The assembly was in session when Washington arrived in Williamsburg. Not much of consequence had occurred, nor did the legislature transact any really substantive business during the next three weeks. Its most radical step was to pass a resolution setting aside June 1 as a fast day to protest Britain’s closing of the port of Boston. Had the governor, John Murray, Lord Dunmore, not responded to this innocuous resolve in an ill-advised manner, the burgesses might have returned to their homes having barely taken note of Boston’s woes. But, like Governor Botetourt five years before, Dunmore responded to the fast day declaration by proroguing the assembly. The burgesses in turn reacted just as they had to Botetourt’s infelicitous decision: they gathered as a rump assembly in the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern and adopted resolutions threatening another economic boycott. (Washington did not let this turn of events tarnish his relations with the chief executive. On the evening of the rump assembly he attended a ball given in honor of Lady Dunmore; in fact, he had dined with the governor and his family twice—and spent the night with them once—since arriving in town, and the previous morning he had ridden with Dunmore to the governor’s farm, where the two had breakfasted, then toured the property.)25
By May 29 most of the delegates had departed for home. Washington still was in the capital, however, tending to personal business (which for all the world appears to have been fence-mending with a governor whose good graces might be essential for attaining those elusive bounty lands). That morning Washington was up early to attend worship services. That was relatively unusual in itself; in fact, he had not been to church in three weeks, but this day he worshipped twice. Late in the afternoon a dispatch rider galloped into town; his panting, sweaty steed indicated that the rider was on a long, urgent mission. In fact, he carried an appeal from Massachusetts, a plea for a united colonial boycott of English goods. In his saddlebags, moreover, were documents showing that Philadelphia and Annapolis already had agreed to stand with Boston. The next morning the assembly’s leadership rounded up the 25 percent or so of the burgesses still in town for an emergency meeting. That group considered the Bay Colony’s entreaty, then ratified a vague motion to act in concert with other colonies. But it postponed a final decision until the full membership could return again in sixty days; in the interim the legislators were to ascertain the “Sense of their respective Counties” as to the wisdom of a boycott.26
Whatever the thoughts of others, Washington’s views had crystallized. He deplored the destruction of the tea by Boston’s radicals, but he felt the ministry must be shown that all America disapproved of taxation without consent. “They have no right to put their hands in my pockets,” is how he put it. In addition, he regarded the Coercive Acts as “an Invasion of our Rights and Priviledges,” and he was especially troubled by Britain’s cavalier alterations of Massachusetts’s government and charter. But how to respond to these depradations? Petitions were useless, no better than wailing and crying for relief, he counseled; on the other hand, now that he no longer was a debtor, he had concluded that it was unjust to withhold the payment of debts. Thus, it was a boycott that he favored. It had worked before, it might work again. Besides, it was morally defensible, for repeal would come only if there was “public virtue enough left among us to deny ourselves everything but the bare necessities of life to accomplish this end.”27
Washington did not go directly home when the legislators finally adjourned. He stayed around the capital for a few days more, dining once again with Dunmore, then attending a fireworks display in honor of the colony’s First Lady. When he did leave Williamsburg it was to ride to Eltham for a visit of several days, a sojourn that included a long riverboat excursion with Martha and the Bas-setts to look after some land he had purchased the previous year. Washington’s schedule was hectic when he finally returned to Mount Vernon. He tended to his farm, and he devoted an unusual amount of his time to political concerns. He attended two citizens’ meetings in Alexandria so that he could report to and hear from his constituents; the second meeting adopted twenty-four resolves, among them a proposal for a nonimporation agreement if the Coercive Acts were not repealed. The meeting also selected Washington to head an emergency governing body for Fairfax County. In the midst of all this Washington was reelected to the Burgesses. (To celebrate he gave a party at which he was careful to offer coffee and chocolate, but not tea.) On August 1, this time accompanied by Jackie, Washington was back in the capital for the extraordinary session of the assembly, now called the Virginia Convention.28
By this time—about sixty days after that dispatch rider had brought Massachusetts’s plea for concerted action to Williamsburg—the notion of holding a continental congress in Philadelphia in September had taken shape, and several colonies already had formally approved such a notion. Nor did Virginia hold aloof from the idea. In fact, the convention met for less than a week, concluding its business with a minimum of rancor. Almost all the assemblymen were prepared to authorize their deputies to the national congress to vote for a boycott. The only divisive issue was over whether the protest should include a nonexportation agreement as well as a nonimportation ploy. Washington and many others resisted a ban on selling goods to the mother country. If Virginia’s commodities were not sold, it was said, debts could not be paid; of course, if that year’s tobacco crop went unsold, many planters would suffer because of the lack of income. In the end, the members compromised. Virginia’s congressmen were directed to vote for nonimportation to begin as early as November 1, but they were told that nonexportation must be postponed for one year. Before it adjourned the assembly created committees in each county to enforce the likely embargo, modeling the plan on the format outlined in the Fairfax Resolves. One of its final actions was to elect seven delegates to the congress in Phildelphia. George Washington was one of the seven.29
Why was Washington one of those selected? Each of the men chosen by the Burgesses had a long record of service in the legislature, and each had been vocal in his support of resistance of Britain’s taxation policies, though the seven reflected a blend of ideas, some having favored a total trade stoppage while others had called for more moderate policies. Although Washington had never been a legislative leader, he was a known quantity. His colleagues evidently saw him as a moderate and level-headed man, a person of integrity, prudence, sobriety, honesty, and personal independence. His record and his great wealth certainly augured for responsible conduct in the congress. He was a soldier, too, something to be considered in this hour of crisis. Besides, he had been very active in the affairs of Virginia for twenty years. It simply was unthinkable that he could have been passed over.
One last duty—one as poignant as any he ever had faced—remained before he could set out for Philadelphia. During that eventful summer Washington had learned that George William and Sally Fairfax no longer planned to return to Virginia. At George William’s request, Washington had agreed to oversee the selling of Belvoir and its furnishings. On August 15 the first of two auctions was conducted, a vendue to clear away every elegant possession in the Fairfaxes’ mansion. Given his intense feelings for Belvoir and the memories it held for him, this must have been a long, painful afternoon for Washington. Strangers roamed the corridors he cherished, pawing over furniture, poking around in the rooms where for nearly twenty-five years he and his friends had shared so many joys and tragedies, where he and Sally Fairfax had talked and laughed, danced and walked, where he had said so many goodbyes to her. Washington also purchased numerous items that day. For nearly £170 he picked up curtains, a sideboard and dining room chairs, a mahogany chest of drawers, a carpet and a mirror, and, most intriguingly, the coverlets, pillows, and bolsters that had adorned Sally’s bed.30
Late in the afternoon, as the cooling August shadows extended over the vast green lawn of Belvoir, Washington climbed upon his mount to return home. When he looked about he must have been touched by the sudden unfamiliarity of the place, by the strange faces and the trampled, unkempt landscape, by the for
lorn silence even amidst the din. Then he turned to ride home to prepare for the Continental Congress, a meeting, he told a friend, that had arisen more from “the Effects of a seeming Necessity, than [from] Choice.”31 As he cantered home he may have realized that the gutting of Belvoir meant the end of a long, sweet portion of his life. But no one, and certainly not Washington, realized that the impending imperial storm was about to change everyone’s life. And for no one would the change be greater than for George Washington.
For a decade and a half Washington had lived as a Virginia planter. His acquisitive manner and his fixation upon augmenting his wealth were not unique for the time and place, but in Washington’s case such behavior seemed to derive from a well-established psychological pattern. Driven by his compelling need for affirmation, Washington seemed never to be contented. More and more slaves were acquired; additional indentured servants were purchased; new rooms were added to Mount Vernon; and, always, the search went on for still more land. Moreover, a certain pretentiousness characterized his life-style. He procured vast amounts of elegant clothing. He wanted to ride in the most handsome carriage. He longed to breed the best dogs. There must be no equal to his stable of horses. He seemed humiliated when Mount Vernon did not produce the best tobacco crop in the neighborhood. He wished for the very best furnishings for his estate. Washington’s was a grandiose style, lived by a man who thought in grandiose terms, a man who lived in a society that admired wealth and power and who, consequently, labored tirelessly to accumulate the tokens that would result in his elevation.
The Washington of these years was not, temperamentally, a particularly appealing figure. He tended to moodiness, to what Thomas Jefferson later called periods of “gloomy apprehensions.”32 His temper was combustible and given to frequent explosions; his irascible side, furthermore, apparently was unmitigated by much of a sense of humor. But perhaps the most striking oddity about Washington was his interpersonal relationships.
With the exception of his ties to his brother-in-law, Burwell Bassett, Washington seems to have been close only to George William Fairfax, and evidence concerning his affiliation with his neighbor remains sketchy. Eight years older than Washington and the product of a formal education in England, George William likely differed considerably from his acquaintance at Mount Vernon. Yet, he seems to have regarded Washington as a friend, and there is no reason to believe that Washington felt any differently about him. Some scholars have regarded the friendship as a natural occurrence, inasmuch as the two men were neighbors and enjoyed an equally lofty status. But that is not quite true, for it confuses Washington’s pre-Revolutionary status with his more exalted position of later years. In the 1760s and early 1770s George William Fairfax clearly was the wealthiest and most powerful figure in his part of Virginia, an educated and cosmopolitan descendant of the most illustrious family in the Northern Neck. He was precisely the sort of friend whom Washington always sought.
In the real sense of the word Washington had no friends among men of his own age and station. Indeed, as he once remarked in a moment of candor, he was too consumed by mistrust to have—or to want—friends. “It is easy to make acquaintances,” he said, “but very difficult to shake them off, however irksome and unprofitable they are found after we have once committed ourselves to them. . . .” “Be courteous,” he advised, “but become a friend only after the other person has been well tried.”33 It was the sort of advice he might have given concerning the purchase of a horse: examine it, try it out, break it in, but acquire it only if there is some profit in the endeavor. His outlook was that of the utilitarian, one who was capable of seeking others only as objects, and, in fact, his interpersonal relationships were meant to serve as a means to an end—to fulfill a grand ambition or to elicit the approval for which he yearned.
Within a few years of becoming the master of Mount Vernon, Washington again seemed to act as though something was missing in his life. His ceaseless efforts to accumulate assets were one manifestation of his emptiness, but his manner of posing for the artist Charles Willson Peale in 1772 was even more revealing. For his first portrait Washington had chosen to be seen as a warrior rather than as a planter, although he had not soldiered for fifteen years. The sense of coherence in his life had seemed to vanish when he left the Virginia Regiment in 1758. Neither the grandiosity nor the brilliance of Mount Vernon could gratify his needs any longer. Now, in the tense summer of 1774, Washington seemed to have identified his search for personal independence with his province’s drive for cohesion, and he even had come to interpret Britain’s new colonial policies in a very personal sense. London’s actions were a threat to his “character as a man.”34 He would not submit to those who sought to become his “lordly Masters.”
At dusk on August 29 the Massachusetts delegation to the Continental Congress reached Philadelphia, where they found half or more of their fellow congressmen already in their lodgings and anxious to meet and size up their colleagues. They found only two or three from Virginia’s delegation, however. Washington was not among them. He still was at home at Mount Vernon, awaiting the arrival of fellow deputies with whom he would share the long ride north.
Late the next day, a blistering hot August afternoon, Patrick Henry, tall and slender, his acquiline nose and piercing grey eyes stamping his countenance with a noble, dashing air, rode up the winding trail from the Potomac to Mount Vernon, accompanied by Edmund Pendleton, a cautious veteran of more than twenty years of political warfare. They remained at the mansion that evening, dining with George and Martha, as well as with George Mason and another neighbor whom the Washingtons had invited over. The men contented themselves with small talk through the meal, but when they adjourned to a parlor they spoke with animation, discussing options and sharing information on current events in their respective counties. It was a conversation in which George must have seldom spoken, for the pedantic Mason and the flamboyant Henry, not to mention Pendleton—a tough, ambitious man whom many regarded not only as the most handsome man in Virginia but as the best debater in the province—were the sorts who naturally monopolized any gathering.35
After breakfast the next morning the three congressmen set out, Martha waving good-bye and, according to legend, telling her husband’s colleagues: “I hope you will stand firm. I know George will.” They traversed the great river by ferry, then, over the next five days they rode relentlessly until the rolling hills gave way to the flat, desolate coastal region that splayed out from the west bank of the Delaware River.
Like the party from Massachusetts, the Virginians also arrived in Philadelphia late in the day, and probably they, too, like their New England brethren, were greeted by dignitaries four or five miles outside the city. Once in town, the men stopped first at the City Tavern for a meal, then the weary travelers hurried to their lodgings. Washington stayed that night with the family of Dr. William Shippen, a University of Edinburghtrained physician who taught at the College of Philadelphia. But rather than impose on their kindness further, he rented a room at a local inn the next day.36
Few congressmen knew anyone other than the members of their own delegation. Only one or two were known by reputation outside their province. Almost everyone had heard of Samuel Adams, and, because of his days as a soldier two decades before, perhaps as many also knew of Washington. He was almost the only former soldier in attendance, and no other delegate—no other resident of Philadelphia, in fact—came close to rivaling him in years of martial experience. It seems likely that he might have been quizzed by his colleagues about American prospects in the event of war with Great Britain. What he told them is not known, but that autumn he wrote a friend in the British army that “more blood [would] be spilt” in an Anglo-American war than “history has ever yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America.” Washington impressed his colleagues with what Silas Deane of Connecticut called his “easy Soldierlike Air”; Deane thought him a man with a “hard . . . Countenance,” but one who “speaks very Modestly, & in cool but
determined Stile & Accent.” Many of the delegates seem to have regarded Washington as a terribly successful soldier during the French and Indian War, and somehow the rumor was started that he had offered to pay for the creation of an entire army from his own immense fortune.37 He did nothing to scotch either notion.
The other congressmen were unknown commodities. Indeed, Virginians knew little of the state of mind of their northern colleagues on the subject of Anglo-American difficulties. So they eagerly met one another, dining and drinking together, talking about almost nothing but politics from morning to night. If politics had a rival attraction it was the city itself, America’s largest metropolis in 1774. Although Washington had been here five times before (he had passed through only a few months previously when he had taken Jackie to college), he too must have been anxious to really look at the town.
Philadelphia was big. Its twenty-five thousand inhabitants made it slightly larger than New York, about half again more populous than Boston. Yet it was a strikingly easy town to get about in. The thoroughfares in Philadelphia were straight and parallel, forming a gridiron pattern. They even had rational names, those streets running east to west designated mostly after trees, while those that intersected were numbered sequentially. These were busy byways too. There seemed to be an endless stream of activity between the town and the docks along the river, for this was the busiest harbor in America, a port that saw well over a thousand ships come and go annually. A stagecoach line also operated out of the city, funneling people and the mail to points north, and many local merchants thrived by dispatching dray after dray of commodities over these streets, then out to the large immigrant population that had flowed through Philadelphia south or west, many eventually settling on lands in the Shenandoah that Washington once had surveyed or fought for. The main streets in this city had a handsome, well-kept look about them. They were paved, all were lined by illuminated lamps as well as by trees that already had grown tall and stately. Brick sidewalks ran alongside these arteries, pathways dotted with more than five hundred public water pumps.
First of Men Page 17