The city was only twelve blocks wide and twenty-five blocks long, but over six thousand houses were crowded into that space, most of them wedged into the east end of town. Few of these residences were mansions. In imitation of the English squires with whom they traded, the Philadelphia gentry had taken to the countryside, preferring to build their elegant dwellings away from the malodorous “vapors” of the city, removed from its ever-present noise and grime, its smoke and oppressive summer heat. Here and there a stroller might glimpse the town house of one who was affluent, usually a two- or three-story brick home, but it was only in the suburbs that one could see the tree-lined estates of the grandees, huge brick houses about which rolled the green, virgin acres of southeastern Pennsylvania, places with names like Woodlands and Whitby Hall, Cedar Grove and Hope Lodge.38
The business district squatted amidst some of the more sumptuous town-houses. Nearly three hundred mercantile establishments were bunched into the first few blocks west of the riverfront, businesses that ranged from dockside warehouses to retail shops to the work sites of the city’s mechanics. Most were small businesses run by a master artisan, a workplace in which the owner labored alongside a young apprentice and one or more journeymen. Scores of craftsmen and craftswomen, each plying his or her own specialized trade, could make a go of it here. Cordwainers, coopers, tailors, and a variety of smiths (blacksmiths, tinsmiths, silversmiths, gunsmiths) operated out of their own houses, anything but elegant one- or two-story dwellings, abodes that always seemed cramped even though they were usually only sparsely furnished. Men and women who specialized in more than twenty separate crafts toiled in the ship-building industry alone, and almost as many varieties of construction tradesmen were required to erect one large house or building (and about five hundred dwellings were erected that year in this city).39
If Washington chose to walk west, into those neighborhoods farthest removed from the job sites, he saw a bruitish squalor that almost rivaled the loathsome conditions in his slave cabins. In fact, nearly 10 percent of Philadelphia’s inhabitants were bonded laborers, slaves or indentured servants. They may not have been much worse off materially than the free but unskilled workers, the laborers who hauled goods and swept chimneys and dug ditches. Only one worker in ten could afford to purchase a house; the remainder, mostly husbands with families of six or seven or more persons, rented lodgings in dingy, drafty, wooden firetraps, tiny apartments that seldom exceeded four hundred square feet, and which were jammed side by side, abutting outhouses and even stables. Husbands and wives, and frequently their children as well, worked six days a week from sunrise to sunset, and, if lucky, the entire family earned a few pounds more than they had to spend for their food and clothing, their rent and firewood.40
How much of this Washington took the time to see is not known, but he did mention in his diary that he received a guided tour of the Pennsylvania Hospital. Together with John Adams and perhaps one or two other colleagues, Washington was taken out to the hospital by Dr. Shippen. A three-story T-shaped structure of brick and stone, the hospital sat in bucolic surroundings adjacent to the city’s almshouse and workhouse, though it was segregated from these abhorrent institutions by white picket fence and a grove of trees. Built only twenty-five years before, this was the oldest hospital in the colonies. The facility existed for the industrious poor, as opposed to the affluent, who were treated at home, and the idle poor, who went unattended. It had been founded both by Quaker benevolence and on the supposition that it was cheaper to keep impoverished men alive and occasionally at work than it was to pay poor relief to their indigent widows and children. Washington’s tour began in the basement where he looked in on the mentally ill; in reality this section was little better than a dungeon where these unfortunates were caged like criminals. Then it was upstairs to the wards, long rooms housing row after row of beds, upon which lay the lame and the ill. It was a “dreadfull Scene,” Adams told his diary; the “Weakness and Languor, the Distress and Misery, of these Objects is truely a Woefull Sight.” Finally, the guests were taken to Shippen’s laboratory, where the physician lectured briefly on the subject of human anatomy, utilizing a plaster of paris model of the body for a guide, as well as paintings of “the Insides of a Man . . . , all the Muscles of the Belly being taken off [to reveal] the Heart, Lungs, Stomach, Gutts.”41
Washington, who had arrived just as Congress was about to meet for the first time, soon had leisure for all the sightseeing he could wish. Congress had no more than convened before it created a committee to draft a statement of American rights. Washington was not named to the panel, thus freeing him to do as he pleased until the committee reported. For nearly two weeks he had no duties to perform, save for reporting to Carpenter’s Hall each morning to learn whether Congress would meet that day. During that period he may have explored Philadelphia. Certainly he socialized with his colleagues; he probably spent some time in the evenings at the gaming table; and for a fact he did attend at least one Presbyterian worship service. He also met several Philadelphians during this period of enforced idleness. He dined at the home of Richard Penn, a former governor of Pennsylvania, and he was the guest of Thomas Mifflin, a successful young merchant, and of John Dickinson; he was hosted by the latter at Fairhill, the “Farmer’s” elegant estate that overlooked the Susquehanna north of the city.42 His most important encounter, however, was with Joseph Reed.
Ten years younger than Washington, a Princeton-educated lawyer, Reed was an opportunist. He hailed from a comfortable, but by no means wealthy family. He had struggled through years of schooling (besides his graduate degree from Princeton, he had a year of formal legal training at the Middle Temple in London) to attain a measure of prosperity and status, yet his estate was valued at only one-eighth that of Mifflin, one-seventieth that of Dickinson. Desirous of more wealth, not to mention power and recognition, Reed long since had learned that the most rapid way to the top was to hitch himself to someone already there. He had married into the family of a wealthy London merchant, then he had become something of a follower of the “Farmer” in the domestic politics of Pennsylvania. Now he was industriously courting many of the most influential congressmen, frequenting their haunts and entertaining them in his comfortable, though hardly posh home. What no one knew was that he was sending accounts of much that transpired to the American Secretary in London, playing that angle, too, in the hope that he might be offered a lucrative post in the imperial bureaucracy. Yet Reed was not a traitor. He preferred that the colonists be reconciled with Great Britain, but on terms satisfactory to the American protest movement; thus, he had been active in radical circles in Philadelphia, and he had played a major role in helping the protest movement in Pennsylvania overcome a powerful conservative resistance to the very notion of a national congress. Washington and Reed probably met frequently during those weeks. The older Virginian, now forty-two, seemed to feel comfortable with this younger man and took an immediate liking to him. Reed was friendly and outgoing, polished and intelligent. In many striking ways, in fact, his conduct was not unlike that Washington had exhibited when he too was just starting out. More striking even, Reed bore a marked physical resemblance to Washington, that is if the two paintings of him that exist—both by Peale—are reasonably accurate renditions.43
When the Grand Committee at last reported, Congress finally got down to business, launching a month of six-day work weeks. Washington apparently attended the meetings faithfully, but, typically, he seldom actually participated and he contributed little to the actions finally taken by the conclave. After some anxious moments in the early days of the meeting, the more radical delegates assumed control. Congress went on to adopt a declaration of rights that, though longer and more explicit, largely reiterated the stand taken by the Old Dominion in the previous decade. The delegates also quickly agreed to boycott Great Britain until the Tea Act and the Coercive Acts were repealed. Agreeing to the mechanics of the embargo proved more difficult, however, for here the selfish interests of va
rious factions collided. Nonimportation posed few problems, but nonexporting colonies wished to immediately stop the shipment of commodities to the parent state, whereas others, principally the tobacco and rice colonies in the South, hoped to forestall a ban on the sale of their goods to England until that year’s crop had been marketed. In the end the South won the clash; New England needed allies badly enough that it was willing to settle for half a loaf. It was decided to begin nonimportation in December, but to defer nonexportation for a year, and it was agreed to create an enforcement mechanism known as the Continental Association, locally elected committees to compel adherence to the boycott. The Congress then smoothed over the rough edges by drafting a soothing letter to the people of Great Britain, and, late in October, having been away from home for sixty days or more, the delegates happily voted to adjourn, pledging only to meet again the following May if the difficulties with the parent state still had not been resolved.44
Washington sped home (he covered the distance between Philadelphia and Virginia in a day and a half less than it had taken him to get to the Congress), arriving on a cool, sunny October afternoon, doubtless delighted to be home to witness the gaudy autumn colors the surrounding hills and forests had put on in his absence. He immediately immersed himself in his business concerns. He sought out his cousin Lund Washington, to whom he had entrusted the management of Mount Vernon, and they rode here and there, inspecting the crops and the mill, looking in on his livestock. He oversaw the auction of portions of the property of a late friend and neighbor, and he attended the final sale of the Fairfax’s property at Belvoir.45 Now and then he hunted, and hardly a day passed without a visitor appearing at his door.
Old friends and acquaintances dropped in, as did some folks that he knew only in passing. William Piercy, a Methodist minister—George referred to him as a Presbyterian in his diary—visited briefly. He was a man recently arrived from London, one whom Washington probably had just met in Philadelphia.46 Charles Lee, styling himself as “General” though he had not risen above the rank of major in the British army, was a guest too, staying for five nights. It was the second recent meeting of the two men, for they had seen one another in Philadelphia, getting together there for the first time since they had accompanied General Braddock on his fateful trip to the Monongahela nearly twenty years before. Lee had lived a very busy life in those two decades. Despairing for advancement in Britain’s peacetime army following the conclusion of the French and Indian War, he had fought as a mercenary with the Poles, commanding Russian troops against the Turks in Moldavia. (He was a general in this army, hence he had some claim to the title he used.) Late in the 1760s he was back in England, dabbling in radical politics, publishing polemics against the Crown. He also puttered with some land speculation schemes in America, and in the summer of 1773 he came for a visit and an inspection of his investments. Like a bohemian he had drifted through three or four colonies during the past year, availing himself of the hospitality of one colonist after another, pausing only long enough to write a pamphlet that argued rather convincingly that America’s soldiers would be more than a match for the redcoats should war break out.
Lee had a way of offending people. Part of it was due to his unconventional life style. Not only was he prone to a nomadic existence, but there was a habitually unkempt air about him as well. According to knowledgeable contemporaries, both peculiarities were attributable to the fact that he had never married, though the reverse may have been as likely an explanation. (Actually, he had “married” and fathered a son by an Iroquois woman, but, however the Native Americans looked on the match, he thought of it simply as a matter of convenience.)
His manner was acerbic and contentious. Well educated—after early training in England he probably was schooled in France and Switzerland—and well read, he had an opinion on everything, and he was not the least reticent about expressing his views. In fact, his conversations had a way of becoming monologues, musings and dogmatic statements delivered in an odd mix of eloquence and of the salty invective of the barracks and the barroom. Then, too, there were his traveling companions. He went everywhere with a pack of dogs. Five hounds accompanied him to Mount Vernon, and, as usual, they were huge oxlike creatures, only slightly less disreputable-looking than Lee himself, though probably considerably less talkative than their master. Lee had one other unsavory habit, one that he revealed just before he departed. He talked Washington out of £15 to pay for his further travels.47
For the first time in fifteen years Washington’s days also were taken up by military concerns that autumn. Fairfax County had organized a volunteer military company in September, even adopting as its uniform the old buff and blue design that Washington had recommended years before. By mid-January the unit had begun to drill under Washington’s careful gaze, training with powder and shot purchased out of money that Washington and George Mason had lent the county. From time to time during these months Washington also assisted the drillmasters of other new companies, and he played an important role in organizing the local enforcement of the economic boycott. In March, Fairfax County elected him as its delegate to the Virginia Convention in Richmond, an ad hoc legislative gathering necessitated by Governor Dunmore’s continued refusal to summon the Burgesses. Washington landed on the committee to oversee the colony’s military preparations, and just before adjournment he was reelected as one of Virginia’s delegates to the second Continental Congress.48
When Washington decided that war was inevitable cannot be precisely determined. His fellow congressman, Richard Henry Lee, and many other leaders as well, had left Philadelphia believing that Britain again would cave in when confronted by the boycott. Some visionaries in America even expected a revolution in England, an uprising by Old Country radicals to topple the allegedly tyrannical regime. Washington never went that far, but as late as February 1775 he still seemed to doubt that war would occur, hinting that he believed the North government would accede to the colonists’ demands. When he returned from Philadelphia, in fact, he resumed his normal speculative pursuits, making the sorts of investments that do not suggest he believed a protracted war was imminent. He secured two parcels of land, one by purchase and one in lieu of the repayment of a loan he had made years before to a neighbor. He also purchased several indentured servants.49 But Washington’s uncanny luck in business matters deserted him during these months, as he suffered one substantial setback and he was faced with the real possibility of a second loss, a stunning commercial reversal.
The previous spring Washington had sent a team of servants and hired hands to settle and commence development of his lands near the mouth of the Great Kanawha River. The venture was a fiasco. The bonded laborers escaped at the first opportunity, and the hirelings soon thereafter were driven away when the frontier again exploded in still another of its episodic bloodbaths. Washington lost over £300 on that gamble, though—in an action that admittedly bears marks of a man racing against time—he immediately bought another labor party, dispatching that team in April 1775. This group was more successful for a time, for by the next spring it had cleared and planted twenty-eight acres; then fresh hostilities with the Indians broke out and this settlement also was abandoned.50
At the same time that Washington was putting together his second team for the Great Kanawha, he received even more disconcerting news. Shortly after he returned from the Virginia convention sessions in Richmond, one of his old soldiers from his frontier days dropped by Mount Vernon bearing the tale that Governor Dunmore was about to disallow all the land grants previously made to the colony’s veterans of the French and Indian War; supposedly, the soldier added, the surveyor of the tract, Washington’s old buddy William Crawford had not been properly licensed. Washington listened with disbelief. He could lose twenty-three thousand acres! He immediately contacted the governor, adducing evidence and entreating the executive’s beneficence. But Dunmore dryly responded that if Crawford was not properly certified “the patents will of consequence be declare
d null and void.”51
Two days after he communicated with Lord Dunmore, Washington seemed to indicate that he now believed war would occur with Great Britain. He reported to George Mercer that he believed the people were ready to fight. One of those who thought war was certain was Horatio Gates, the former British officer with whom Washington had served on that trek to the Monongahela in 1755. Like Lee, Gates had quit the peacetime army in Britain during the 1760s; he had searched out a parcel of land in Virginia near Berkeley Springs, and he had moved there in 1773. Now that war was a possibility Gates felt the itch for his old calling, and he paid a visit to Washington in April to urge his old acquaintance to help him secure a commission in case Congress created an American army. “General” Lee dropped back by too, for another five-day stint, although whether he too was looking for a commission or simply for a roof over his head is not clear.52
Lee had hardly ridden away to bring his brand of cheer to some other lucky planter when Washington received ominous tidings: Governor Dunmore had directed the seizure of the colonists’ powder stored in Williamsburg. Moreover, Washington learned that troops were being organized to march on the capital where, according to some, the chief executive would be confined under house arrest until the purloined powder was returned. The next day volunteer officers from Dumfries dispatched a courier to Mount Vernon to learn whether Washington would march with them. But before Washington could respond another express arrived at his door. This messenger brought even more disconcerting news. Ten days before British troops had clashed with colonial militiamen in two obscure villages in Massachusetts; there had been many casualties on both sides in the town of Lexington, as well as in a place called Concord. Everything now was altered. War with the parent state seemed a certainty. It was best to defer bellicose action in Virginia until the meeting of the second Congress, scheduled to meet in less than two weeks.53
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