George Washington Read online

  In March 1731, the couple married. Augustine was thirty-six, Mary thirteen years younger. Within a year, on February 11, 1732 (or February 22, according to the Gregorian calendar adopted by Britain in 1752), a son was born to them in the house on Popes Creek. He was named George, just like the king in London.

  The Virginia into which George Washington was born was very different from the colony his great-grandfathers had encountered during the 1650s. The “Old Dominion” was now the most venerable of no fewer than thirteen British colonies ranged along North America’s eastern seaboard, from Nova Scotia down to South Carolina; they would be joined by a fourteenth, Georgia, in 1733. By midcentury their combined population numbered about one and a half million and was rising rapidly. Britain was not the only colonial power on the continent: France had settlements in Canada and Louisiana, while Spanish Florida bordered Georgia. Both components of New France together contained barely 70,000 people, and all of Spanish North America—including the Mexican borderlands—mustered perhaps 10,000 settlers; in population terms, these territories were therefore insignificant when set alongside the English-speaking colonies, yet they belonged to traditionally hostile powers and posed obstacles to expansion. And, of course, the vast interior west of the Appalachian Mountains was still inhabited by aboriginal Indian tribes; by the arrival of Washington’s ancestors, epidemic illnesses and catastrophic warfare had already winnowed their populations to just 10 percent of what they had been before first contact with European fishermen, but while willing enough to exploit the incomers as trading partners, the survivors were determined to keep their remaining hunting grounds.

  Populous and thriving, by the 1730s, Britain’s older established colonies had already matured into increasingly sophisticated societies, capable of governing themselves with a minimum of interference from London, some 3,000 miles in distance, and three months away by round-trip. These provinces formed the core of what was already being styled the “British Empire” and were prized for their valuable raw materials and the growing markets they offered for the Mother Country’s own manufactured goods. Despite the value placed upon colonial trade, at the time of Washington’s birth Whitehall’s authority was far from overriding. Most colonies, including Virginia, had a royally appointed governor; as the monarch’s local representative, he was intended to enjoy viceregal status and wield appropriate power. Within each colony, the governor’s chief support was the legislative and executive council, a body of about twelve eminent appointees who were expected to orchestrate political support for Crown policies. From London’s perspective, the governor and his loyal council would work together to dominate colonial politics, whipping the locally elected “assemblies” into line. The reality was very different.

  Taking their lead from events across the Atlantic, where the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–89 had seen the authoritarian James II ejected, and the more biddable Dutchman William of Orange invited by Parliament to take his place as King William III, the lower houses of assembly had emerged as the dominant force in provincial politics, eclipsing the governor and his council. Closely linked to the rise of these parliament-like assemblies was the formation of distinct colonial elites who craved political power to match their increasing wealth and social prominence. By the late seventeenth century, the older colonies like Virginia were already home to major landowners who identified their fortunes with the success and prestige of their colony. Such gentry, whose influence was bolstered by an intricate network of intermarriage, monopolized political life. They alone were rich enough to offer the free food and drink required to buy the votes of the white freeholders who elected representatives to assemblies like Virginia’s House of Burgesses.

  By 1732, another dramatic change had occurred within Virginian society. The original workforce of indentured servants—who for all the risks and hardships they faced had come to the Chesapeake through personal choice—had been largely replaced by another composed overwhelmingly of involuntary laborers.

  During the late seventeenth century, an economic upturn in England had slowed the flow of servants seeking to better their prospects in Virginia or Maryland. After 1718, Britain’s new policy of transporting reprieved felons to the American colonies, in particular the Chesapeake, went some way to meeting the tobacco planters’ continuing demands for unpaid manpower. Lesser criminals were required to labor for seven years before becoming free; in the case of felons convicted of crimes carrying the death penalty, fourteen years or even a life term might be applied. Those who came home early risked the gallows. By 1775, when war between Britain and her American colonies brought the one-way traffic to an abrupt end, an estimated 50,000 convicted criminals had been sent across the Atlantic, accounting for a quarter of all British immigrants.7

  Ranging from hardened professional footpads and burglars lucky to escape the noose to starving children snared for petty thievery, this unwanted influx prompted howls of protest from the colonial elites, who blamed the convicts for an imported crime wave. Indeed, to the Pennsylvanian journalist Benjamin Franklin this “deluge of wickedness” upon Virginia, Maryland, and his own colony epitomized the “sovereign contempt” with which the “Mother Country” was capable of viewing its American “children.” Writing in 1751 under the suggestive pseudonym “Americanus,” Franklin advised his fellow colonists to retaliate by exporting “rattle-snakes for felons.”8

  Despite the outcry they provoked, these batches of English “transports” were insignificant when set beside the incoming waves of African slaves. Just a few hundred strong in 1650, a century later slaves numbered some 150,000, accounting for 40 percent of the Chesapeake’s population. Subjected to a harsh work regime and brutal punishments and with precious little prospect of ultimate freedom, black slaves were increasingly regarded as inhuman brutes by their masters. This racist stance was adopted to justify an institution that flew in the face of the freedoms that Englishmen had fought so hard to win for themselves; bolstered by a dread of servile revolt, it also helped to promote solidarity between the Chesapeake’s planters and a growing band of poor whites whose failure to achieve material success left them disgruntled and potentially rebellious.9 In Virginia, even the lowliest former convict knew only too well that life could be much, much worse. George Washington was to grow up within a society in which the contrast between “liberty” and “slavery” could not have been starker.

  Before long, young George was joined by a sister, Betty, and a brother, Samuel. But life in the Old Dominion remained precarious, particularly on the sultry, low-lying Tidewater, where river-borne fevers helped to keep the headstone carvers and grave diggers busy. Before he was three, George’s half sister Jane was dead. In 1735, Augustine Washington moved his family to his new estate fronting the Potomac at Little Hunting Creek. There, in the home that would later become known as Mount Vernon, two more brothers were born: John Augustine, or “Jack,” in 1736, and Charles a year later.

  George’s half brothers, Lawrence and Augustine junior, were both far older than he and away at school in England, where their father had also been educated. Lawrence returned home in 1738, by now a worldly-wise gentleman of twenty. George idolized him, and, for all the great difference in their ages, they became firm friends. Later that year, Augustine acquired another tract of land, this time on the Rappahannock River some two miles from the expanding village of Fredericksburg. Moving once again, he ensconced his growing brood in a two-story wooden building, named Ferry Farm from the nearby river crossing.

  In the following year, war erupted between Britain and her old imperial rival, Spain. The conflict would be remembered by the strange name of “The War of Jenkins’s Ear” after the English sea captain whose mutilation at the hands of vindictive Spanish coast guards provided a convenient excuse for hostilities. Coming after a generation of peace and dangling the alluring prospect of pilfering the Spanish Empire, the war was popular in Britain and its American possessions alike. The conflict promptly produced a hero for the British pub
lic: by his daring capture of Spain’s imperial outpost at Porto Bello in November 1739, Vice Admiral Edward Vernon generated a wave of patriotic fervor that saw him celebrated in poems and plays and on plates and punchbowls.10

  Across the Atlantic, eleven colonies from Massachusetts to North Carolina contributed enough recruits to fill a sprawling four-battalion formation eventually totaling more than 4,000 men. Most, although by no means all, of the rank and file in this so-called American Regiment were volunteers; in Virginia, which contributed four companies, justices of the peace were authorized to conscript those able-bodied men who lacked employment, sweeping up vagrants, former indentured servants, and others considered undesirable and expendable. While the field and staff officers, along with one lieutenant per company, were to be British and appointed from London, all the other officers, including the captains, would be Americans. A total of eighty-eight blank king’s commissions were sent across the Atlantic to be awarded to such “men of interest in their country” as the colonial governors deemed worthy.11

  There were not enough of the coveted royal commissions to meet the demand, but Lawrence Washington mustered sufficient influence to secure the captaincy of one of the Virginian companies. Unorthodox in size and composition, the “American Regiment” was nonetheless a regular British Army unit, and Lawrence’s commission was signed by King George II himself.12 The regiment’s proud continental title was also significant: it reflected an unprecedented display of cooperation, not simply between the American colonists and Great Britain, but between the individual colonies themselves.

  Colonel William Blakeney, the English officer sent across the Atlantic to supervise the regiment’s enlistment, was clearly impressed by the enthusiasm for the expedition that he encountered in New York. But the colonel also noticed a colonial trait that hinted at tensions to come: “From the highest to the lowest, the inhabitants of these provinces seem to set a great value on themselves, and think a regard is due to them, especially in the assistance they are able to give the Mother Country on such occasions.” He added a warning: “and, as they are a growing power, should they be disappointed in what is promised them, and which they expect, future occasions of the like nature may suffer for it.”13

  The expedition’s first target was the city of Cartagena, on the coast of what is now Colombia. Mustering at Jamaica in the autumn of 1740 under the command of the famed Vice Admiral Vernon and his army colleague Brigadier General Thomas Wentworth, the formidable Anglo-American armada reached Cartagena in the following spring. There, it initially made some headway but swiftly lost all momentum in the teeth of a combination of factors: unexpectedly determined Spanish resistance, friction between the naval and army commanders, and, above all, the Caribbean’s array of lethal diseases. The unacclimatized invaders suffered appallingly. By the time it was finally called off in 1742, the expedition had cost the lives of more than 10,000 of the 14,000 soldiers ultimately involved. Just a fraction of them were killed in action, with the majority felled by malaria, yellow fever, or dysentery. Losses among the American Regiment were correspondingly high: for some of the colonies, nine out of ten of those who had set off with such high expectations of glory and booty never came home.14

  One man who lived to tell the tale was Captain Lawrence Washington. His survival, when so many others died, probably owed much to his appointment to command the men of his regiment serving as marines, and berthing aboard Admiral Vernon’s flagship, the eighty-gun HMS Princess Carolina.15 As Vernon’s crew had been on station in the Caribbean for more than a year and were already “seasoned” to its diseases, Princess Carolina offered a healthier environment than the troopships fresh from England and North America and the filthy camps established onshore.

  Writing to his father from Jamaica in May 1741, as the survivors of the bungled Cartagena expedition regrouped for a strike against Cuba, Lawrence gave some hint of his experiences, observing: “War is horrid in fact, but much more so in our imagination.”16 Yet the hard facts of the Caribbean campaign were horrific enough. It is possible that Captain Washington had described them in previous letters home, of which he had “writ many” without any reply; or perhaps he made a conscious decision to spare his family an account of the ghastly sights he surely witnessed as Cartagena’s harbor grew noisome with the floating bodies of the dead thrown overboard from the hospital ships, “affording prey to carrion crows and sharks, which tore them in pieces without interruption.” This grisly detail was recalled by another eyewitness, Tobias Smollett, who served as a surgeon’s mate aboard the fleet and drew upon his experiences at Cartagena in both his 1748 novel Roderick Random and in a factual account published in 1756.17

  In his surviving letter, Lawrence Washington likewise failed to mention an episode early in the siege of Cartagena when he had participated in a hazardous amphibious assault. Unaware of this incident, George Washington’s biographers have concluded that his half brother never experienced combat during the campaign. In fact, Lawrence helped to lead troops in a celebrated feat of arms: given his influence as a role model for young George, this is surely significant. Once again, Smollett provides the missing information, describing the skirmish in his nonfiction narrative of the campaign. On March 17, 1741, the army officers had sought Admiral Vernon’s assistance in destroying a troublesome battery guarding the harbor, known as the Barradera. As Smollett reported:

  In compliance with this request, a detachment of 300 sailors, supported by a body of soldiers that still remained on board of the fleet, were conveyed thither at night in boats, under the command of Captains Boscawen, Watson, Coats, Washington, Mr. Murray, and Lieutenant Forrest, who attacked the battery with great valor, repulsed the enemy, and spiked up the cannon.18

  Admiral Vernon, who claimed to have hatched the plan himself, praised the attack on March 18 as a “bold, resolute and well-executed enterprise,” although the only officers he named in his dispatch to the governor of Jamaica were his own sailors; already at loggerheads with General Wentworth, he had no wish to glorify soldiers, “our gentlemen of parade.”19

  In his influential published account of the siege, Vernon’s chief engineer, Captain Charles Knowles, agreed that the Barradera assault was “as bold, and surprising an enterprise, as is to be met with,” although he, too, failed to include Lawrence Washington among the officers who led it. This omission may have been deliberate, as Knowles was clearly prejudiced against the American Regiment. From the very outset the Americans were despised, he wrote. While the troops from England were “raw and undisciplined,” the Americans were even worse; many of the soldiers were Irish and therefore suspected of being “Papists” like the Spaniards, while even their officers were held in scorn, “composed of blacksmiths, tailors, shoemakers, and all the banditti that country [America] affords.”20

  The perceptive Smollett took a more balanced view of the American Regiment’s potential. During the bloody and futile attempt to storm the fortress of St. Lazarus on April 9, 1741, he recalled, the Americans had been placed in the rear of the assault troops, relegated to carrying scaling ladders and woolpacks to fill up the fort’s ditch. When the attack stalled, the Americans refused to bring their burdens forward. However, as Smollett added, “though they would not advance as pioneers, many of them took up the firelocks which they found on the field, and, mixing among the troops, behaved very bravely.” In Smollett’s considered view, the expedition’s failure was not attributable to any lack of courage among the ordinary soldiers and sailors but resulted from “a low, ridiculous, and pernicious jealousy” between the navy and army officers, and especially the commanders. General Wentworth was “wholly defective in part of experience, confidence and resolution.” As for Admiral Vernon, Smollett raged, he was “of weak understanding, strong prejudices, boundless arrogance, and over-boiling passions.”21

  Unlike those veterans who returned embittered by their experience of the whole botched venture, Lawrence Washington viewed Vernon in a more benevolent light. His close cont
act with the admiral, from whom, as George remembered “he had received many distinguished marks of patronage and favor,” explains the veneration in which he held him, which endured despite the expedition’s dismal outcome.22

  Lawrence’s yarns of fighting the “Dons” on the Spanish Main no doubt fired the imagination of his devoted half brother. They must have provided a welcome distraction from young George’s homely existence, a world still largely bounded by mundane horizons and limited expectations. Very little is known of George’s childhood, a void that allowed early hagiographers like Parson Weems to let their imaginations run wild and spin improbable tales intended to establish his saintly character. Despite the enduring legend, there is no evidence that six-year-old George ever confessed to wantonly taking an ax to one of his father’s prized cherry trees.23

  From the ages of about seven to eleven, George was probably tutored at home at Ferry Farm, and he then attended a school at nearby Fredericksburg. He certainly learned the rudiments of reading and writing, but spelling remained a problem for the rest of his life. This weakness in letters, which was shared by his poorly educated mother, was counterbalanced by a marked aptitude for figures, inclining him toward trigonometry and a precocious interest in surveying.