His Excellency: George Washington (3 page)

We know beyond any doubt that George Washington was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, near the banks of the Potomac River, on February 22, 1732 (New Style). He was a fourth-generation Virginian. The patriarch of the family, John Washington, had come over from England in 1657 and established the Washingtons as respectable, if not quite prominent, members of Virginia society. The Indians had named him “town taker,” not because of his military prowess, but because he had manipulated the law to swindle them out of their land.

The bloodline that John Washington bequeathed to his descendants exhibited three distinctive tendencies: first, a passion for acreage, the more of it the better; second, tall and physically strong males; and third, despite the physical strength, a male line that died relatively young, all before reaching fifty. A quick scan of the genealogy on both sides of young George’s ancestry suggested another ominous pattern. The founder of the Washington line had three wives, the last of whom had been widowed three times. Washington’s father had lost his first wife in 1729, and Mary Ball Washington, his second wife, was herself an orphan whose own mother had been widowed twice. The Virginian world into which George Washington was born was a decidedly precarious place where neither domestic stability nor life itself could be taken for granted. This harsh reality was driven home in April 1743, when Augustine Washington died, leaving his widow and seven children an estate that included ten thousand acres divided into several disparate parcels and forty-nine slaves.
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Washington spent his early adolescence living with his mother at Ferry Farm in a six-room farmhouse across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg. He received the modern equivalent of a grade-school education, but was never exposed to the classical curriculum or encouraged to attend college at William and Mary, a deficiency that haunted him throughout his subsequent career among American statesmen with more robust educational credentials. Several biographers have called attention to his hand-copied list of 110 precepts from
The Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation,
which was based on rules of etiquette originally composed by Jesuit scholars in 1595. Several of the rules are hilarious (#9, “Spit not into the fire . . . especially if there be meat before it”; #13, “Kill no vermin, or fleas, lice, ticks, etc. in the sight of others”); but the first rule also seems to have had resonance for Washington’s later obsession with deportment: “Every action done in company ought to be done with some sign of respect to those that are present.” As a reminder of an earlier era’s conviction that character was not just who you were but also what others thought you were, this is a useful point that foreshadows Washington’s flair for disappearing within his public persona. But the more prosaic truth is that
Rules of Civility
has attracted so much attention from biographers because it is one of the few documents of Washington’s youth that has survived. It is quite possible that he copied out the list as a mere exercise in penmanship.
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The two major influences on Washington’s youthful development were his half brother, Lawrence, fourteen years his senior, and the Fairfax family. Lawrence became a surrogate father, responsible for managing the career options of his young protégé, who as a younger son had little hope of inheriting enough land to permit easy entrance into the planter class of Chesapeake society. In 1746, Lawrence proposed that young George enlist as a midshipman in the British navy. His mother opposed the suggestion, as did his uncle in England, who clinched the negative verdict by observing that the navy would “cut him and staple him and use him like a Negro, or rather, like a dog.”
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Lawrence’s two other contributions to Washington’s future career were richly ironic. In 1751 he traveled to Barbados, seeking a tropical cure for his tuberculosis, and took Washington along as a companion. This turned out to be Washington’s one and only trip abroad and the occasion for his contraction of smallpox. He carried barely discernible pockmarks on his face for the rest of his life, but also immunity against the most feared and fatal disease of the era. Then, in 1752, Lawrence lost his bout with tuberculosis, thereby sustaining the family tradition of short-lived males. His 2,500-acre plantation, now named Mount Vernon, became part of the estate that Washington eventually inherited. Lawrence’s premature death made possible his greatest legacy.
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The Fairfax influence also had its ironies. At about the age of fifteen Washington began to spend much of his time at Mount Vernon with Lawrence, who had married Ann Fairfax of the Fairfax dynasty at nearby Belvoir. The patriarch of the clan was Lord Thomas Fairfax, an eccentric member of the English peerage whose disdain for women and love for horses and hounds soon carried him across the Blue Ridge to pursue his passion for foxhunting undisturbed by the nettlesome duties of managing his estates. His cousin William Fairfax assumed that responsibility, which was a truly daunting task. The much-disputed Fairfax claim, only recently validated by the Privy Council in London, gave Lord Fairfax proprietary rights to more than five million acres, including the huge Northern Neck region between the Potomac and Rappahannock. The Fairfaxes, in short, were a living remnant of European feudalism and English-style aristocracy, firmly imbedded within Virginia’s more provincial version of country gentlemen. As such, they were the supreme example of privileged bloodlines, royal patronage, and what one Washington biographer has called “the assiduous courting of the great.” Though Washington was destined to lead a revolution that eventually toppled this whole constellation of aristocratic beliefs and presumptions, he was initially a beneficiary of its powers of patronage.
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In 1748, William Fairfax gave sixteen-year-old Washington his first job. He accompanied William’s son, George William Fairfax, on a surveying expedition of the Fairfax holdings in the Shenandoah Valley. Washington’s first diary entries date from this time, so we get our initial glimpse of his handwriting and prose, as well his impression of the primitive conditions on the far side of the Blue Ridge: “Went into the Bed as they call’d it when to my Surprize I found it to be nothing but a Little Straw—Matted together without Sheets or any thing else but only one Thread Bare blanket with double its Weight of Vermin such as Lice Fleas & c.” The few settlers in this frontier region struck him as strange creatures, who wore tattered clothes and tended to speak German rather than English. He also saw an Indian war party, returning from a skirmish with one scalp and celebrating their victory by dancing around their campfire to the music of a kettledrum.
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If the Fairfax family represented the epitome of English civilization, the area west of the Blue Ridge represented the far edge of civilization’s progress. Beyond that edge lay the Ohio Country, where anything that Europeans called civilization ceased to exist altogether. The previous year, in 1747, Lawrence had joined a group of investors to form the Ohio Company, which obtained a royal grant of half a million acres to bring Virginia’s version of civilization to that distant place west of the Alleghenies, where Washington would soon test his manhood against the elements in the name of the British king. For now, however, and for the next three years, he remained on the eastern edge of Virginia’s frontier, surveying the Fairfax holdings in the Northern Neck and Shenandoah Valley, mastering his new trade by conducting more than 190 surveys, usually camping under the stars, doing well enough financially to permit his first purchase of land, a 1,459-acre plot on Bullskin Creek in the lower Shenandoah.
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Again, the historical record affords only glimpses of the emerging young man. There are pieces of adolescent doggerel about his “Poor Resistless Heart” pierced by “cupid’s feather’d Dart,” perhaps a reference to an unknown “Low land Beauty” that stirred his passions, perhaps a reference to his futile pursuit of Betsy Fauntleroy, a sixteen-year-old coquette who found him unacceptable. His name appears as plaintiff in a Fredericksburg court case, filing charges against one Mary McDaniel for rifling through his clothes while he was bathing in the local river. (She received fifteen lashes.) Later on women would swoon at his appearance, but at this early stage he struck them as awkward, even oafish, and paralyzingly shy.
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No full physical description exists for this period, but accounts from a few years later allow us to project backward to envision a very tall young man, at least six feet two inches, which made him a head higher than the average male of the time. He had an athlete’s body, well proportioned and trim at about 175 pounds with very strong thighs and legs, which allowed him to grip a horse’s flanks tightly and hold his seat in the saddle with uncommon ease. His eyes were grayish blue and widely set. His hair was hazel brown, destined to darken over the years, and usually tied in a cue in the back. He had disproportionately large hands and feet, which contributed to his awkward appearance when stationary, but once in motion on the dance floor or in a foxhunt the natural grace of his movements overwhelmed the initial impression. Well-muscled and coordinated, he never threw a silver dollar across the Potomac (to do so at the Mount Vernon shore would have been physically impossible), but he did throw a rock over the Natural Bridge in the Shenandoah Valley, which was 215 feet high. He was the epitome of the man’s man: physically strong, mentally enigmatic, emotionally restrained.
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In June 1752, while Lawrence lay dying at Mount Vernon, Washington petitioned Governor Dinwiddie for one of the adjutant-general posts in the Virginia militia. He had no military experience whatsoever, and, apart from being an impressive physical specimen, no qualifications for the job. Here the two major influences on his early years converged in their customary ways. Lawrence’s death created an opening in the adjutancy corps, and William Fairfax used his influence to assure Dinwiddie that the young man was up to the task. As Washington himself put it: “I am sensible my best endeavors will not be wanting.” Dinwiddie concurred, made himself Washington’s new mentor and patron, then dispatched Major Washington into the western wilderness the following year.
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ASSASSINATION AND NECESSITY

O
VER THE COURSE
of the next five years, from 1754 to 1759, Washington spent the bulk of his time west of the Blue Ridge, leading a series of expeditions into the Ohio Country that served as crash courses in the art of soldiering. They also provided him with a truly searing set of personal experiences that shaped his basic outlook on the world. Instead of going to college, Washington went to war. And the kind of education he received, like the smallpox he had contracted in Barbados, left scars that never went away, as well as immunities against any and all forms of youthful idealism.

The first adventure began in the spring of 1754, when the Virginia House of Burgesses voted funds to raise a regiment of three hundred men to protect settlers in the Ohio Country from the mounting French threat. Washington was made second in command with the rank of lieutenant colonel. In April he left Alexandria at the head of 160 troops charged with the mission of securing the strategic location at the juncture of the Allegheny and Monongahela, where the Ohio Company had already begun to construct a fort. Soon after he completed the difficult trek over the Alleghenies, Washington learned that a French force of more than a thousand had seized the half-built fort, renamed it Fort Duquesne, and were proceeding to radiate French influence over the several Indian tribes in the region. The best intelligence came from his former companion and major Indian ally, Tanacharison, who apprised Washington that the situation was truly desperate: “If you do not come to our Assistance now,” he wrote, “we are entirely undone, and imagine we shall never meet again.” Faced with a vastly superior enemy force, Washington decided to build a makeshift fort near Tanacharison’s camp, rally whatever Indian allies he could find, and wait for reinforcements. Tanacharison promised his support, but also warned that the odds were stacked against them.
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On May 27, Tanacharison reported the appearance of French troops in the vicinity and brought a delegation of warriors to join Washington’s garrison at Great Meadows about forty miles from Fort Duquesne. On the morning of May 28, Washington found a French patrol of thirty-two soldiers encamped in a forest glen that Tanacharison described as “a low obscure place.” His detachment of forty, plus the Indian allies under Tanacharison, encircled the French camp. Washington’s report on the action that ensued, sent to Dinwiddie the next day, was succinct: “I there upon in conjunction with the Half-King . . . formed a disposition to attack them on all sides, which we accordingly did and after an Engagement of abt 15 minutes we killed 10, wounded one and took 21 Prisoners, amongst those that were killed was Monsieur De Jumonville, the Commander.” His diary account, even more succinct, was also more revealing: “we killed Mr. de Jumonville—as also nine others . . . the Indians scalped the Dead.”
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What actually happened at what came to be called Jumonville Glen soon became an international controversy about who fired the first shot in the French and Indian War. It has remained a scholarly debate ever since, in part because it was Washington’s first combat experience, in part because there is good reason to believe that he found himself overseeing a massacre. Though the eyewitness accounts do not agree—as they seldom do—the most plausible version of the evidence suggests that the French troops, surprised and outgunned, threw down their weapons after the initial exchange and attempted to surrender. The French commander, Joseph Coulon de Villiers, sieur de Jumonville, though wounded in the exchange, tried to explain that he had come on a peace mission on behalf of his monarch, Louis XV, exactly the same diplomatic mission that Washington had performed the previous year on behalf of the British monarch, claiming sovereignty over the disputed Ohio Country.