the other colonial legislatures to petition the Crown for repeal. The Burgesses in Virginia were the first to act, informing the king in a remonstrance that they alone were “the sole constitutional representatives of his Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the people of Virginia”; it was an act that the secretary of state for American affairs termed “more alarming than those from Massachusetts.” Again the Virginia assembly acted without George Washington, however. He had remained at Mount Vernon to meet with William Crawford and complete the bargain by which the frontiersman would search out good land for him in western Pennsylvania and the Ohio country.12
Washington, in fact, evidently displayed no interest in the Townshend Duty crisis until more than a year after his colleagues in the Burgesses had acted. Once again he had been preoccupied by his farming and business pursuits; he had traveled extensively during those months, journeying to Fredericksburg on two occasions, and making trips to the Pamunkey, to the Great Dismal Swamp, to Williamsburg and then on to Eltham to visit the Bassetts, and finally to survey the George Carter tract on Opequon Creek.13
By April 1769, when he did speak out on British policies, the imperial crisis had deepened. The colonial secretary had ordered the dissolution of the Massachusetts assembly for its having protested against the Townshend Duties, and the ministry had ordered General Gage to transfer a regiment of his army to troublesome Boston. In response the three great northern port cities, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, had joined in an economic boycott of Britain. Virginia had kept abreast of these activities through its newspaper, the Virginia Gazette, but it had taken no action since its resolution a year earlier. Rather suddenly, indeed quite surprisingly, Washington was among the first to suggest that the time had come to act. On April 5 he dispatched a trenchant letter to his neighbor George Mason, a missive that taken at face value reads almost like a revolutionary manifesto. The communiqué also hints strongly that Washington now believed British policy was not just ill-advised, but that it was a deliberate, concerted attack on colonial liberty.
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