Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

  “I was of a short-lived family,” George Washington later noted of his male ancestors, with his father passing at age forty-eight when George was eleven.28 Born on February 22, 1732, to Augustine’s second wife, George had two older half brothers in an era when primogeniture assured that most inheritance went to the eldest son. The oldest sibling, Lawrence, received the Mount Vernon plantation while George’s smaller share was controlled by his coarse, demanding, and selfish mother, Mary Ball Washington. Although of the planter class, George would have to work for his living and never received the formal education in England bestowed on his half brothers. With the hope of building his fortune in land speculation on the frontier like his forefathers, he opted to become a surveyor. Virginia still had a vast western wilderness. Surveyors were needed to inventory and divide it. Through their inside information, they could get in on the ground floor by acquiring some of the best parcels.

  WASHINGTON FOUND HIS FIRST FORAY into the wilderness exhilarating. Six feet tall with broad hips and “blessed with a good constitution,” as he later put it, he traveled in a surveying party with George William Fairfax, whose family held the largest proprietary land grant in Virginia.29 A wedge-shaped slice encompassing more than five million acres between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, the grant ran northwest from the Chesapeake Bay to the modern-day border of West Virginia and western Maryland. Mount Vernon lay in its already subdivided and settled eastern reaches, near the Fairfaxes’ elegant seat of Belvoir Manor.

  The party’s goal was the northern Shenandoah Valley, a fertile part of the Fairfax Grant beyond the Blue Ridge not yet surveyed for sale. George William’s father, William, was the grant’s local land agent living at Belvoir; William’s first cousin Thomas, an eccentric bachelor who held the title 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, was its current British proprietor and continually in need of revenue from it to maintain his lavish lifestyle. After Lawrence Washington hastily married William’s fifteen-year-old daughter Ann in 1743, before a scandal broke involving her and a local Anglican priest, George Washington gained entry to Belvoir and befriended George William Fairfax. First William and later Thomas took a liking to the young Washington, and became his mentors.

  The expedition to the Shenandoah Valley in the spring of 1748 traversed a frontier region on the cusp of settlement. Washington, age sixteen, sometimes lodged in the crude cabins of early settlers but favored sleeping outside or in tents. His bed in one cabin, he wrote, was “nothing but a Little Straw—Matted together without Sheets or any thing else but only a Thread Bear blanket with double its Weight of Vermin such as Lice Fleas &c.”30 Plagued by heavy spring rains, the surveying party killed wild turkeys for food, swam its horses across swollen rivers, canoed down creeks, and at one point followed what Washington depicted as “the Worst Road that was ever trod by Man or Beast.”31 Judging by the words devoted to it in his journal, Washington’s favorite experience involved a chance encounter with “thirty odd Indian coming from War with only one scalp.” Washington went on: “We had some Liquor with us of which we gave them Part in elevating there Spirits put them in the Humour of Dauncing of whom we had a War Daunse.” He branded the dance and accompanying music, which he described in some detail, as “a most comicle” spectacle.32 Comfortable in the salons of Mount Vernon and Belvoir, Washington was also at home on the frontier and proved immune to its physical hazards.

  Washington’s work on this expedition must have impressed the Fairfaxes because he received ever more assignments to survey their lands, including in the Shenandoah Valley. Using income and insights from these jobs, Washington bought his first Shenandoah properties in 1750 and within two years had acquired more than two thousand acres there—a sizable holding for a youth of twenty who had had virtually no money of his own just a few years earlier.

  Meanwhile, Lawrence Washington’s health steadily deteriorated. He had contracted tuberculosis, which was then a common disease with a shockingly high mortality rate. George accompanied him on various trips to obtain treatment, including to Barbados in 1751, but nothing helped. He died in 1752, leaving Mount Vernon to his young wife, Ann, and infant daughter Sarah, with George next in line if they left no descendants in the Washington line. When Sarah died two years later, Ann leased the plantation to George on favorable terms. It passed to him when she died in 1761. All in the family was the Washington way. Because of it, George Washington suffered a morbid propensity to benefit from family tragedy.

  Lawrence’s death also created a vacancy in the appointed position of Virginia adjutant general, the colony’s top military post. George wanted this too. Lawrence had earned the job as much from his service leading Virginia troops in the 1741 Battle of Cartagena de Indias—an engagement during the War of Jenkins’ Ear between Britain and Spain, for which he obtained an officer’s commission in the regular British army—as from his family connections and social status. Without any military experience, George Washington had little to recommend him for the position other than his relationship to the former occupant and support from the Fairfax clan. That proved enough in colonial Virginia for its resident governor Robert Dinwiddie to split the post into four geographic divisions and for Washington, after some maneuvering, to become district adjutant for the northern one, covering the Fairfax Grant. Thus, at twenty, he leapfrogged to the rank of major in the Virginia military. Now all he lacked to match his brother was a regular army officer’s commission—a prize he long sought but never received. America’s most storied military career was launched on the basis of family ties and a half brother’s death rather than proven ability.

  The timing of this notable rise coincided with Washington’s initial participation and rapid promotion within the Freemason movement. The first Masonic lodge in northern Virginia opened in 1752. Attracted (much like Franklin) to the ethical code and male fellowship offered by Freemasonry, Washington promptly joined it. He ascended to the rank of Master Mason within a year. Certainly in colonial Virginia, where the male Fairfaxes were active members, the Masonic movement provided the sort of connections that could advance a career. Because of the movement’s secrecy, no one can now judge just how much membership helped Washington or Franklin. It surely helped some, and likely helped immensely.33 For Franklin and Washington, Freemasonry provided an invisible bond that endured for life.

  EUROPEAN CLAIMS TO LAND on the North American continent rested on exploration and occupation. In the case of Britain, its claims relied on John Cabot’s sightings of the North Atlantic coast from Nova Scotia to Virginia in 1498, followed in time by the permanent occupation of the region, beginning with Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth in 1620. Pennsylvania later filled in a key stretch in between. Britain’s chief European rival, France, also made claims on the continent. It based them on the exploration of Canada, the Great Lakes region, and the Mississippi River south to the Gulf of Mexico by a series of explorers—from Jacques Cartier in 1534 through Samuel de Champlain in the 1610s to Robert de La Salle in 1682. Permanent French occupation began with Quebec in 1608 and extended to Louisiana by 1714. This pattern of expansion inevitably led to conflict as France’s rapidly spreading but lightly settled fur-trading colonies reached around Britain’s more slowly extending but more densely populated agrarian settlements. The first decisive clashes occurred in the North Atlantic region, where Britain wrested Acadia from France during Queen Anne’s War in 1713.

  By the 1750s, the tinderbox shifted to the Ohio River valley, where British settlers pushing west from Virginia and Pennsylvania butted against French efforts to occupy the space between its established provinces in Canada and Louisiana. Virginia based its claim to this so-called Ohio Country on its 1609 second charter, which purported to give it rights to all lands “from Sea to Sea, West and Northwest,” and was interpreted by the mid-1700s to cover such lands at least as far west as the Mississippi River.34 Under its 1681 charter, Pennsylvania received a superior claim to the land directly to its west as far as five degrees of longitude, which would later be found
to include “the Forks of the Ohio”—present-day Pittsburgh—where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to form the Ohio. The first attempt by the British to occupy this region occurred in 1749, when the Virginia-based Ohio Company received a royal grant for 500,000 acres of land between the Fairfax Grant and the Ohio River. Maintaining the grant, however, required building a fort and settling at least one hundred families on the land within seven years. France countered by sending an expedition from Canada down the Ohio River to claim the region formally in 1749 and, four years later, by beginning to erect a line of forts along this route from Lake Erie toward the strategic Forks of the Ohio.

  Upon learning of the French forts, Governor Dinwiddie, who had invested in the Ohio Company along with Lawrence Washington and other Virginians, asked his government in London how to respond. Instructions signed by the king directed Dinwiddie to send an emissary to the French commandant in the Ohio Country demanding an immediate withdrawal. If the French did not leave, the instructions to Dinwiddie added, “We do herby strictly charge, & command You, to drive them off by Force of Arms.”35

  Dinwiddie chose his newly minted adjutant for the northern district of Virginia, twenty-one-year-old George Washington, to deliver this message. Even Washington later acknowledged “the extraordinary circumstance that so young and inexperienced a Person should have been employed on a negotiation with which subjects of the greatest importance were involved.”36 On October 31, 1753, the same day that he received his orders at Virginia’s capital, Williamsburg, Washington departed for the frontier. Assembling a seven-member party of interpreters and guides along the way that included the noted frontier scout Christopher Gist, Washington hoped to complete the trip before winter rendered the route impassible. The mission would make his reputation.

  Crossing the Allegheny Mountains on horseback in driving fall rains and early winter snows, Washington’s first objective was the Forks of the Ohio and a Native American meeting site near it, Logstown, where he hoped to recruit allies for his encounter with the French. At the time, despite the growing presence of British settlers and French fur traders, the Ohio Country remained under the effective control of various Native groups—particularly the Delaware, Mingo, and Shawnee—that sought to play each European power against the other for their own survival. Further complicating the political situation, the powerful, pro-British Iroquois Confederacy or “Six Nations,” which was centered in the eastern Great Lakes region and represented locally by Tanacharison, whom the colonists called “Half King” for his status in the area, asserted a sort of vassalage over the weaker tribes of the Ohio Country.

  Reaching Logstown after twenty-five days of hard travel, Washington recruited Tanacharison, two older tribal leaders, and a young Seneca hunter to go with his party to meet the French at their bases farther north. A larger Native contingent might raise suspicions, they explained, but in truth no others would go against the French. At this point in his journal, Washington related an eloquent speech by Tanacharison denouncing the French for invading the Ohio Country and establishing forts. Tanacharison praised “our Brothers the English” for not doing so. “The Land does not belong to one or the other,” he said of the Europeans, “but the GREAT BEING above allow’d it to be a Place of residence for us.”37 Washington tactfully, some might say duplicitously, kept quiet about the Ohio Company’s true intentions for the region. On his way to Logstown, he had spent two days scouting the Forks of the Ohio as a possible site for the Ohio Company’s fort.

  From Logstown, Washington rode overland with his expanded party some seventy miles north in five days to the fortified French trading post at Venango on the Allegheny River, then another sixty miles north in four days along the unfortunately named French Creek to Fort Le Boeuf, the southernmost French fort in the region. Snow, rain, and swollen rivers slowed their progress. Finally, on December 12, six weeks after he left Williamsburg, Washington met the French commandant for the Ohio Country and, a day later, delivered Dinwiddie’s letter demanding that the French peaceably depart from “the Lands upon the River Ohio, in the Western Part of the Colony of Virginia.” Naturally the French commandant refused: “As to the summons you send me to retire,” he wrote back formally to Dinwiddie, “I do not think myself obliged to obey it.”38 As for English fur traders on the Ohio, whom the French had already begun to round up and send to Canada, Washington reported, “He told me the Country belonged to [the French], & that no English Man had a right to trade upon them Waters.”39 The forms of eighteenth-century European-style war had been satisfied; the fighting could begin.

  More had happened than simply an exchange of letters. Observers apparently had shadowed Washington’s party for weeks, with the same people turning up at different places. Charged with collecting intelligence on the French, at every stop from Logstown through Venango to Fort Le Boeuf, Washington heard similar reports from Native American informants, self-proclaimed French deserters, and French officers that thousands of soldiers were descending on the Ohio Country from Canada and Louisiana and dozens of local French forts were either built or planned. He saw only one fort and, by his own count, maybe a hundred men, but was assured that more than a thousand more soldiers had been temporarily withdrawn to winter quarters farther north. Also at every stop, the French tried to win over the Native leaders accompanying Washington by threats and bribes, warning them that the survival of their people depended on breaking from the British. “He was plotting every Scheme that the Devil & Man cou’d invent, to set our Indians at Variance with us,” Washington said of the French commandant.40 Treating him with every diplomatic courtesy, the French sent Washington back on December 16 with a story to tell of their resolve, belligerency, and might.

  WHERE WASHINGTON’S OUTBOUND JOURNEY in late fall had been challenging, his midwinter return trip became a death-defying adventure. The horses were debilitated by the trek north, and Washington sent them ahead unloaded with three guides while he joined the rest in taking canoes down the ice-choked French Creek, a seven-day trip to Venango that he put at 130 miles due to all the river’s bends and turns. “The ice was so hard we could not break through, but were obliged to haul our vessels across a point of land,” Gist wrote at one point. “The creek being very low and we were forced to get out, to keep the canoes from oversetting, several times; the water freezing to our clothes,” he noted at another.41

  Washington planned to remount at Venango for the overland trek to the Forks of the Ohio, but the horses still proved “so weak & feeble,” as he put it, that the Virginians took up their gear in packs and walked.42 With the formalities finished and a hard march ahead, Washington discarded his military uniform in favor of leather leggings and a blanketlike matchcoat—an “Indian walking Dress,” he called it.43 Tanacharison and the two other Native leaders remained behind at Venango.

  “I can’t say that ever in my Life I suffer’d so much Anxiety as I did in this affair,” Washington lamented at the time about the French. “I saw that every Stratagem that the most fruitful Brain cou’d invent: was practiced to get Half King won to their interest, & that leaving of him here, was giving them the Opportunity they aimed at.”44

  Begun as a group effort with lame horses, the overland trek proved unnervingly slow to Washington. “The Horses grew less able to travel every Day,” he complained. “The Cold increas’d very fast, & the Roads were getting much worse by a deep Snow continually freezing.”45 In haste to reach Virginia with his report, after three days of slogging through the forest with the others, which included a very bleak Christmas, Washington left the group behind and, accompanied only by Gist, rushed on toward the Forks of the Ohio and home.

  “The Day following,” Washington wrote, “we fell in with a Party of French Indians, which had laid in wait for us.”46 Gist remembered it as only a single male, whom he had seen with the French at Venango and now offered to serve as their guide. At some point, both Washington and Gist noted, the Native turned and fired toward them at short range—a mere fiftee
n feet, according to Washington. “Are you shot?” Washington asked Gist. “No,” Gist replied.47 Then they both set upon their assailant. Gist wanted to kill him. Washington instead held him until dark and then, pretending to make camp, set him free. Once the assailant was some distance away but before he could return with others, the Virginians made a dash toward the Allegheny River, walking all night and the entire next day, until they felt safe enough to camp before crossing the river above the Forks of the Ohio, where they hoped to collect fresh horses for the trip home. This was the first of many such brushes with death at close quarters for Washington—experiences that led some to see his life as charmed.

  Reaching the Allegheny on December 29, Washington hoped to find it frozen for the crossing. Instead, the middle churned with rushing water and broken ice. With Gist, he spent the day building a makeshift raft. Launched after sunset in a waterscape that must have looked like Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 painting of Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas night twenty-three years later, the raft did not make it far across this raging river. “Before we got half over,” Washington wrote, “we were jammed in the Ice in such a Manner, that we expected every Moment our Raft wou’d sink, & we Perish.” Using a crude punting pole to stop the raft short of a menacingly large chunk of oncoming ice, he added, the rushing floe hit with “so much Violence against the Pole, that it Jirk’d me into 10 Feet Water.”48 A strong swimmer but perilously at risk in the frigid water, Washington grabbed onto the raft and got back on board but by then it was useless to try to guide the raft toward either shore. Gist had frostbite and Washington was drenched and in danger of hypothermia. As their raft carried them past an island in midstream, the men jumped off and waded ashore. “We contented ourselves to encamp upon that island,” Gist dryly noted.49 By morning, the extreme cold had frozen the river’s surface so completely that the men could walk safely to the far shore and on to the Forks of the Ohio.