George Washington

by Stephen Brumwell

  Augustine Washington died on April 12, 1743. He was forty-eight—a fair age for a Washington. By then he had accumulated more than 10,000 acres, split into at least seven tracts. None of Augustine’s children were neglected in his will, but Lawrence, as the eldest son, naturally received the largest share, including the plantation on Little Hunting Creek. Renaming the property Mount Vernon in honor of his revered patron, Lawrence undertook major rebuilding. He commemorated this work by laying a carved cornerstone that proudly recalled his recent services as an officer of the king. Its design featured a heart, Lawrence’s initials, and a pair of halberds; these were the ax-like pole arms carried by sergeants in the British Army and an unmistakable expression of the householder’s martial credentials.24

  While Lawrence upgraded Mount Vernon, eleven-year-old George, the third son and by a second marriage, had to be content with Ferry Farm and a share of the household slaves and other possessions. Ultimately, George’s own inheritance made little difference, as his mother did not relinquish it to him when he came of age. Disinclined to remarry, Mary Ball Washington stayed put at Ferry Farm for another eighteen years after her son’s twenty-first birthday, running the property down through poor management. Self-willed, selfish, and apparently utterly indifferent to her son’s growing fame, she was a bane. Despite the best efforts of later apologists to cast her in a more sympathetic light, it is clear that George Washington’s mother was a stultifying presence, one who not only denied him a happy and loving childhood but irked him far into his adult years.

  For George, the grief resulting from the unexpected death of his father was compounded by the implications for his own future. Above all, it quashed any hopes that he, too, would enjoy the benefits of an English gentleman’s education and the opportunity to experience the fabled Mother Country at first hand. It was a bitter disappointment, a blow that would have a lasting impact. Meanwhile, George continued his schooling locally: his surviving exercise books show that, while much attention was devoted to the practicalities of life among the Virginian gentry—copying out the most common legal documents, for example—some effort was also made to convey the social skills expected of his class. When he was aged about twelve, George carefully transcribed a document that was destined to influence him for the rest of his life. Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation was a handbook on manners for the aspiring gentleman, listing 110 maxims that laid down the ground rules of etiquette. Besides blunt injunctions against spitting into the fire, crushing fleas in company, and blowing one’s nose at the table, the Rules of Civility offered advice on the tricky art of interacting with others, whatever their social rank. Throughout there was a strong emphasis on decorum and self-control. For example, Rule 1 read: “Every action done in company, ought to be with some sign of respect, to those that are present”; while Rule 40 cautioned: “Strive not with your superiors in argument but always, submit your judgment to others with modesty.” Imbibed by Washington at an impressionable age, the Rules of Civility offered crucial guidance, providing a firm foundation for his future conduct.25

  George was soon given an opportunity to put such guidelines to the test. With his father gone, the dashing Lawrence now played an even greater part in his life, as both a friend and a mentor. Once in full possession of Mount Vernon, Lawrence swiftly married Anne Fairfax, the daughter of Colonel William Fairfax, whose impressive mansion, Belvoir, was just four miles away. This was a development of immense significance for George, granting him access to the very highest level of Virginian society. At Belvoir and Mount Vernon alike, the awkward youngster began to acquire some of the finer social graces expected of a gentleman, while enjoying welcome respites from his mother’s baleful company at Ferry Farm. In addition, like Lawrence Washington, the English-born Colonel Fairfax was a combat veteran. As a teenager during the War of the Spanish Succession, he’d served in both the Royal Navy and British Army under his cousins, Captain Robert Fairfax and Colonel Martin Bladen; increasingly adopting the role of surrogate father, he, too, offered a source of wartime anecdotes calculated to kindle a precocious interest in soldiering.26

  The importance of Belvoir for George’s prospects was greatly enhanced in 1747, when he was fifteen, with the arrival from England of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, the colonel’s cousin. A former cavalryman, this hard-riding, fox-hunting, misogynistic aristocrat was proprietor of Virginia’s Northern Neck. Inheritance of a royal grant, given back in 1649 by the exiled Charles II to one of his staunch supporters, John Culpeper, had made Fairfax the effective overlord of a great wedge of land totaling more than 5 million acres, sandwiched between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, and stretching back almost 200 miles from Chesapeake Bay to their headwaters in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  Denied the English education experienced by his half brothers Lawrence and Augustine, at Belvoir George Washington encountered the next-best thing, mixing with its English-born residents, receiving their advice, and observing at first hand the refined Old World manners and elegant material culture that long-established Virginian dynasties still aspired to. In this rarefied enclave, it is possible that George may have deliberately imitated the speech patterns of his mentors, Colonel and Lord Fairfax, cultivating an English accent.27

  Lord Fairfax’s patronage soon provided George with a crucial professional opportunity and his first taste of a new and exciting environment. In March 1748, when a surveying party was sent into his Lordship’s western domains as part of an ongoing initiative to nail down the boundaries of frontier land that was being sporadically and illegally settled, George was invited to go along. By then the sixteen-year-old had applied himself so diligently to his mathematical texts that he was already capable of running simple surveys and could look to a lucrative career as a land surveyor.

  Two years earlier, when George was fourteen, there had been talk of a very different future, as a midshipman in Britain’s Royal Navy. As Washington much later recalled, he came close to becoming a sailor of the king: the scheme, which was championed by Lawrence, and which perhaps owed something to his admiration for Admiral Vernon, had progressed to the point where George’s baggage was ready for his departure; it only foundered at the last moment because his contrary mother, on the advice of her brother Joseph, suddenly turned against it with a passion.

  While George made the 1748 trip as a traveling companion to George William, the son of Colonel Fairfax, it nonetheless provided a chance to learn more about surveying at first hand from a team of acknowledged experts. George’s journal of the month-long expedition, which ranged beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Shenandoah Valley, is the earliest surviving record of his candid thoughts and reactions.28 His impressions are revealing, reflecting what was to be an enduring obsession with the vast North American interior, and especially the potential that it offered for financial exploitation. In the Shenandoah Valley, for example, George was struck by the “most beautiful groves of sugar trees . . . and richness of the land.”

  It was all very different from Ferry Farm or Mount Vernon. After one long day out with the surveyors, George stayed at the home of Captain Isaac Pennington, over the Blue Ridge. Still attuned to Tidewater notions of comfort and cleanliness, George stripped himself as usual before getting into bed, only to find that it was “nothing but a little straw matted together without sheets or anything else but only one thread bare blanket with double its weight of vermin such as lice, fleas etc.”

  On March 23, arriving some forty-five miles to the northwest at Colonel Thomas Cresap’s fortified trading post at the mouth of the Potomac’s South Branch, Washington and his companions came face-to-face with another, far more exciting, feature of frontier life. Cresap’s post lay on a well-worn tribal trail, and they were “agreeably surprised at the sight of thirty odd Indians coming from war.” Washington’s first glimpse of “undomesticated” Indians amid their own natural environment clearly intrigued him, inspiring a detailed and unusually spirited description in his otherwise humdrum
diary. A gift of liquor encouraged the Indians to perform an enthusiastic and striking “war dance.” Forming a large circle around a great fire, George wrote, “the best dancer jumps up as one awaked out of a sleep and runs and jumps about the ring in a most comical manner.” While the others followed his lead, the musicians began to play, beating time on a drum made from a pot half full of water with a deerskin stretched across it, and shaking a gourd “with some shot in it to rattle and a piece of an horses tail tied to it to make it look fine.”

  Some days later George and his companions encountered a very different group of frontier folk, “a great company of people—men, women and children” who followed them through the woods as they went about their surveying, proving more irritating than entertaining. These Germans, who had drifted down from Pennsylvania, were squatting on his Lordship’s lands and were anxious at the prospect of being evicted from their homesteads.

  Such non-English settlers were a new phenomenon in the 1740s, the spearhead of a fresh influx of immigrants from Europe who mostly bypassed the long-inhabited coastal settlements in search of land and freedom on their hazardous frontier fringes. Besides the Germans encountered by Washington’s party, the backcountry of Virginia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania was also attracting the so-called Scotch-Irish from Ulster, tough folk well suited to their dangerous new surroundings. Taken together, this incursion was slowly changing the ethnic balance of the hitherto overwhelmingly “English” colonies. To Washington and his companions, the German incomers were no less alien than the aboriginal warriors of the interior. Indeed, he believed them to be “as ignorant a set of people as the Indians. They would never speak English but when spoken to they all speak Dutch [sic].”

  For much of the trip the party camped out in all weathers, dining on the wild turkeys they shot. Young George was roughing it in the wilderness and enjoying the experience. On April 8, after negotiating rugged, mountainous terrain, they camped in the woods “near a wild meadow.” George wrote: “After we had pitched our tent and made a very large fire we pulled out our knapsack in order to recruit ourselves. Every [one] was his own cook. Our spits was forked sticks. Our plates was a large chip. As for dishes we had none.” Having tasted, and relished, the wild frontier that would go far to shape his emerging character, George returned safe to Mount Vernon on April 13, 1748.

  Later that same year, the impressionable teenager first met a young woman who was to exert an equally dramatic influence upon him. His friend George William Fairfax married the vivacious Sarah Cary and brought her home to Belvoir. Known as Sally, she was two years older than George Washington. From that time until almost the end of his life, Sally Fairfax was destined to enjoy a special place in George’s affections. Although the loss of virtually all the correspondence that passed between them complicates the issue, as will be seen, the few surviving letters suggest strongly that Sally held a powerful and lasting attraction for George and that he swiftly fell deeply in love with her.29

  George now pursued his interest in surveying to support himself and to accumulate more land of his own. By 1749, aged just seventeen, he was running professional surveys and over the coming three years conducted some 190, nearly all of them involving new grants on the frontiers of Lord Fairfax’s Northern Neck domain. Here once again the Fairfax factor was to prove vital for George Washington’s prospects: not only was surveying a profitable profession in its own right, yielding a higher annual income than that enjoyed by most Virginian planters or tradesmen, but it provided excellent opportunities for him to acquire prime tracts of land ahead of rivals. In his short spell of active surveying, it has been estimated that George earned something approaching £400; equating eighteenth-century sums to modern values is notoriously difficult, but in an age when a skilled artisan with a family to support might hope for an annual wage of £35, this clearly amounted to a tidy sum. In the same three-year period, by either purchase or grant, he acquired 2,315 acres of good-quality land in the Lower Shenandoah Valley, equaling that held by the far older Lawrence at Mount Vernon.

  George took a break from surveying in September 1751 when he accompanied his beloved half brother to the island of Barbados, in hopes that the Caribbean climate would ease his increasingly troubling cough. It is likely that Lawrence Washington was suffering from one of the era’s great killers: tuberculosis, or “consumption.” In May 1749, he had been excused from attending Virginia’s House of Burgesses, where he represented Fairfax County, “for the recovery of his health” and that summer sailed for England in search of a cure. When Lawrence returned with no improvement to his condition, it was resolved that he would try the warmer climate of Barbados instead and that George should go with him.

  This was George Washington’s one and only sea voyage, and it left a strong impression upon him. His journal of the trip to Barbados, which survives only in tattered fragments, notes the porpoises, which sported alongside the ship and which were often gaffed and served up for supper, and the changing weather conditions. Washington swiftly acquired a smattering of nautical jargon, and his journal is full of abbreviations suggesting that a life before the mast might not have been such a bad idea after all.

  The Washington brothers arrived at the island’s leading settlement of Bridgetown in early November 1751, to be welcomed by the prominent merchant and planter Major Gedney Clarke, whose sister Deborah was married to Colonel William Fairfax. Yet again the Fairfax connection had its uses, introducing the new arrivals to such genteel society as Barbados boasted. It was Major Clarke who recommended a doctor to examine Lawrence; his diagnosis was encouraging, giving hopes of a cure. That same day, November 5, George and Lawrence rode out to seek lodgings for their stay. It was the cool of the evening, and, as George enthused in his journal, they were “perfectly enraptured with the beautiful prospects, which every side presented to our view.”30

  Such tranquil vistas were deceptive. Barbados was Britain’s second-oldest Caribbean colony, established back in 1627. Sugar was the dominant crop, its intensive cultivation driven by a growing taste for tea and coffee in Great Britain and her North American possessions alike and by the widespread popularity of powerful rum distilled from molasses. But like the tobacco that soothed pipe smokers throughout Britain’s empire, this sweetness came from the bitter experience of enslaved Africans. By the early 1750s, black slaves outnumbered the island’s white population by more than three to one, leaving the planters in perpetual fear of an uprising. As a Virginian who had grown up surrounded by tobacco plantations, Washington was already familiar with the institution of slavery. Yet the Barbados version was notoriously harsh. Slaves toiled for long hours in the cane fields under a broiling sun. It was backbreaking work, and they were only kept to it by the lash and by a far more savage array of punishments for runaways and troublemakers. If George Washington noticed these brutalities, he failed to mention them in what survives of his journal, although, with his keen interest in military matters, he did remark on the island’s fortifications; on November 13, 1751, he dined at Bridgetown’s fort, tallying up the thirty-six guns mounted within the ramparts and another fifty-one in batteries outside.31

  Just days later, George was “strongly attacked with the smallpox,” a disease that took a heavy toll on his contemporaries, and particularly the young. Decades later, when he was among the most famous Americans of his generation, Benjamin Franklin still grieved for his son, “a fine boy of four years old” who had succumbed to smallpox in 1736. Franklin regretted bitterly that he had never inoculated his little boy, a risky procedure to be sure, but better than leaving him totally defenseless against the disease.32 Smallpox survivors were often left disfigured with deeply pitted complexions—the “pox-fretten” faces that feature so often in newspaper advertisements describing runaway servants, deserters, and other miscreants. Washington was unusually lucky: in exchange for nothing more than a few shallow scars on his nose, he gained lifetime immunity from one of the era’s worst scourges.

  But Lawrence’s
persistent cough only worsened. After four months on Barbados, while George headed home to Virginia, he sailed on alone to Bermuda in hopes its climate would work a cure. That, too, was a futile effort: the invalid returned to his beloved Mount Vernon and died there in June 1752, still in his early thirties. Another Washington had found an early grave, and George had lost a much-loved friend and mentor.

  Following Lawrence’s death, George gradually abandoned the profession of surveying. Not even the great expanse of the Northern Neck was limitless, and the same Fairfax power that had given such a boost to George’s career barred him from carving out an extensive territory of his own like surveyors elsewhere on Virginia’s frontier. Surveying was a practical skill that Washington would never forget, and one that he would occasionally return to, but it was no longer the focus for his ambition: that turned increasingly to soldiering.

  Undoubtedly encouraged by Lawrence’s example and his tales of Caribbean campaigning, George actively sought a military position for himself by following his half brother’s lead. Lawrence Washington’s status as a bona fide combat veteran had gained him the post of adjutant general for Virginia, which involved responsibility for overseeing the efficiency of the colony’s militia, composed of those freeholders expected to turn out and fight in a military crisis; his deputy was George Muse, an Englishman who had settled in Virginia and a fellow survivor of the ill-fated American Regiment’s stint in the Caribbean. As Virginia’s sporadic Indian wars of the previous century were now a distant memory and there had been no external threats to the colony since then, by the mid-eighteenth century its militia had long since lost its true role; aside from “patrols” intended to monitor and intimidate the slaves and bound servants, it functioned more as a social club than a fighting force to be reckoned with.33