Washington: A Life (16 page)

When the bruised young colonel returned to Winchester—the “cold and barren frontiers,” as he called them—he applauded one development: several hundred Catawba and Cherokee Indians had enlisted on the British side for the first time since the Fort Necessity debacle, an alliance that promptly embroiled Washington in a ghoulish commerce.
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The Virginia assembly had agreed to pay the Indians ten pounds for every enemy scalp they brought into camp. When a party of Cherokees arrived bearing four scalps and two prisoners, Washington hadn’t yet received the necessary gifts to reward them. “They are much dissatisfied that the presents are not here,” he told Dinwiddie, labeling these new Indian allies “the most insolent, most avaricious, and most dissatisfied wretches I have ever had to deal with.”
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The Indians were about to terminate the alliance, when the gifts belatedly arrived.

During this humiliating period, Washington often felt helpless in dealing with his men. Despite being threatened with punishment, more than a quarter of new recruits deserted, and Washington’s personal grievances fueled his rage at them. When a thousand lashes didn’t stop the desertions, he upped the penalty to a draconian fifteen hundred lashes. The historian Fred Anderson has estimated that Washington administered an average of six hundred lashes in each flogging, putting him on a par with his most severe British counterparts.
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With icy determination, he even constructed a gibbet tall enough to instill terror in anybody contemplating desertion. “I have a gallows near 40 feet high erected (which has terrified the
rest
exceedingly) and I am determined … to hang two or three on it as an example to others,” he informed one officer.
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That summer Washington decided to hang fourteen men for desertion. Fortunately, even as a young man he never acted heedlessly, and he gave way to second thoughts. Knowing his own nature, he let his temper cool. In the end, he pardoned twelve of the men—they had been kept “in a dark room, closely ironed”—and executed only two repeat offenders. “Your honor will, I hope, excuse my hanging instead of shooting them,” Washington told Dinwiddie. “It conveyed much terror to others and it was for example[’s] sake we did it.”
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It should be noted that, while Washington didn’t balk at naked terror, he had already warned that recidivists would be hanged.

Throughout the summer Washington grew quarrelsome in correspondence with Dinwiddie, believing that his former patron was now hostile to him and opposed the regular commission he pursued. Indeed, Dinwiddie’s letters were often carping and demeaning in tone. The young officer felt at the mercy of an incompetent governor, who for his part felt powerless in dealing with Lord Loudoun and arbitrary instructions from London. The experience gave Washington new insight into the problem of being ruled by people overseas who were ignorant of local conditions.

He ventilated his dismay to his admirer, Speaker Robinson: “I am convinced it would give pleasure to the governor to hear that I was involved in trouble, however undeservedly.”
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Dinwiddie must have heard that Washington was talking behind his back, because he scolded him that September. “My conduct to yo[u] from the beginning was always friendly, but you know I had g[rea]t reason to suspect yo[u] of ingratitude, which, I’m convinced, your own conscience and reflection must allow I had reason to be angry. But this I endeavor to forget.”
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The reason that Dinwiddie endeavored to forget was that he was now ailing and had decided to return to England. Washington responded to his accusation with hot-tempered indignation: “I do not know that I ever gave your Honor cause to suspect me of ingratitude, a crime I detest, and would most carefully avoid.”
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In the younger man’s view, he was merely guilty of speaking openly about policy errors imposed by the governor. The correspondence with Dinwiddie degenerated into petty bickering. When Washington asked for a leave of absence to visit Williamsburg, Dinwiddie scoffed that he had already been indulged with too many leaves. Washington returned a stinging retort: “It was not to enjoy a party of pleasure I wanted [a] leave of absence.”
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Washington lost his other principal backer that September when Colonel Fairfax died and he made the melancholy journey to Belvoir to attend the funeral.

 

 

DOUBTLESS DISTURBING HIM that fall was a recurrence of the “bloody flux,” or dysentery, which had started around midsummer. The symptoms stole upon Washington so gradually that he functioned more or less normally at first. With his staunch commitment to work, he kept Governor Dinwiddie in the dark about his condition. Then in early November he felt the full brunt of the illness. As fellow officer Captain Robert Stewart described it, Washington was “seized with stitches and violent pleuritic pains … his strength and vigour diminished so fast that in a few days he was hardly able to walk.”
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After Dr. Craik examined him, he warned Washington that his life was endangered and chided him for not seeking treatment sooner, saying that “your disorder hath been of long standing and hath corrupted the whole mass of blood. It will require some time to remove the cause.”
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Craik bled Washington several times, which only weakened him further. The doctor prescribed rest, fresh air, and water as offering Washington the best chance for recovery. His iron constitution having broken down, he relinquished command to Captain Stewart and set out for home.

Once at Mount Vernon in mid-November, he consulted Dr. Charles Green of Alexandria, who forbade him to eat meats and prescribed a diet of jellies and other soft foods, lubricated with tea or sweet wine. With a lifelong bias against medication, Washington preferred to let illness take its course. At first his sister (or possibly sister-in-law) came to nurse him, but when she left and he looked attractively helpless, he attempted to lure Sally Fairfax to his bedside. In a note, he asked if he could borrow a book of recipes to prepare jellies, noting that “my sister is from home and I have no person that has been used to making these kind of things and no directions.”
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It seems probable that Sally rose to the bait.

Every time Washington seemed to gain ground, the disease recurred with a vengeance. With some symptoms resembling tuberculosis, he grew terrified that he would follow in brother Lawrence’s footsteps. In February he even had to deny reports of his death circulating in Williamsburg. “I have heard of letters from the dead, but never had the pleasure of receiving one till your agreeable favor came to hand the other day,” his friend Robert Carter Nicholas told him wryly. “It was reported here that Colo. Washington was dead! As you are still alive, I must own myself obliged to the author of that report.”
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It said something about Washington’s high standing in Virginia society that the capital hummed with these rumors. When he left for Williamsburg on February 1, he was soon overcome by fever and had to turn around and return home. The physicians again admonished Washington that he jeopardized his life by taking such a journey. On March 4 he described to Colonel John Stanwix the “great injury” already done to his constitution and the need for “the greatest care and most circumspect conduct” if he was to recover.
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With only a slim chance of securing a regular army commission, the despondent Washington thought of “quitting my command and retiring from all public business, leaving my post to be filled by others more capable of the task.”
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The next day he left for Williamsburg, stopping en route to visit his mother. In the capital, Dr. John Amson assured him that his fears of consumption were unfounded and that he was indeed recuperating from the dysentery.

For someone with Washington’s robust physique, the dysentery must have had a profound psychological effect. His body had suddenly lost the strength and resilience that had enabled him to cross freezing streams and ride through snowy forests. And it was not the first time he had experienced a sense of physical fragility. By the age of twenty-six, he had survived smallpox, pleurisy, malaria, and dysentery. He had not only evaded bullets but survived disease with astounding regularity. If these illnesses dimmed his fervor for a military commission, they may also have reminded him of the forgotten pleasures of domestic life.

AFTER HIS WOUNDING CONFRONTATIONS with the haughty agents of British imperial power—Dinwiddie, Shirley, and Loudoun—Washington could only have concluded that his dreams of a military career would always be foiled by deep-seated prejudice against colonial officers and that it made more sense to become an independent planter. While posted to the frontier in the summer of 1757, he daydreamed about Mount Vernon and compiled shopping lists of luxury goods to be shipped from London. Though he had never been to England, he tried to imitate the style of an English country gentleman, instructing Richard Washington that “whatever goods you may send me, where the prices are not absolutely limited, you will let them be fashionable, neat, and good in their several kinds.”
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The young man’s social ambitions seemed boundless. He ordered a marble chimneypiece with a landscape painting above the mantel and “fine crimson and yellow papers” for the walls.
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Such rich colors for wallpaper were then thought very fashionable. Though mahogany was an expensive imported wood, Washington opted for a mahogany bedstead and dining table and a dozen mahogany chairs. To entertain in regal style, he ordered a complete set of fine china, damask tablecloths and napkins, and silver cutlery whose handles bore the Washington crest—a griffin poised above a crown, set above an ornamental shield with three stars, the whole emblazoned with the Latin motto
Exitus Acta Probat
(“The outcome justifies the deed”).
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In his purchases, Washington instinctively trod the fine line between showiness and austerity, defining a characteristic style of understated elegance.

Mount Vernon would be George Washington’s personality writ large, the cherished image he wished to project to the world. Had the estate not possessed profound personal meaning for him, he would never have lavished so much time and money on its improvement. It was Washington’s fervent attachment to Mount Vernon, its rural beauties and tranquil pleasures, that made his later absences from home so exquisitely painful. He believed in the infinite perfectibility of Mount Vernon, as if it were a canvas that he could constantly retouch and expand. There he reigned supreme and felt secure as nowhere else.

In December 1757 he made his first additions to the property, buying two hundred acres at nearby Dogue Run and another three hundred acres on Little Hunting Creek. This proved the first wave of an expansion that would ultimately culminate in an eight-thousand-acre estate, divided into five separate farms. Since few professional architects existed at the time, Washington followed the custom of other Virginia planters and acted as his own architect. He worked from British architectural manuals, coupled with his own observation of buildings in Williamsburg and Annapolis. Drawing on popular classical elements, he melded ideas from various places and devised a synthesis uniquely his own.

In 1758 Washington doubled the size of the main house and began to convert Lawrence’s farmhouse into an imposing mansion. He could have swept away the old foundations and started anew, making the house more symmetrical and architecturally satisfying. Instead, he built on top of earlier incarnations. Whether this stemmed from economy or family reverence is not known. But where Lawrence, a naval officer, had placed the entrance on the east side of the house, facing the water, George, an army officer and a western surveyor, switched the entrance to the west side, presenting an arresting view for visitors arriving by horse or carriage. First glimpsed from afar, the house would impress travelers with its grandeur. At this point, however, it was still boxy and unadorned and devoid of the elements that later distinguished it: the cupola, the piazza with the long colonnade, the formal pediment above the entrance. In a geometric pattern likely copied from Belvoir, Washington laid out a pair of rectangular gardens with brick walls in front of the house, allowing visitors to experience his magnificent grounds before alighting at his door. Washington also fleshed out the upstairs, making it a full floor, reworked most of the ground-floor rooms, and added a half-story attic, resulting in eight full rooms in all.

In 1758 Washington’s aspirations still outstripped his means, and he resorted to ruses to make his abode seem more opulent. Unable to afford a stone house, he employed a method known as rusticated boards that created the illusion of a stone exterior. First plain pine boards were cut and beveled in a way that mimicked stone blocks. Then white sand from the Chesapeake Bay was mingled with white paint, which lent the painted wood the rough, granular surface of stone. In many respects, Mount Vernon is a masterpiece of trompe l’oeil. Washington used another sleight of hand on his study walls, a technique called “graining” that transformed cheap, locally available woods, such as southern yellow pine or tulip poplar, into something resembling expensive imported hardwoods, such as mahogany or black walnut.

Mount Vernon’s history is inseparable from that of its resident slaves, who toiled in its shadows and shaped every inch of it. The mansion renovation absorbed a vast amount of human labor: sixteen thousand bricks were forged for two new chimneys that arose at either end of the house, and slaves scoured nearby woods for the white oak that underlay roof shingles. For more specialized work, Washington typically hired a white craftsman or indentured servant to supervise skilled slaves as assistants. By the late 1750s Washington had assembled an expert team of seven slave carpenters. During the remodeling, overseer Humphrey Knight assured Washington that he didn’t hesitate to apply the lash, if necessary, to these enslaved artisans: “As to the carpenters, I have minded ’em all I posably could and has whipt’em when I could see a fault.”
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It was a relatively rare example in Mount Vernon annals of an overseer confessing that he whipped slaves, a practice Washington grew to abhor, though he condoned it on rare occasions.