First of Men

by Ferling, John;

  “[O]ur lordly Masters in Great Britain,” he began, “will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprication of American freedom.” Something must be done, he continued. He was prepared to take up arms in defense of his liberty, he went on, but then he quickly exclaimed: “A-ms I wou’d beg leave to add, should be the last recourse, the dernier resort.” Remonstrances, he said had been ineffectual. But by “starving their Trade and manufacturing,” repeal perhaps could be secured—and war might be averted.14

  Washington’s letter can be read in two ways, although whichever interpretation is chosen, it is clear that this date marks a departure in his thinking. Taken literally, his strident note can be seen as the outcry of a man genuinely troubled by the constitutional tyranny of British actions. There is no evidence that he yet had read any of the popular ideological tracts spawned by the crisis—he would not purchase Dickinson’s famous Letters until six weeks after he wrote Mason—though he must have perused a few of the somewhat similar essays that had appeared from time to time in the Virginia Gazette, and he surely would have heard some of his colleagues in the legislature address these points. His thinking may also have been influenced by Mason. Like Washington, Mason was a wealthy planter and land speculator, but chronic problems stemming from the gout had disabled him, forcing him into a sedentary life at Gunston Hall, a splendid Georgian brick mansion just a few miles from Mount Vernon. Mason used his enforced idleness to build an extensive library and to steep himself in the treatises of eighteenth-century Whig philosophers. Much earlier than Washington, Mason professed to see a plot in London to destroy American liberties, though he carefully confined his public denunciation of British policies to constitutional arguments. How much Mason may have influenced Washington is a matter of conjecture, but the two often met socially and it is difficult to believe that their conversations did not occasionally turn to political matters.15

  On the other hand economic considerations seldom were far from Washington’s consciousness. At least one person who knew him, Jackie Custis’s tutor, Jonathan Boucher, later attributed Washington’s patriotism solely to “avaricious[ness] under the most specious appearance of disinterestedness.” Boucher was an exiled Tory when he reached that conclusion, and he undoubtedly was prejudiced against Washington. Nevertheless, Washington himself told Mason that there were “private as well as public advantages to result” from a boycott of English goods. The personal advantages that he alluded to were twofold: Mount Vernon’s manufactured commodities might replace the boycotted English goods; moreover, with judicial proceedings suspended for the duration of the crisis, Britain’s merchants would be prevented from suing planters (including Washington) for outstanding debts.16 If Washington might gain by a boycott, it was not likely that he could be particularly harmed by a cessation of imperial trade; not only had he long since largely converted from tobacco to grain production, but Mount Vernon was virtually a self-sufficient little community.

  To some it may be unpleasant to think that Washington could have acted so crassly, yet, given his profoundly acquisitive nature and his long history of tirelessly pursuing “private . . . advantage,” it would be unrealistic to imagine that these forces may not have shaped his behavior. In his only reference to the Stamp Act, for example, he had spoken of the tax as unconstitutional, but he also had hinted at a crude class analysis of the legislation, obliquely identifying the principal victims of the duty as the most affluent sector of colonial society, that element with the cash in hand to consume the commodities upon which the tax was levied.17 However, it would be overstating the case to insist that economic considerations alone motivated him. The sarcasm that dripped from his reference to “our lordly Masters” in London, and his allusion to imperiled liberty (penned, after all, in a private letter to a friend and neighbor, and hence not the sort of document that might require embellishment or false statements), suggest that he was moved by political and philosophical considerations as well.

  Two aspects of Washington’s outlook in 1769 often have been overlooked by historians. He already recognized that petitions to the British government were useless, a lesson that many moderates in the protest movement still had not learned five or six years later. Moreover, his statement about taking up arms is arresting. In the papers of those thought to be more radical than Washington—men like Patrick Henry, for instance, or the Adamses in Massachusetts—no reference to hostilities settling the issue can be found at such an early juncture.

  A few days after his letter to Mason, the two men—together with Richard Henry Lee, the London-educated master of Chantilly plantation in Westmoreland County—prepared a draft of a nonimporation agreement for presentation at the next meeting of the Burgesses, scheduled to convene in the next few weeks. On the last day of April Washington set out for Williamsburg, pausing in Fredericksburg, then detouring to Eltham, finally arriving in the capital a few days before the assembly was gaveled to order. Lodging at Raleigh Tavern, he enjoyed several days of socializing, dining twice with the governor and as often with the speaker of the assembly, attending the annual spring horse races, and visiting friends who lived nearby. On May 16 the legislators got down to serious business. Washington was up early and rode to York County to inspect his dower lands, but he was back by 11:00 A.M. when the session began. That day the House of Burgesses adopted several resolutions, including a denunciation of the Townshend Duties. An angry Governor Botetourt immediately dissolved the legislature. “Your resolves . . . augur ill,” he presciently told the assemblymen as he sent them packing. But the burgesses did not go home. They tramped down the street and conducted their official—though illegal—business at the Raleigh Tavern. For the first time Washington played a major role in legislative deliberations; he unfurled the boycott scheme and immediately was selected to a committee to prepare an embargo plan. What resulted was a far less comprehensive boycott than many northern colonies had adopted; with the exception of wine and slaves, only taxed commodities would be excluded, and no goods (certainly not tobacco) were banned from exportation. The House promptly accepted the report, then it adjourned. Washington stayed in town that night to attend a party celebrating the queen’s birthday.18

  A week before the House of Burgesses acted, the king of England had been greeted by Londoners with derisive shouts as he rode from his palace to Westminster to close a session of Parliament. London was seething, churning with fury that spring, most of it brought on by a silly clash between the Crown and John Wilkes, a scurrilous rascal who repeatedly had been denied the parliamentary seat to which he had been elected. A radical reform movement had organized too, protestors who questioned both domestic matters and the government’s American policy. Under siege, the government had begun to retreat. Weeks before Whitehall learned of Virginia’s resolutions or its boycott, ministers had begun to talk secretly of a partial repeal of the Townshend Duties. They did not reach an immediate decision, but on March 5, 1770—ironically the very day of the Boston Massacre—a new ministry headed by Lord North moved to rescind each of the objectionable duties, save for the tax on tea.19

  Revocation did not occur a moment too soon for the colonial radicals. By late that summer the colonists’ economic resistance was in a state of collapse; steps already were being taken in Philadelphia and New York to terminate the boycott. When the reality of deprivation (or lost sales) caused by the boycott became manifest, some—especially among the merchants and the largest consumer class—began to lose their enthusiasm for continued opposition. Some lost their zeal even earlier. George Washington, for instance, his own boycott notwithstanding, placed two orders for British commodities in July 1769 that came close to heartily violating the essence of the law he had helped to draft only two months before. Boycott or not, he ordered a powder horn, a musket, sacks (“Markd GW”), three nutcrackers, and eighty-four books for Jackie.20

  Harmony prevailed between the colonists and the parent state during the next three years, shattered only by infrequent and always localized clashes�
��an assault by Rhode Island hot-heads on the Gaspee, a British revenue cutter, for example, or the publication by Massachusetts’s radicals of purloined letters between that province’s lieutenant governor and officials in London that purported to demonstrate the existence of a conspiracy to extirpate American liberties. Even the continued assessment on tea seems not to have bothered the great majority of colonists. Indeed, relations were so good that most colonists may have presumed that the tense days of the Stamp Act clash and the Townshend Duty crisis were gone forever.

  Washington certainly seems to have held to this view between 1770 and 1773. At least he went about his business as if he expected the Anglo-American union to continue unabated. Even before the end of 1770 he once again exhibited enthusiasm for an effort to make the Potomac navigable from Fort Cumberland to Alexandria, a notion that he had mused over for a decade; think of the “immense advantages” to be derived by making the river the “Channel of Commerce between Great Britain and that immense Territory Tract of Country which is unfolding to our” west, he told an acquaintance. That August he ordered more goods from London, although they were to be shipped only if the Townshend Duties were “totally repeald.” Coming more than five months after Lord North’s action, it is difficult to imagine that he did not know that the taxes had been only partially rescinded; yet he evidently received the commodities that he ordered, the result perhaps of couching his directive to the London mercantile house in such artful terms. In November he arranged to purchase fifteen thousand acres in the Ohio country, if Crawford liked the looks of the tract; and it was during the next twenty months that he looked for an investment in Florida and that he expended his inexhaustible energy in pursuit of his bounty lands. By 1773 he had hired a team to build a mill on real estate that he owned on the Youghiogheny (near the present site of Perryopolis, Pennsylvania), and throughout that spring he made plans to accompany the governor of Virginia on a July land-hunting excursion into the Ohio Valley; only Patsy’s death prevented him from making the trip. That autumn, when the first essays on the Tea Act appeared in colonial newspapers, Washington was looking into surveying lands below the Scioto River in the transmontane region.21

  Indeed, that fall Washington seemed oblivious to the unrest generated by the Tea Act in South Carolina and several northern cities. Although Virginians apparently had adhered to the Townshend Duty on tea (it had paid duties on eighty thousand pounds of the beverage in 1771 and 1772), tea smuggling had become an art form in the North. The Tea Act was designed to end the contrabandage and to finally reap some real revenue from the six-year-old levy. It succeeded only in reviving the moribund protest movement, however, and in instigating a chain of events that culminated in the Boston Tea Party and the less violent responses in Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston.22

  For weeks after Washington learned of these incidents it was business as usual at Mount Vernon. To enhance his fishing enterprise he acquired a brig for £175, and he concocted a scheme to settle a portion of his Great Kanawha lands with immigrants brought over from the Palatinate; in March 1774 he even sent out an advance party of twenty servants and hired hands to lay the groundwork. It seemed almost a carefree time for Washington. He hunted whenever business and the weather permitted (at least eight times in late December and January); he spent several nights at the theater in Alexandria, and he took in both horse and boat races. In the weeks preceeding the convening of the House of Burgesses in May—a session almost certain to deal with Britain’s response to the destruction of the tea in Boston—neither his correspondence nor his diary betray the slightest evidence that he suspected that America and Britain were on the verge of momentous events. He and Martha visited the Calverts in Maryland for two days early in May, then, when he was not absorbed by his losses in the late season cold snap, his diary went on in the normal vein: “Went to a Boat Race & Barbicue. . . . We . . . went to Pohick Church. At home all day alone. . . . I contd at home all day. . . . At home all day alone. Set off with Mrs. Washington for Williamsburg. . . .”23

  The Washingtons rode into the tiny capital on May 16, a clear and cool spring day. A serene atmosphere seemed to prevail in the city, but beneath the surface more supercharged emotions bubbled. Historically, the native gentry who dominated Virginia had been uneasy with the colony’s position. Virginia’s planter aristocracy traced its social, economic, and political hegemony to the vast wealth it derived from the fragile, mercurial leaves of the tobacco plant. Theirs was a one-crop economy, which gave them only a tenuous hold on wealth and power. The world tobacco market generally had boomed in the half century since the 1720s, yet there had been occasional disquieting reminders of the precariousness of the ruling class’s position. For instance, episodic wars over which colonials exercised little direction had a way of playing havoc with their economic well-being, causing prices to fall, credit to tighten. But, worrisome as such circumstances may have been, so far these dislocations had always been temporary. Then came the sudden intrusion of recent British statecraft, a departure in policy that was fraught with disturbing psychological and socioeconomic implications for Virginia’s ruling elite.

  Since the 1750s, and especially after the Stamp Act, the substruction upon which the authority of Virginia’s gentry was established increasingly had seemed to be threatened by a faraway polity over which it exerted little or no control. In the past twenty years Britain had interceded frequently to curtail Virginia’s independence in economic matters, first nullifying legislation passed by the House of Burgesses to relieve provincial taxpayers (an incident in the 1750s that came to be called the “Parson’s Cause”), then in 1764 forbidding the colony to put out paper money as legal tender. Those intrusions were followed by imperial taxation, the suspension of provincial assemblies by royal officials, talk of London designating a nobility for America, and prattle about arbitrary changes in colonial charters. Then, too, there had been Whitehall’s muddled western land policies, dictates that blocked an additional way to wealth and only added to the burden of anxiety already borne by the gentry. That very year, in fact, authorities in London had directed the governor of Virginia to sell lands only at public auction and at a much higher minimum price than previously. Thus, when Washington’s friend Richard Henry Lee spoke of the “iron hand of power” that Britain exerted over America, he expressed both the conscious and the subliminal perceptions on the part of Virginia’s troubled rulers about their relation to the empire.

  Britain’s manifest challenge to the political and economic autonomy of the colonial ruling class threatened to further weaken, perhaps to destroy, the latter’s tenuous preeminence. It was a threat that the gentry initially sought to resist by appealing to constitutional rights, an argument through which the elite meant to protect not only their class interests but what they understood to be their English—and Virginian—liberties. British actions threatened the aristocracy’s self-image. The ruling elite in Virginia had presumed itself to be an aristocratic class, apeing the fashions and behavior of English noblemen, yet knowing somehow that to be a valid gentry it must have full independence, free of the taint of subordination. But now events and policies had made an impact on both the Old Dominion and its colonial brethren in such a manner as to make it all too clear that the Virginia elite’s claim to gentry status was seriously threatened. For a class conditioned to think that a man must either be lord and master or a retainer, it was a revelation with potentially devastating ramifications.24

  No one was likely to have been more aware than Washington of the potential consequences of Britain’s policies to Virginia’s ruling class, or of the likely impact of these acts upon individual gentrymen. More so than almost any other Virginian, this proud man already had experienced the haughty arrogance of officials who looked upon Americans as provincials, as rustic outlanders naturally inferior to their more cosmopolitan English brethren. To get his way with these officials he had been compelled to adopt the manner of a sycophant, servilely importuning other men for favors. He no lon
ger was inclined to act in such a way. Indeed, it must always have been painful for him to play such a role, for this was the same man who had made Herculean efforts to free himself from each liability that had shackled him, from a domineering mother, from his own lack of education and his unpolished manners, from his inferiority of station compared to most elite planters, from a provincial command below that of junior officers fortunate enough—or sufficiently obsequious and parasitical—to have obtained a royal commission. Many scholars have searched in vain for signs that Washington responded to the policies of the parent state on the basis of principle or ideology. He certainly agreed with the Whig philosophy expounded by the leading American protestors, but his reaction was less that of the ideologue than of the individualist.

  His response revealed his utter exasperation at foreign constraints, his sense of outrage that other men might endeavor any longer to hold him in thrall. More than almost any other statement Washington had made before 1774, his reference to those in London who would presume to be his “lordly masters” divulged the feelings of this independent man. Whatever sentiments had transported other men to this precarious moment, George Washington seems to have arrived at the precipice of rebellion by interpreting British policy in terms of his personal well-being. His path to sedition left him no less radical than other activists, however. In fact, for a man with such ardent drives, the very personalness of his perceived relationship to Great Britain may have caused him to react in terms that were far more radical than those yet embraced by most colonists. For Washington, at least, his opposition to the mother country ran far deeper than a constitutional objection to ministerial taxes.