George Washington Read online

  Both George and Martha Washington were reluctant to scrimp on the fashionable English clothes and furniture fitting for their station or on regular entertaining. The Virginian custom of unstinting hospitality ensured that there were often guests for dinner at Mount Vernon. There were parties, card games, dancing, and such balls and theater performances as Williamsburg or Alexandria could offer, but, above all, fox hunting. An accomplished horseman, Washington was as devoted to following the hounds as any English country squire. His diaries are full of descriptions of hunting, cornering, and killing foxes across the Northern Neck. For example, in January 1769, he was out hunting with his Fairfax County neighbors on five successive days. Washington was equally fanatical about preserving the purity of his pack of hounds, noting with despair the “promiscuity” of bitches such as “Countess,” who broke free from her kennel and mated once with Washington’s own spaniel and twice with “a small foist looking yellow cur” before her escape was discovered.30

  The Washingtons’ lavish lifestyle and George’s policy of upgrading and expanding his estates and then buying more slaves to work the extra acres, came at a price. In early 1764, he received a jolt when Robert Cary and Company informed him that he was no less than £1,811.1.1 in their debt. Washington was ruefully obliged to admit that the merchant’s figures were right: the harsh reality was that Mount Vernon tobacco fetched lower prices than that grown by his neighbors. Time and again, Washington complained that he was underpaid for his tobacco and overcharged for the imported goods, which were often of inferior quality or damaged during their passage across the Atlantic. Just as Washington was convinced that provincial officers had failed to receive their just rewards, so it now seemed that the colonists were being treated as second-class citizens of the British Empire, palmed off with outmoded and shoddy merchandise. Every chipped piece of china, every ill-fitting pair of breeches, every barrel of beer that had already been drunk down to the dregs by thirsty sailors on the voyage from England contributed to a growing sense of resentment.

  Washington’s readiness to experiment with alternatives to tobacco offered one possible solution to the financial dilemma; but, given his long-standing interests, land speculation was far more alluring. Washington was willing to seek land wherever it could be found, and not just in the west. In the wake of the 1763 peace, he made two trips to the Dismal Swamp, which straddled Virginia’s border with North Carolina, an area that appeared to offer potential for drainage and development. Washington’s account of his trip to the region that October provides a detailed record of a swamp that was a geological oddity, lying above the surrounding land.31 Along with several partners Washington formed a company to drain and develop the area. The next year, 1764, slaves were sent to start work, but returns were modest.

  In June 1763, Washington joined eighteen other speculators from Virginia and Maryland in a far more ambitious venture called the Mississippi Company: this aimed to take out an option on a vast swathe of land—2.5 million acres—recently conquered from the French. Yet before the company members could even file their petition, their hopes were dashed by that October’s royal proclamation. That same legislation blocked another ploy by which Washington hoped to acquire western lands. Ever since 1759, the recently retired Washington and other officers of the Virginia Regiment had petitioned for their share in the 200,000 acres of bounty land promised by Governor Dinwiddie to stimulate recruitment back in 1754; like the Mississippi Company, this initiative was sunk by the new ban upon trans-Appalachian settlement. While it failed to halt the flow of white settlers across the mountains, the proclamation was more effective in blocking the efforts of major speculators like Washington, who required clear title to land before they could sell it.32

  But Washington remained undeterred, viewing the 1763 proclamation as a “temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians.” To be ready to act when that barrier fell and to preempt other speculators, in 1767 he proposed a partnership to another Virginian veteran, Captain William Crawford; according to local tradition, Washington had known Crawford since they were schoolboys in Fredericksburg. Together they would survey and patent prime tracts around Pittsburgh and farther down the Ohio. Washington told Crawford that anyone who “neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for their own . . . will never regain it.” Crawford, who was on the spot, would identify the best locations, while it was Washington’s role to secure them as soon as possible, covering the costs of surveying and patenting. Tracts would be divided up between them. Washington urged Crawford to proceed in all secrecy, both to avoid broadcasting his dismissive attitude toward the proclamation and to keep competitors in the dark.33

  The opportunity that men like Washington had been waiting for came in November 1768, when the Iroquois formally relinquished their claim to an extensive territory, including what would become Kentucky. Seeking to guarantee the integrity of their tribal heartlands, the Iroquois had surrendered land that was not theirs to give. While the so-called Treaty of Fort Stanwix was never ratified by Britain and was angrily repudiated by the Shawnees and other tribes of the Ohio Valley for whom Kentucky was a prized hunting ground, it stimulated a land grab that effectively pushed the dividing line between whites and Indians far westward to the Ohio River; over the next quarter century the Shawnees and a growing band of tribal allies would fight tenaciously to defend that new frontier.34

  Encouraged by the bulging of the hated Proclamation Line, in the following year Washington formally renewed his claim to a colonel’s share of the long-promised bounty lands—the just due of those who had “toiled, and bled” for Virginia. Washington hoped for a single large reserve within which each qualified veteran could pick the best lands he could find. Instead, Fauquier’s successor as Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Norborne Berkeley, Lord Botetourt, and his council required claimants to make their selection from twenty distinct parcels of land. In response to this, Washington called meetings of the veterans and persuaded them to appoint his partner Captain Crawford to act as surveyor for all.35

  In autumn 1770, in company with another veteran of the Virginia Regiment’s campaigns, his friend Dr. James Craik, Washington set out to supervise the surveys, traveling to the Great Kanawha River, a tributary of the Ohio below Pittsburgh. The trek took him past places evocative of memories: the Great Meadows, where he had been obliged to capitulate in 1754 and the site of Braddock’s massacre a year later. He also met Thomas Gist, the son of his faithful guide Christopher, who as an ensign in the Virginia Regiment had been captured by the Hurons at Grant’s Defeat. Yet Washington’s detailed journal remained focused on the future potential of these lands, not their past significance; he was more concerned with soil and timber than recollections of near-death encounters. For example, in his diary for October 13, 1770, Washington wrote: “When we came down the hill to the plantation of Mr. Thomas Gist, the land appeared charming; that which lay level being as rich and black as anything could possibly be.”36

  Only occasionally did Washington note the intrusion of the past upon the present. On October 28, he encountered “an old acquaintance,” one of the Indians who had accompanied him on his diplomatic mission to the French forts in 1753. Seneca chief “Kiashuta,” or “Guyasuta,” was apparently delighted to see Washington once again, even though he had fought against the British during the French and Indian War and the ensuing Indian rebellion associated with Pontiac; indeed, before that outbreak, Guyasuta had moved among the discontented tribes seeking to forge a truly pan-Indian confederacy; had he succeeded, the outcome of “Pontiac’s War”—and the course of North American history—might have been very different. To Washington, however, Guyasuta the visionary Indian diplomat remained the “Hunter”: he now lived up to his name by supplying his guests with a “quarter of very fine buffalo.”37

  It was Washington who allotted the bounty lands among the veterans, officers, and soldiers alike. When his own field officer’s share was ad
ded to that bought from men too poor to help finance the surveys or too skeptical to risk a commitment, Washington had amassed some 24,000 acres; with land eventually acquired under other bounty provisions included within the 1763 proclamation, which invited war veterans to settle in Florida, Canada, and other territories wrested from the Bourbons, this total rose to more than 35,000 acres. His policy of selecting the very best land—“the cream of the country,” as he later called it—for himself and his crony Craik attracted criticism from fellow veterans.38

  Washington responded by emphasizing that it was only through his determination that they had been given the chance to claim their bounty lands at all. One veteran who felt that he had been denied his rightful quota was Major George Muse, the same man who as Washington’s lieutenant colonel at Fort Necessity had been stigmatized as a coward. Muse’s “impertinent letter” has regrettably been lost, but Washington’s angry response reveals his lasting contempt for an officer who had failed to match his own standards of gentlemanly conduct. He wrote:

  I am not accustomed to receive such from any man, nor would have taken the same language from you personally, without letting you feel some marks of my resentment. . . . For though I understand you were drunk when you did it, yet give me leave to tell you, that drunkenness is no excuse for rudeness; and that, but for your stupidity and sottishness you might have known, by attending to the public gazettes . . . that you had your full quantity of ten thousand acres of land allowed you . . . do you think your superlative merit entitles you to greater indulgences than others? . . . All my concern is that I ever engaged in behalf of so ungrateful and dirty a fellow as you are.39

  Washington’s uncharacteristically withering dismissal of the wretched Muse suggests that his own military service and the high reputation that he had established continued to matter to him. This may help to explain why, in May 1772, he chose to pose for his first and what would presumably be his last formal portrait dressed not as the gentleman farmer he was, but as the officer of the Virginia Regiment that he had once been.

  The resulting portrait of Washington, the first of seven to be painted by Charles Willson Peale, reveals an amiable-looking forty-year-old, confident of his status and apparently unconcerned about concealing the paunch now straining the buttons of the waistcoat he had worn in his twenties. In fact, as Peale could testify, the approach of middle age had done nothing to diminish Washington’s phenomenal strength. During his stay at Mount Vernon, the artist recalled how he and some other young men were stripped to their shirtsleeves and engaged in the sport of tossing a heavy iron bar. Without deigning to even remove his coat, Washington sauntered over, hefted the bar, and flipped it way beyond the farthest mark.40

  Peale’s portrait includes telling details; they offer evidence that Washington’s selection of his old uniform was deliberate rather than whimsical and intended to recall specific aspects of his military career. For example, the faded crimson sash across his chest had once belonged to Braddock and was given to him as a keepsake by the dying general after the disastrous engagement from which Washington had miraculously emerged unscathed and with such credit. From the pocket of his waistcoat juts a folded paper marked “Order of March,” a carefully observed detail commemorating Washington’s responsibilities as brigadier under Forbes in 1758. Washington’s gorget—the small crescent-shaped badge of rank worn at the throat by eighteenth-century officers—bears the rampant lion and unicorn of the royal arms. This hint of lingering allegiance to Britain’s monarchy is intriguing. In 1772, the very act of donning his old regimentals must have evoked mixed memories of Washington’s days as guardian of the Virginian frontier, stirring both pride in his achievements and a residual anger at the slights he had endured. He could not have known that in just three years he would be in uniform once again, this time fighting to protect Virginian and American liberties from British tyranny.41

  In fact, when he posed for Peale’s portrait, Washington had already acknowledged that armed resistance to imperial policies was not unthinkable. As noted, during the 1760s, Washington’s existing sense that the British establishment had failed to recognize his abilities was compounded by fresh grievances relating to his treatment at the hands of voracious London merchants and by the legislation that consistently hamstrung his ventures into land speculation. While Washington was clearly irked by what he regarded as British discrimination against colonials, during that same decade, as British taxation policies provoked vociferous colonial reaction, he scarcely gained the reputation of a radical revolutionary. In the House of Burgesses, where he represented his own Fairfax County from 1765, he typically took a backseat in the debate over what was increasingly seen as a ministerial conspiracy to strip Americans of their hard-won English liberties. Through Washington’s personal correspondence, however, it is possible to trace his growing disillusionment with imperial policies, a hardening in his attitude and, ultimately, an acceptance that war with Britain was inevitable.

  In September 1765, Washington gave a dispassionate assessment of the effect of that year’s Stamp Act upon trade between Britain and her colonies. Rising to oppose Prime Minister George Grenville’s measure in a forceful speech in Parliament, the Quebec veteran Isaac Barré had used the opportunity to defend the much-maligned British Americans, describing them as “Sons of Liberty.” Barré, like the former war leader William Pitt, was hailed as a “friend” of the colonists; when his words were reported in American newspapers, they were swiftly embraced as a proud title by the most determined opponents of British taxation.42 Washington was not yet among them. While certainly believing the act, which aimed to impose a tax upon paper, to be “ill judged,” Washington distanced himself from “the speculative part of the colonists, who look upon this unconstitutional method of taxation as a direful attack upon their liberties, and loudly exclaim against the violation.” However, as he assured his wife’s uncle, Francis Dandridge, people were already beginning to realize that they could live without those “many luxuries which we lavish our substance to Great Britain for.” Turning to the “necessaries of life,” for the most part they could be found within the colonies themselves. This was scarcely firebrand rhetoric, but it nonetheless demonstrated a willingness to begin cutting the apron strings that still tethered colonial “children” psychologically to the “Mother Country.”43

  As the controversy dragged on and ministers in London came and went, imposing legislation in fits and starts, British attempts to generate American revenue encountered peaks of colonial resistance, matched by deceptively tranquil troughs when economic conditions in America improved and discontent subsided. This suggests that, for many colonials, opposition to British policies was fueled by economic as much as by ideological factors. Yet the underlying issue, the perceived threat to liberty, endured; during the second half of the 1760s, the political stance of Washington, who was as interested as anyone in financial realities, slowly shifted.

  By 1769, when the next concerted wave of British taxation policy, the Townshend Duties of 1767, prompted colonial resistance through nonimportation pacts, Washington’s position had altered significantly from four years earlier. By now he was contemplating armed resistance against “our lordly masters in Great Britain,” who seemed bent upon depriving Americans of their freedoms. But while Washington believed that “no man should scruple, or hesitate a moment to use a-ms [arms] in defense of so valuable a blessing” as liberty, he was still emphasizing that this “should be the last resource; the dernier resort.” Addresses to the king and Parliament had been tried and failed, yet it remained to be seen whether economic warfare targeting British trade and manufactures would bring ministers to a proper awareness of Americans’ rights and privileges.44

  In May 1769, Washington was present when the House of Burgesses resolved that it alone had the right to tax Virginians. After Lieutenant Governor Botetourt responded by dissolving the defiant Assembly, Washington was among those burgesses who promptly adjourned to a local tavern and signed an agre
ement pledging to embargo all taxed items from Britain. Like many men of his class, however, Washington took a dim view of unrestrained mob action against British policies. He was unmoved by the “Boston Massacre” of March 1770, in which several members of a crowd were shot dead by the British soldiers they were baiting, and appalled by the destruction of property resulting from the “Boston Tea Party” in late 1773, when Bostonians disguised as Mohawks dumped a consignment of cut-rate East India Company tea into their harbor. Yet he was even more vehemently opposed to the punitive measures, which smacked of despotism, that the exasperated British promptly imposed in retaliation. These so-called Coercive Acts, which closed the port of Boston to all commerce, stripped the Massachusetts assembly of its powers to appoint the governor’s council, and saw the return of redcoats who had been removed amid the tension following the “Boston Massacre,” were widely interpreted as an all-out attack upon colonial rights and proved the real turning point for men like George Washington.45

  By the summer of 1774, Washington was reconciled to the inevitability of war with Britain. Writing to Bryan Fairfax, the brother of his friend George William Fairfax, Washington believed that the time for petitions was now over: “Does it not appear, as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness, that there is a regular, systematic plan formed to fix the right and practice of taxation upon us?” he asked. Surely, the attack upon the liberty and property of the Bostonians mounted by the Coercive, or “Intolerable,” Acts was proof of that. Such tyrannical measures left no doubt that the ministry in London would stick at nothing to carry its point. For Washington, the only response was now clear: “Ought we not, then, to put our virtue and fortitude to the severest test?” It was another rhetorical question.46