When he returned to the luxuries of home, George found a disturbing surprise. George Fairfax had married a tall and lively eighteen-year-old named Sarah Carey. Everyone called her Sally. Washington had been susceptible to girls for some time. Schoolmates accustomed to his stolidity had remarked on the times he romped with one of the neighborhood girls. But Sally Fairfax was not one for romping. She was only two years older than he, but she was married and her husband would inherit lavishly. Sally wasn’t beautiful, but her long face was alight with intelligence and humor and she moved with a mature grace. Her teasing overtures stirred George Washington profoundly.
For the next four years, Washington divided his time between surveying the countryside and weeks of indulgence at Mount Vernon and Belvoir. There always seemed to be a host of pretty girls on hand, not least Mrs. Fairfax. Washington acquired more land and was named a county surveyor. But he appeared doomed to fall in love easily and lucklessly. He wrote to one young woman in Fredericksburg three times and got no answer. As he took up his pen for a fourth attempt, he confessed to her that he was almost discouraged. Nearing his twenty-first birthday, Washington seemed to have inherited his mother’s intense will and was on the way to harnessing it.
Then George’s prospects improved abruptly for a distressing reason. Lawrence Washington’s three children had died, and now he was suffering from a persistent cough that suggested tuberculosis. He sailed to the West Indies hoping that the sun would cure him. George went with him to Barbados while his wife stayed behind to tend their frail fourth infant. The trip mocked their expectations. Lawrence became worse and sailed on to Bermuda alone because George had contracted smallpox, a light case that left a few scars across his nose. On his return to Virginia, George found that he had also developed pleurisy. Meanwhile, Lawrence gave up his quest and came home to die.
The foresight of Lawrence’s will reflected his recent losses. During his wife’s lifetime she would live on at Mount Vernon as guardian for their surviving child. If that daughter also died, Mount Vernon and the rest of the estate passed to George upon the death of Lawrence’s widow. Lawrence had been one of the four majors in Virginia’s militia. As his heir, George sought that commission, and the Fairfax family helped him get it. Within six months, Lawrence’s infant daughter had died and his widow had remarried and moved away. George Washington began to assume responsibility for Mount Vernon. He had become a prosperous gentleman farmer, complete with a gentleman’s military rank.
Washington wanted his rank to be more than honorary. In 1753, at twenty-one, he volunteered for his first assignment, even though the mission seemed political rather than military. French forces had occupied a great thin curve from Canada to the Louisiana territory and were confining the British colonies to the Atlantic coast and out of the fertile Western lands. The British planned to challenge the French claims by building a fort on the Ohio River. But scouts reported that the French were constructing their own forts from the Ohio north to Lake Erie. When Virginia’s acting governor, Robert Dinwiddie, drafted a letter warning France to stop its inroads into English territory, Major Washington volunteered to deliver it. The journey was arduous, nearly five hundred miles each way, and Mary Washington took his departure for abandonment. Years later, she continued to complain that his military service had given her no end of trouble.
Traveling by canoe and horseback along icy rivers and snowbound trails, George Washington’s party took fifty-two days to reach the French camp. Washington delivered Dinwiddie’s politely phrased ultimatum, and a captain named La Force composed a reply for the French that was equally civil: “As to the summons you send me to retire, I do not think myself obliged to obey it.” But after several French officers had drunk quantities of wine, they assured Washington privately that they intended to take the Ohio, and by God they would do it.
When Washington returned to Williamsburg with that response, Dinwiddie insisted that he write a full account of the episode. Washington obeyed with grave misgivings and apologies for his literary shortcomings. But Dinwiddie had the six-thousand-word account published and circulated widely, even in London. The House of Burgesses rewarded Washington with fifty pounds for his performance, and Virginia decided to send its militia to hold the Ohio country by reinforcing a British fort on the Monongahela River. Washington, who had just turned twenty-two, was promoted to lieutenant colonel and named second in command for the expedition.
He marched west from Alexandria early in April 1754 with two companies of men. Washington was an untried soldier, but he looked imposing in the red coat and three-cornered hat of Virginia’s militia officers. His youth caused him to accentuate his natural reserve. Washington thought a degree of distance was essential in a leader of men and wasn’t concerned if his troops considered him aloof. Establishing his authority was especially important because he had doubts about the quality of the troops his officers had scared up. They looked to him like drifters who would be hard to control. Most of them hadn’t seen any more warfare than he had, and their pay was bad—about eightpence a day. Their real incentive, which Washington understood, was the prospect of owning land. Dinwiddie had promised that the volunteers would divide the twenty thousand acres of rich frontier land that the French were contesting.
Washington brought along as his interpreter a young Dutchman who had accompanied him on the earlier mission. Jacob van Braam, who had been in America barely two years, made his living teaching French and fencing and had joined the Masonic lodge at Fredericksburg about the same time as Washington. Once again the march was grueling. The wagons at the outset covered eleven miles a day, but as they got farther into the wilderness Washington had to be content with little more than a mile. Rumors reached him that the French had already overrun the British garrison on the Monongahela, but Iroquois tribesmen along the route encouraged Washington to keep going. The twenty thousand warriors of the Six Nations Iroquois confederation held the balance between the French and the English, and for more than a century they had allied themselves with Britain. Washington took their advice and pressed on.
During the last week in May he reached the Great Meadows, a two-mile stretch of long grass and low bushes. As Washington rested his men there, a brave named Silverheels brought a message from his chief. Tanacharison, called the Half-King, knew where a band of French soldiers were encamped. Even though France and England were officially at peace, George Washington and the Half-King agreed to launch a surprise attack.
At 7 A.M. on May 28, forty of Washington’s men and a dozen Iroquois braves caught thirty Frenchmen as they were getting dressed and making breakfast. The gunfire went on for less than fifteen minutes and killed ten of the French, including their commander, Coulon de Jumonville. As the rest tried to escape, they were blocked by the Half-King’s braves with raised tomahawks. George Washington took ten prisoners and sent them under guard back to Virginia. His first taste of battle exhilarated him. He was still excited—though he tried to appear nonchalant—when he wrote about the engagement to his younger brother, John Augustine. Only one of his own men had been killed, Washington reported casually, and only two or three wounded. “I heard the bullets whistle,” he added, with a bravado he would regret, “and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.”
George Washington had ordered the first shots of the French and Indian War.
He learned belatedly from his prisoners that the French party had been only a diplomatic mission, much like the one that had taken him to Captain La Force. All the same, Washington was promoted on the spot to full colonel and made commander of the entire Virginia contingent. But he had little time to bask in his success. A large French force led by Jumonville’s brother was heading toward the Great Meadows for revenge. Washington threw up hasty defenses on the plain. With an accuracy bordering on wit, he named the result “Fort Necessity.”
After a month with the young colonel, the Half-King concluded that Washington was good-natured but appallingly inexperienced and unwilling to tak
e advice. Long before the news of the French retaliation, the chief had urged him to dig in at the meadow, but Washington hadn’t listened. When he was forced to act, he had pitched his fort on ground with such poor drainage that the least rain would flood his trenches. Washington also cut the trees back only sixty yards from the southeast side of his fort, which brought the trenches within musket fire. The Half-King’s Iroquois warriors began to fade away.
On July 3, during a rainstorm, the French struck. This time the battle lasted longer, about an hour, and Washington’s green troops were clearly outfought. Thirty Americans were killed, including one of Washington’s slaves, and another seventy were wounded. Unless he was willing to fight to the death, Washington had only one option. In the early hours of the fourth of July, 1754, he surrendered.
Jacob van Braam’s translation of the French surrender document made its broad outlines sound favorable to Washington. He would be allowed to march his men out from Fort Necessity with all honors of war. The Americans could take only one cannon but all of their personal belongings. Two of Washington’s captains would stay behind as hostages until the French prisoners from the earlier engagement were released in Virginia. Those generous terms carried a preamble, however. As rain continued to pour down, van Braam, whose knowledge of French was not infallible, stumbled through the text by candlelight under a leaking stockade roof. It claimed that the French raid had never been intended to disrupt the peace between France and England but only to avenge the assassination of a French officer. When he translated that phrase for Colonel Washington, van Braam rendered “l’assassinat” as “death.” The error misled Washington about the magnitude of the confession he had just signed.
As Washington returned to Virginia, the Half-King gave his verdict on the battle. The French had been great cowards for not pressing their advantage, but the Americans had been fools. Other warriors from the Six Nations heard about the battle and agreed with him. Before Washington reached home, many of the tribes were turning away from the English, and by the year’s end their warriors had either joined with the French or were staying neutral.
Washington’s private journal was lost or stolen during his retreat. When it turned up in Europe, the French were already using his surrender terms to portray the British as murderers. A London magazine printed Washington’s letter to his brother, and when King George II read that the young American commander had called the whistle of bullets charming he remarked, “He would not say so had he heard many.” Among Britain’s military officers, George Washington’s name was becoming famous—as a byword for colonial incompetence.
In Williamsburg, Robert Dinwiddie, who had been the young colonel’s patron, was separating himself from the defeat at Necessity. The authorities also refused to honor Washington’s surrender terms and release the French prisoners. They said he had exceeded his authority. Youth and inexperience had contributed to Washington’s defeat, but his bravery had been unmistakable, and the men who served under him valued it above an error in translation. Washington came back to Virginia under a haze, if not a cloud, but he was now a man to be taken seriously. He leased Mount Vernon from Lawrence’s widow for fifteen thousand pounds of tobacco a year and took it as his country seat. He dined often at Belvoir, where Sally Fairfax remained charmingly impudent and instructed her seamstress to make shirts for him.
But Washington’s military ambitions were effectively blocked. The new commander in chief for all royal forces in America openly criticized Washington’s performance at Fort Necessity, and when the Virginia troops were reorganized Colonel Washington was reduced to captain. Washington resigned.
He admitted that he left only because his honor had been affronted and that he was still strongly drawn to the soldier’s life. In spring 1755 he offered to join a new expedition against the French. It would be led by Edward Braddock, a blunt-tongued major general sent from London. Washington avoided the troublesome matter of rank by volunteering to serve as a civilian and to pay his own expenses. Again, Mary Washington insisted that George not leave her, and her pleas delayed him one day. But Washington believed he could endure any amount of abuse—even from his mother—as long as he acted from decency and principle. Before he rode to join Braddock at Fredericksburg, he paused to write a fond but decorous letter to Sally Fairfax, assuring her that none of his friends could bring him more real delight than she. Mrs. Fairfax replied that although she wanted news of him, he should send it through mutual friends and not write to her directly. Washington accepted that reproach—he called it a gentle rebuke—and wrote to her anyway.
At the end of May 1755, one year after he had surprised Jumonville at breakfast, Washington set out with Braddock and more than two thousand British regulars, volunteers and militia for the French fort of Duquesne, one hundred and fifty miles away. During the expedition, Washington was handed one of his mother’s rare letters. She asked him to send her a supply of butter and a Dutchman to help on her farm. “Honoured Madam,” Washington began dutifully and went on to explain that where he was traveling both commodities were in short supply.
As they drew within a few miles of Duquesne, Braddock’s advance guard was attacked by a band of Indians and Frenchmen who picked them off from behind trees. Washington had dysentery and was trailing at the end of Braddock’s column. He had been disappointed when Braddock ordered him to stay back, but the commander had promised to summon him when the attack began.
Although he could barely mount his horse, Washington heard the first shots and rode to join the fray. French bullets tore into his coat, he endured waves of nausea, and two horses were shot from under him. Through it all, Washington fought on. Before the firing ended, the attackers had killed or wounded almost a thousand of Braddock’s men—two thirds of the force sent into battle. Still the British officers would not change their traditional tactics and fight the French and the Indians on their own terms. Edward Braddock was shot through the lungs as he was giving the order to withdraw, and Washington helped carry him off the field in a silk sash. Braddock died during the retreat. His men buried him secretly in a grove a mile and a half from Fort Necessity.
For Washington, it had been another failure. Yet this time he reaped only praise for his gallantry. To his brother John he wrote that when he got back to the British camp he had heard stories of his death and even of his deathbed speech: “I take this early opportunity of contradicting the first and of assuring you I have not composed the latter.” The governor of North Carolina wrote to congratulate him on the honor he had gained, and he was commissioned a militia colonel once again and named commander in chief of Virginia’s forces. At twenty-three, George Washington had come through three military engagements without even a flesh wound and had begun to seem equally adroit, or lucky, in surviving the political wars.
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Despite his new prestige, George Washington was balked whenever he tried to turn Virginia’s militia into soldiers capable of fighting the French. He complained to Dinwiddie that his authority was inadequate for coping with insolent soldiers and their indolent officers. Washington threatened to resign over the point, and this eventually led to a military code that permitted jailing, flogging, even death, for the militia. A man who lapsed into profanity could expect to be flogged twenty-five times with a cato’-nine-tails, and Washington justified to Dinwiddie the punishment he had meted out to serious offenders: “Your honor will, I hope, excuse my hanging, instead of shooting them. It conveyed much terror to others; and it was for example sake that we did it.”
Washington was not good at recruiting, which made the persistent desertions even more disturbing. Though he could have deserters flogged until spectators wept at their suffering, men still ran away. He held rigidly to the British system that channeled all dealings with privates through their sergeant, which meant that he rarely came to know his soldiers individually. Just as he discouraged familiarity, Washington was slow to praise. No matter how long and industriously a man worked, he should not look for reward o
r acknowledgment.
Washington had pledged to his men that he would be absolutely fair, and—except for favors to two sons from the Fairfax family—he kept his promise. In time, that stern but impartial leadership won him loyalty and a measure of affection. But British regulars found Washington not especially personable, too blatantly ambitious and, at his best, merely competent.
In time of trouble, George Washington tended to solicit sympathy, but whenever he lamented his circumstances to Governor Dinwiddie or to Sally Fairfax’s father-in-law, Colonel William Fairfax, he got few condolences. The colonel advised him to reflect on Caesar and Alexander and bear his difficulties with the same magnanimity. Writing to the governor, Washington covered himself with the kind of praise he withheld from his underlings. No man, he assured Dinwiddie in one letter, ever had endeavored to discharge the trust reposed in him with greater honesty and more zeal for his country’s interest than he himself had done. But Washington complicated his relations with Dinwiddie by going around the governor to the Burgesses. When Dinwiddie’s age, combined with a stroke, forced him from office, he wrote to Washington complaining that his many friendly gestures had been repaid by constant challenges to his authority. Washington denied the accusation, unless, he said, the governor was offended by “open, disinterested behavior.” Washington sought in vain to call on the governor and clear up their last dispute, but Dinwiddie refused and sailed home to London convinced of Washington’s ingratitude.
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