George Washington Read online

  But there were adventures too. Meeting some thirty Indians, the surveyors shared out their liquor. The Indians responded with a “grand speech,” Washington wrote, after which “the best dancer jumps up as one awaked out of a sleep and runs and jumps about the ring in a most comical manner.” The teenager offered an equally patronizing account of German settlers who followed the party, “showing their antic tricks.” He called them “as ignorant a set of people as the Indians,” noting disdainfully that they spoke no English.16

  Washington and George William headed home wiser about frontier life though not yet frontiersmen. Their return took extra days following a wrong turn in the woods.17

  For the rest of the year, Belvoir and Mount Vernon swirled with activity. In June, Lawrence successfully defended his Fairfax County seat in the House of Burgesses. Washington, fascinated by politics, saved the vote tally sheet. George William Fairfax won a seat from Frederick County on the frontier, where Lord Fairfax soon would settle. Because Virginia allowed a man to run wherever he owned sufficient land, the Fairfaxes could be candidates in multiple counties.18 Lawrence and the Fairfaxes joined the new Ohio Company’s petition to acquire 200,000 acres of land beyond the Blue Ridge.19

  Lawrence and Anne, who had already lost two babies, had a little girl.20 In December, George William Fairfax married Sarah Cary, the tall daughter of a wealthy Virginia family. Known as Sally, the bride was eighteen, two years older than Washington. She would become a friend. Amid these happy events, however, Lawrence developed a cough that would not go away. In mid-December, he took a leave from the burgesses’ deliberations, pleading ill health. By May of 1749, he was thinking of traveling in search of a cure. “I hope your cough is much mended,” Washington wrote to his brother.21

  It wasn’t.

  Chapter 4

  His Brother’s Keeper

  In 1749, with his mother still controlling Ferry Farm, the seventeen-year-old Washington was so short of money that he declined a trip to Mount Vernon because his horse was underfed.1 A Virginian unable to keep his horse in feed was no gentleman.

  Washington struck out to make his way as a surveyor. When the colony incorporated a new city ten miles upstream from Mount Vernon, he used family and Fairfax connections to become assistant to the surveyor who laid out Alexandria’s building lots. When it came time to auction off the lots, the purchasers included two sons of Colonel Fairfax, plus Lawrence and Austin Washington. George, however, lacked the funds to bid.2

  Fortunately, newly created Culpeper County, west of Fredericksburg, needed a surveyor. Responding to Fairfax influence, the local court appointed Washington, a teenager.3 He promptly surveyed a four-hundred-acre site and drew other work.

  Through the autumn, Washington completed dozens of surveys around the Shenandoah valley, mostly for people acquiring grants from Lord Fairfax. Working with rugged characters in rough surroundings, the young man toughened. “I have not sleeped above three nights or four in a bed,” he wrote, but often lay down before a fire on straw or a bearskin, “with man, wife, and children like a parcel of dogs or cats.” In cold weather, he slept in his clothes “like a Negro,” and “happy’s he that gets the berth nearest the fire.” The money was good. Based on his customary survey fee of 2 pounds, 3 shillings, Washington earned more than £100 in less than two months, outstanding income for one so young.4

  Washington’s surveying, built on the Fairfax connection, flourished anew in the spring, when he marked off forty-seven tracts, earning more than £140. He picked up more jobs over the summer, then returned to the Shenandoah for autumn surveys.5

  With money in hand, Washington accumulated the trappings of a gentleman. He bought a “pole-chair harness,” a two-seat, one-horse riding chair: the equivalent of his first car. He bought about one thousand acres in two parcels (one from Lord Fairfax) bordering Bullskin Creek in Frederick County.6 Washington began his gentleman’s wardrobe. He would always be fussy about his appearance, understanding that clothes framed the impression he made. For an early visit to Mount Vernon, he packed seven shirts, six linen waistcoats, seven caps, and four neck cloths. In a memorandum for a tailor, he specified the number of buttonholes in his coat, its length, and the width of the lapels.7

  A gentleman enjoyed the chase, horse racing, and gambling. Though Washington often called gambling a vice, he nonetheless enjoyed it, especially cards (whist and loo) and billiards. According to his financial accounts, Lawrence could best him at the card table, but Washington had more success with brother Austin and Lawrence’s wife Anne.8

  Washington employed a dancing master for instruction in that essential social grace, for which his athleticism served him well.9 Writing still did not come easily. One letter began with a single sentence of more than two hundred words. His admission that he was sending a fourth missive to a young lady without receiving any reply suggests that he had missed important cues of her disinterest.10

  Family events crowded in. Betty, his surviving sister (who bore an uncanny resemblance to her brother George), married a wealthy Fredericksburg merchant, Fielding Lewis. Lawrence and his wife had another baby girl. A tragedy struck among the slaves at Ferry Farm when one murdered another.11 But Lawrence’s lingering illness overshadowed everything. He sailed to England for medical advice, but returned unimproved. He resolved to try the healing qualities of the mineral waters of Berkeley Springs in the Shenandoah country. Because Lawrence’s wife was pregnant, George accompanied his brother on the trip, performing surveying jobs as they moved west. Lawrence again found no relief. He had tuberculosis, then called consumption. There would be no cure for two more centuries.12

  In the spring of 1751, the brothers tried another trip to Berkeley Springs. As they proceeded, Washington completed more surveys while Lawrence saw to land business.13 Again, the older brother did not improve. The hand of death was upon him. For nearly two years, he had endured consumption’s wracking cough, fevers, and night sweats. His breathing sometimes hurt and he tired easily. He had been to English doctors, Virginia doctors, and the waters of Berkeley Springs. Nothing helped.

  The British colony of Barbados was said to offer a healing climate for lung disorders, plus renowned physicians. As luck would have it, Colonel Fairfax’s wife had a brother there who could present them to Barbados society. The Fairfax connection rarely failed.

  With another new baby in her arms, Lawrence’s wife could not travel, so Washington undertook the melancholy journey with his brother. He would see a new part of the world. He might make advantageous connections among wealthy sugar planters and British military officers. And perhaps Lawrence would find a miracle.

  * * *

  The brothers sailed from Virginia in late September, the heart of the Caribbean hurricane season. Washington kept a daily log, recording the ship’s direction and speed, distance covered, winds, latitude and longitude, plus remarks about the weather and the ships they passed. For a surveyor with a mathematical bent, keeping such records was second nature. On fine days, Washington fished off the deck.14

  After more than two weeks, heavy storms struck. The sailors, Washington reported, “never had seen such weather before.” When the howling winds and churning seas subsided, the crew discovered that much of the ship’s food had been eaten by maggots and other pests. Finally tied up at Bridgetown in early November, the Washingtons lodged with friends of Major Gedney Clarke, brother to Colonel Fairfax’s wife.15

  Because of its fabulous sugar wealth, the island, which measured only fourteen miles by twenty-two miles, held 90,000 people. Bridgetown was home to 10,000, more than four times larger than the most populous Virginia town. Blacks outnumbered whites more than four to one.16

  Washington waxed ecstatic over Barbados, declaring himself “perfectly ravished by the beautiful prospects which on every side presented to our view. The fields of cane, corn, fruit trees, etc. in a delightful green.”17 Hills afforded “a beautiful prospect both of sea
and land.” The warmth of the climate, according to another visitor, meant that residents were “very thinly clad,” while the Negroes “have no more covering on them than what decency requires to cover their nakedness.”18

  A leading doctor pronounced that Lawrence’s affliction could be cured. Buoyed by this sunny diagnosis, the brothers rented a hillside house overlooking the harbor’s bright blue waters, although Washington thought the rent “extravagantly dear.”19 Clarke, wealthy from trading slaves and smuggling rum, injected the Washingtons into Barbadian society, as Clarke’s home regularly filled with navy and army officers and “strangers of every respectable denomination.”20

  A view of Carlisle Bay, Barbados, 1820

  Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

  Washington watched a fireworks show on Guy Fawkes Day and toured Bridgetown’s fort, built to withstand maritime assaults. He attended a production of The Tragedy of George Barnwell, a taste of theater that would ripen into a lifelong enthusiasm with a practical benefit for a political actor with a gift for performance. The actor’s tools—how to stand and move, how to convey messages with gestures and expression, how to modulate the voice and pace your speech—serve a politician well.21

  The fun ended after only two weeks, when Washington contracted smallpox. He was bedridden for more weeks. Though the illness left Washington’s face with telltale pockmarks, it also gave him lifelong immunity against further attacks.22

  George’s recovery only underscored Lawrence’s grim prospects. Despite the cheery initial prognosis, as Lawrence wrote to Colonel Fairfax, he did not improve. Lawrence bemoaned the island’s warm, unchanging climate. “By the time the sun is half an hour high,” he wrote, “it is as hot as at any time of the day.” He craved more variety in the weather.23

  Those long days of illness in Barbados may help account for Washington’s future willingness to ignore risks that would cause other brave men to turn away. Honor would always be more important to him than saving a few days that he might never see anyway. The brothers decided that Washington should return home alone. Lawrence, now on his fourth journey to retrieve his health, was running out of options. If he did not rally soon, he resolved to move on to Bermuda and hope to do better there.

  On December 22, just ten days after rising from his sickbed, Washington took ship for home. In his journal, he recorded none of his feelings, noting only, “Took leave of my brother.”24 Instead of introspection, he wrote of the rich Barbadian soil and the economics of sugarcane production, the islanders’ hospitality and the agreeable manners of the women, the debts that plagued many planters, and the acquittal of a rich man accused of raping his servant, a verdict which offended Washington’s sense of justice.25

  He thought the island’s government fees were arbitrarily high, while Barbadians were “either very rich or very poor.” He praised the island’s royal governor, who performed his duties well enough, yet by “declining much familiarity is not overzealously beloved.” Washington’s future public deportment would have some of those characteristics.26

  Winter sailing proved as difficult as the hurricane season had been. Seasickness struck Washington on the first day afloat, and his journal describes gales, violent storms, hail, snow, and on several days a “mountainous sea.”27 Mid-journey, he discovered that his belongings had been rifled and his money was gone. Another life lesson.

  After landing in Virginia, Washington stopped in the colonial capital of Williamsburg to meet the energetic new governor, Robert Dinwiddie.28 A partner in the Ohio Company venture that Lawrence had joined, Dinwiddie had his eyes firmly fixed on Virginia’s western country, which he intended to secure for Britain against French encroachments. The tall young man coming to meet with him was not yet twenty years old, but would become central to that effort.

  Chapter 5

  Turning Point

  Little about Williamsburg inspired awe when Washington arrived in late January 1752. The town held barely a thousand residents—a fraction the size of Bridgetown on Barbados. The population swelled four times a year during “court days,” when markets, legal proceedings, and social events drew Virginians from their plantations, but late January was quiet. An earlier visitor called Williamsburg “a most wretched, contrived affair.” Its capitol had burned five years before; a replacement was under construction. The Governor’s Palace was also under repair.1

  The sixty-year-old Dinwiddie had been governor for only two months, but he knew Virginia and its politics. Born to a merchant family in Scotland, he had traded and held public offices in Bermuda. Appointed tax collector for America’s southern colonies, Dinwiddie settled near Williamsburg, taking a seat on Virginia’s Executive Council. Powerful Virginians mistrusted Dinwiddie—a Scot who collected taxes had two black marks against him—but he was a vigorous public servant intent on vindicating Britain’s claims to western lands.2

  After Washington presented letters from Barbados, the men talked through dinner. They were an unlikely pair: a tall, lanky teenager and a stout man who might have been his grandfather, linked by their mutual interest in the west and by mutual friends, the Fairfaxes. Dinwiddie surely asked after Lawrence, the colony’s senior military official, whose health mattered if the governor’s policies provoked a frontier war. Washington combined a gentleman’s manner with a toughness earned surveying. Accustomed to responsibility—as a surveyor and while caring for his brother—he had a quiet confidence. Dinwiddie might have uses for him.3

  Spring brought surveying work; Washington bought more land on Bullskin Creek.4 In April, Lawrence wrote from his new perch in Bermuda, reporting that he felt “like a criminal condemned, though not without hopes of reprieve.” A local doctor had banned him from consuming meat or liquor, and ordered that he ride around the small island. Lawrence had rallied, then fallen back. “If I grow worse,” he concluded, “I shall hurry home to my grave.”5

  * * *

  Having fought three wars over the previous sixty years, France and Britain now were colliding in North America.

  New France stretched in a crescent from Cape Breton Island in the Atlantic, across Canada, down the Mississippi valley to New Orleans, and west to the Rocky Mountains.6 To connect its far-flung settlements, France needed to control the Ohio River, the best water route between the Atlantic and the Mississippi. From Montreal, travelers could ascend the St. Lawrence River, cross Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, then paddle to a land connection to streams that fed the Ohio. Control of the Ohio would solidify France’s settlements.7

  Though the French lands were massive, the British population in America was twenty times larger. If the French won control of the Ohio, while the Spanish held Florida, British settlers might be unable to spread out as they intended. Four British syndicates, including the Ohio Company, each held grants of at least 100,000 acres in the west, heedless of conflicting claims of Indian tribes or the French.8

  The contest for the Ohio began in earnest in the 1740s. Offering cheaper, more plentiful goods, the British moved in on the Indian fur trade.9 A French military mission in 1749 aimed to solidify the Ohio tribes’ allegiance to King Louis XV.10 Three years later, the French employed sterner measures, leading an attack on Miami Indians who traded with the British. The attackers boiled and ate the Miami chief.11

  The Ohio Company, with Lawrence Washington as president, was in the thick of the struggle. It built a storehouse where Wills Creek entered the Potomac (now Cumberland, Maryland) and sent backwoodsman Christopher Gist on expeditions to confirm the French attacks on British traders and “note every parcel of good land” in the west. Gist invited Indian leaders to a meeting with Dinwiddie at Logstown (near Braden, Pennsylvania), but warned his employers that the Indians feared the British hunger for land.12

  The tribes held the balance of power between the European empires. Though reduced by disease and war, the Indians were unparalleled forest fighters, skilled at silent stalking a
nd swift ambush. Indian ways of war—scalping, occasional torture, and rare cannibalism—terrified Europeans. Most tribes wanted neither set of Europeans to prevail, so they changed sides when one grew too strong. Some Indian villages flew the flags of both nations.13

  Virginia’s elite, hoping to cash in on western land, worried about the French initiative. So did Dinwiddie, the Ohio Company partner and agent of empire. He demanded reports of any violence caused by Indians or Frenchmen, so he could petition the French for redress; if his petition were refused, he wrote with a wink, “we may proceed in another manner.” The governor proclaimed, “I have the success and prosperity of the Ohio Company much at heart.”14

  Dinwiddie’s 1752 meeting with the Indians illustrated the miscommunication that snarled relations between whites and Indians. Tribes tended not to designate a single leader, entrusting functions to individuals based on their talents. The tribe’s speaker at a council might not be its war leader, or even its senior elder. Whites puzzled over who made the tribe’s decisions. Also, tribal leaders were usually not literate, so formed agreements through council speeches. Unimpressed with the European fetish for written understandings, they often signed papers that differed from what they had agreed to verbally.15

  At Dinwiddie’s Logstown conference, the Virginia commissioners could not decide whether the tribal spokesman, Tanaghrisson, was a Seneca or a Mingo or a Catawba. His authority seemed to derive from the Iroquois in New York. With a shrug, they called him “the Half-King.”16 Tanaghrisson, who disliked the French, agreed that the British could build a single fort on the Ohio, but not the full-scale settlement that the British and the Ohio Company had in mind. The British drafted a written agreement that authorized both. Tanaghrisson signed, but then said the treaty had no effect until the Iroquois council approved.17