George Washington

Contents

OHAP. PAGE

I. In Washington's Day 3

II. A Virginian Breeding . . t 45

Chapter II

George Washington was cast for his career by a very scant and homely training. Augustine Washington, his father, lacked neither the will nor the means to set him handsomely afoot, with as good a schooling, both in books and in affairs, as was to be had ; he would have done all that a liberal and provident man should do to advance his boy in the world, had he lived to go with him through his youth. He owned land in four counties, more than five thousand acres all told, and lying upon both the rivers that refresh the fruitful Northern Neck; besides several plots of ground in the promising village of Fredericksburg, which lay opposite his lands upon the Eappahannock ; and one-twelfth part of the stock of the Principio Iron Company, whose mines and furnaces in Maryland and Virginia yielded a better prolit than any others in the two colonies. He had commanded a ship in his time, as so many of his neighbors had in that maritime province, carrying iron from the mines to England, and no doubt bringing convict laborers back upon his voyage home again. He himself raised the ore from the mines that lay upon his own land, close to the Potomac, and had it carried the easy six miles to the river. Matters were very well managed there, Colonel Byrd said, and no pains were spared to make the business profitable. Captain Washington had represented his home parish of Truro, too, in the House of Burgesses, where his athletic figure, his ruddy skin, and frank gray eyes must have made him as conspicuous as his constituents could have wished.

He was a man of the world, every inch, generous, hardj^, independent. He lived long enough, too, to see how stalwart and capable and of how noble a spirit his young son was to be, with how manly a bearing he was to carry himself in the world ; and had loved him and made him his companion accordingly. But the end came for him before he could see the lad out of boyhood. He died April 12, 1743, when he was but forty-nine years of age, and before George was twelve ; and in his will there was, of course, for George only a younger son's portion. The active gentleman had been twice married, and there were seven children to be provided for. Two sons of the first marriage survived. The bulk of the estate went, as Virginian custom dictated, to Lawrence, the eldest son. To Augustine, the second son, fell most of the rich lands in Westmoreland. George, the eldest born of the second marriage, left to the guardianship of his young mother, shared with the four younger children the residue of the estate. He was to inherit his father's farm upon the Rappahannock, to possess, and to cultivate if he would, when he should come of age ; but for the rest his fortunes were to make. He must get such serviceable training as he could for a life of independent endeavor. The two older brothers had been sent to England to get their schooling and preparation for life, as their father before them had been to get his — Lawrence to make ready to take his father's place when the time should come ; Augustine, it was at first planned, to fit himself for the law. George could now look for nothing of the kind. He must continue, as he had begun, to get such elementary and practical instruction as was to be had of schoolmasters in Virginia, and the young mother's care must stand him in the stead of a fathers pilotage and oversight.

Fortunately Mary Washington was a wise and provident mother, a woman of too firm a character and too steadfast a courage to be dismayed by responsibility. She had seemed only a fair and beautiful girl when Augustine Washington married her, and there was a romantic story told of how that gallant Yirginian sailor and gentleman had literally been thrown at her feet out of a carriage in the London streets by way of introduction — where she, too, was a visiting stranger out of Virginia. But she had shown a singular capacity for business when the romantic days of courtship were over. Lawrence Washington, too, though but five-and-twenty when his father died and left him head of the family, proved himself such an elder brother as it could but better and elevate a boy to have. For all he was so young, he had seen something of the world, and had already made notable friends. He had not returned home out of England until he was turned of twenty-one, and he had been back scarcely a twelvemonth before he was off again, to seek service in the war against Spain. The colonies had responded with an unwonted willingness and spirit in 1710 to the home government's call for troops to go against the Spaniard in the West Indies ; and Lawrence Washington had sought and obtained a commission as captain in the Virginian regiment which had volunteered for the duty. He had seen those terrible days at Cartagena, with Vernon's fleet and Wentworth's army, when the deadly heat and blighting damps of the tropics wrought a work of death which drove the English forth as no fire from the Spanish cannon could. He had been one of that devoted force which threw itself twelve hundred strong upon Fort San Lazaro, and came away beaten with six hundred only. He had seen the raw provincials out of the colonies carry themselves as gallantly as any veterans through all the fiery trial ; had seen the storm and the valor, the vacillation and the blundering, and the shame of all the rash affair; and had come away the friend and admirer of the gallant Vernon, despite his headstrong folly and sad miscarriage. He had reached home again, late in the year 1742, only to see his father presently snatched away by a sudden illness, and to find himself become head of the family in his stead. All thought of further service away from home was dismissed. He accepted a commission as major in the colonial militia, and an appointment as adjutant-general of the military district in which his lands lay ; but he meant that for the future his duties should be civil rather than military in the life he set himself to live, and turned very quietly to the business and the social duty of a proprietor among his neighbors in Fairfax County, upon the broad estates to which he gave the name Mount Vernon, in compliment to the brave sailor whose friend he had become in the far, unhappy South.

Marriage was, of course, his first step towards domestication, and the woman he chose brought him into new connections which suited both his tastes and his training. Three months after his father's death he married Anne Fairfax, daughter to William Fairfax, his neighbor. 'Twas William Fairfax's grand uncle Thomas, third Lord Fairfax, who had in that revolutionary year

1646 summoned Colonel Henry Washington to give into his hands the city of Worcester, and who had got so sharp an answer from the King's stout soldier. But the Fairfaxes had soon enough turned royalists again when they saw whither the Parliament men would carry them. A hundred healing years had gone by since those unhappy days when the nation was arrayed against the King. Anne Fairfax brought no alien tradition to the household of her young husband. Her father had served the King, as her lover had — with more hardship than reward, as behooved a soldier — in Spain and in the Bahamas; and was now, when turned of fifty, agent here in Virginia to his cousin Thomas, sixth Baron Fairfax, in the management of his great estates, lying upon the Northern Neck and in the fruitful valleys beyond. William Fairfax had been but nine years in the colony, but he was already a Virginian like his neighbors, and, as collector of his Majesty's customs for the South Potomac and President of the King's Council, no small figure in their affairs — a man who had seen the world and knew how to bear himself in this part of it.

In 1746 Thomas, Lord Fairfax, himself came to Virginia — a man strayed out of the world of fashion at fifty-five into the forests of a wild frontier. The better part of his ancestral estates in Yorkshire had been sold to satisfy the creditors of his spendthrift father. These untilled stretches of land in the Old Dominion were now become the chief part of his patrimony. 'Twas said, too, that he had suffered a cruel misadventure in love at the hands of a fair jilt in London, and so had become the austere, eccentric bachelor he showed himself to be in the free and quiet colony. A man of taste and culture, he had written with Addison and Steele for the 4

Spectator / a man of the world, he had acquired, for all his reserve, that easy touch and intimate mastery in dealing with men which come with the long practice of such men of fashion as are also men of sense. He brought with him to Virginia, though past fifty, the fresh vigor of a young man eager for the free pioneer life of such a province. He tarried but two years with his cousin, where the colony had settled to an ordered way of living. Then he built himself a roomy lodge, shadowed by spreading piazzas, and fitted with such simple appointments as sufficed for comfort at the depths of the forest, close upon seventy miles away, within the valley of the Shenandoah, where a hardy frontier people had but begun to gather. The great manor-house he had meant to build was never begun. The plain comforts of " Green way Court" satisfied him more and more easily as the years passed, and the habits of a simple life grew increasingly pleasant and familiar, till thirty years and more had slipped away and he was dead, at ninety-one — broken-hearted, men said, because the King's government had fallen upon final defeat and was done with in America.

It was in the company of these men, and of those who naturally gathered about them in that hospitable country, that George Washington was bred. "A stranger had no more to do," says Beverley, " but to inquire upon the road where any gentleman or good housekeeper lived, and there he might depend upon being received with hospitality"; and 'twas certain many besides strangers would seek out the young major at Mount Yernon whom his neighbors had hastened to make their representative in the House of Burgesses, and the old soldier of the soldierly house of Fairfax who was President of the King's Council, and so next to the Governor himself. A boy who was much at Mount Yernon and at Mr. Fairfax's seat, Belvoir, might expect to see not a little that was worth seeing of the life of the colony. George was kept at school until he was close upon sixteen ; but there was ample vacation-time for visiting. Mrs. Washington did not keep him at her apron-strings. He even lived, when it was necessary, with his brother Augustine, at the old home on Bridges' Creek, in order to be near the best school that was accessible, while the mother was far away on the farm that lay upon the Rappahannock. Mrs. Washington saw to it, nevertheless, that she should not lose sight of him altogether. When he was fourteen it was proposed that he should be sent to sea, as so many lads were, no doubt, from that maritime province ; but the prudent mother preferred he should not leave Virginia, and the schooling went on as before — the schooling of books and manly sports. Every lad learned to ride — to ride colt or horse, regardless of training, gait, or temper — in that country, where no one went afoot except to catch his mount in the pasture. Every lad, black or white, bond or free, knew where to find and how to take the roving game in the forests. And young Washington, robust boy that he was, not to be daunted while that strong spirit sat in him which he got from his father 'and mother alike, took his apprenticeship on horseback and in the tangled woods with characteristic zest and ardor.

He was, above all things else, a capable, executive boy. He loved mastery, and he relished acquiring the most effective means of mastery in all practical affairs. His very exercise-books used at school gave proof of it.

They were filled, not only with the rules, formulae, diagrams, and exercises of surveying, which he was takingspecial pains to learn, at the advice of his friends, but also with careful copies of legal and mercantile papers, bills of exchange, bills of sale, bonds, indentures, land warrants, leases, deeds, and wills, as if he meant to be a lawyer's or a merchant's clerk. It would seem that, passionate and full of warm blood as he was, he conned these things as he studied the use and structure of his fowling-piece, the bridle he used for his colts, his saddlegirth, and the best ways of mounting. He copied these forms of business as he might have copied Beverley's account of the way fox or 'possum or beaver was to be taken or the wild turkey trapped. The men he most admired — his elder brothers, Mr. Fairfax, and the gentlemen planters who were so much at their houses — were most of them sound men of business, who valued good surveying as much as they admired good horsemanship and skill in sport. They were their own merchants, and looked upon forms of business paper as quite as useful as ploughs and hogsheads. Careful exercise in such matters might well enough accompany practice in the equally formal minuet in Virginia. And so this boy learned to show in almost everything he did the careful precision of the perfect marksman.

In the autumn of 1747, when he was not yet quite sixteen, George quit his formal schooling, and presently joined his brother Lawrence at Mount Vernon, to seek counsel and companionship. Lawrence had conceived a strong affection for his manly younger brother. Himself a man of spirit and honor, he had a high-hearted man's liking for all that he saw that was indomitable and well-purposed in the lad, a generous man's tenderness in looking to the development of this thoroughbred boy; and he took him into his confidence as if he had been his own son. Not only upon his vacations now, but almost when he would, and as if he were already himself a man with the rest, he could live in the comradeship that obtained at Belvoir and Mount Vernon. Men of all sorts, it seemed, took pleasure in his company. Lads could be the companions of men in Virginia. Her outdoor life of journeyings, sport, adventure, put them, as it were, upon equal terms with their elders, where spirit, audacity, invention, prudence, manliness, resource, told for success and comradeship. Young men and old can be companions in arms, in sport, in woodcraft, and on the trail of the fox. 'Twas not an indoor life of conference, but an outdoor life of affairs in this rural colony. One man, indeed, gave at least a touch of another quality to the life Washington saw. This was Lord Fairfax, who had been almost two years in Virginia when the boy quit school, and who was now determined, as soon as might be, to take up his residence at his forest lodge within the Blue Ridge. George greatly struck his lordship's fancy, as he did that of all capable men, as a daring lad in the hunt and a sober lad in counsel ; and, drawn into such companionship, he learned a great deal that no one else in Virginia could have taught him so well — the scrupulous deportment of a high-bred and honorable man of the world ; the use of books by those who preferred affairs ; the way in which strength may be rendered gracious, and independence made generous. A touch of Old World address was to be learned at Belvoir.

His association with Lord Fairfax, moreover, put him in the way of making his first earnings as a surveyor.

Fairfax had not come to America merely to get away from the world of fashion in London and bury himself in the wilderness. His chief motive was one which did him much more credit, and bespoke him a man and a true colonist. It was his purpose, he declared, to open up, settle, and cultivate the vast tracts of beautiful and fertile land he had inherited in Virginia, and he proved his sincerity by immediately setting about the business. It was necessary as a first step that he should have surveys made, in order that he might know how his lands lay, how bounded and disposed through the glades and upon the streams of the untrodden forests ; and in young Washington he had a surveyor ready to his hand. The lad was but sixteen, indeed; was largely self-taught in surveying ; and had had no business yet that made test of his quality. But surveyors were scarce, and boys were not tender at sixteen in that robust, out-of-door colony. Fairfax had an eye for capacity. He knew the athletic boy to be a fearless woodsman, with that odd, calm judgment looking forth at his steady gray eyes; perceived how seriously he took himself in all that he did, and how thorough he was at succeeding ; and had no doubt he could run his lines through the thicketed forests as well as any man. At any rate, he commissioned him to undertake the task, and was not disappointed in the way he performed it. Within a very few weeks Washington conclusively showed his capacity. In March, 1748, with George Fairfax, William Fairfax's son, for company, he rode forth with his little band of assistants through the mountains to the wild country where his work lay, and within the month almost he was back again, with maps and figures which showed his lordship very clearly what lands he had upon the sparkling Shenandoah and the swollen upper waters of the Potomac. 'Twas all he wanted before making his home where his estate lay in the wilderness. Before the year was out he had established himself at Greenway Court; huntsmen and tenants and guests had found their way thither, and life was fairly begun upon the rough rural barony.

It had been wild and even perilous work for the young surveyor, but just out of school, to go in the wet springtime into that wilderness, when the rivers were swollen and ugly with the rains and melting snows from off the mountains, where there was scarcely a lodging to be had except in the stray, comfortless cabins of the scattered settlers, or on the ground about a fire in the open woods, and where a woodman's wits were needed to come even tolerably off. But there was a strong relish in such an experience for Washington, which did not wear off with the novelty of it. There is an unmistakable note of boyish satisfaction in the tone in which he speaks of it. " Since you received my letter in October last," he writes to a young comrade, " I have not sleep'd above three nights or four in a bed, but, after walking a good deal all the day, I lay down before the fire upon a little hay, straw, fodder, or bear-skin, whichever is to be had, with man, wife, and children, like a parcel of clogs and cats ; and happy is he who gets the berth nearest the fire. . . . I have never had my clothes off, but lay and sleep in them, except the few nights I have lay'n in Frederick Town." For three years he kept steadily at the trying business, without loss either of health or courage, now deep in the forests laboriously laying off the rich bottom lands and swelling hill -sides of that wild but goodly country between the mountains, now at

Greenway Court with his lordship, intent upon the busy life there, — following the hounds, consorting with huntsmen and Indians and traders, waiting upon the ladies who now and again visited the lodge ; when other occupations failed, reading up and down in his lordship's copy of the Spectator, or in the historians who told the great English story. His first success in surveying brought him frequent employment in the valley. Settlers were steadily making their way thither, who must needs have their holdings clearly bounded and defined. Upon his lordship's recommendation and his own showing of what he knew and could do, he obtained appointment at the hands of the President and Master of William and Mary, the colony's careful agent in the matter, as official surveyor for Culpeper County, " took the usual oaths to his Majesty's person and government," and so got for his work the privilege of authoritative public record.

Competent surveyors were much in demand, and, when once he had been officially accredited in his profession, Washington had as much to do both upon new lands and old as even a young man's energy and liking for an independent income could reasonably demand. His home he made with his brother at Mount Vernon, where he was always so welcome ; and he was as often as possible with his mother at her place upon the Rappahannock, to lend the efficient lady such assistance as she needed in the business of the estate she held for herself and her children. At odd intervals he studied tactics, practised the manual of arms, or took a turn at the broadsword with the old soldiers who so easily found excuses for visiting Major Washington at Mount Vernon. But, except when winter weather forbade him the fields, he was abroad, far and near, busy with his surveying, and incidentally making trial of his neighbors up and down all the country-side round about, as his errands threw their open doors in his way. His pleasant bearing and his quiet satisfaction at being busy, his manly, efficient ways, his evident self-respect, and his frank enjoyment of life, the engaging mixture in him of man and boy, must have become familiar to everybody worth knowing throughout all the Northern Neck.

But three years put a term to his surveying. In 1751 he was called imperatively off, and had the whole course of his life changed, by the illness of his brother. Lawrence Washington had never been robust ; those long months spent at the heart of the fiery South with Vernon's fever-stricken fleet had touched his sensitive constitution to the quick, and at last a fatal consumption fastened upon him. Neither a trip to England nor the waters of the warm springs at home brought him recuperation, and in the autumn of 1751 his physician ordered him to the Bahamas for the winter. George whom he so loved and trusted, went with him, to nurse and cheer him. But even the gentle sea -air of the islands wrought no cure of the stubborn malady. The sterling, gifted, lovable gentleman, who had made his quiet seat at Mount Yernon the home of so much that was honorable and of good report, came back the next summer to die in his prime, at thirty-four. George found himself named executor in his brother's will, and looked to of a sudden to guard all the interests of the young widow and her little daughter in the management of a large estate. That trip to the Bahamas had been his last outing as a boy. He had enjoyed the novel journey with a very keen and natural relish while it promised his brother health. The radiant air of those summer isles had touched him with a new pleasure, and the cordial hospitality of the homesick colonists had added the satisfaction of a good welcome. He had braved the small-pox in one household with true Virginian punctilio rather than refuse an invitation to dinner, had taken the infection, and had come home at last bearing some permanent marks of a three weeks' sharp illness upon him. But he had had entertainment enough to strike the balance handsomely against such inconveniences, had borne whatever came in his way very cheerily, with that wholesome strength of mind which made older men like him, and would have come off remembering nothing but the pleasure of the trip had his noble brother only found his health again. As it was, Lawrence's death put a final term to his youth. Five other executors were named in the will ; but George, as it turned out, was to be looked to to carry the burden of administration, and gave full proof of the qualities that had made his brother trust him with so generous a confidence.

His brother's death, in truth, changed everything for him. He seemed of a sudden to stand as Lawrence's representative. Before they set out for the Bahamas Lawrence had transferred to him his place in the militia, obtaining for him, though he was but nineteen, a commission as major and district adjutant in his stead ; and after his return, in 1752, Lieutenant-Governor Din w iddie, the crown's new representative in Virginia, added still further to his responsibilities as a soldier by reducing the military districts of the colony to four, and assigning to him one of the four, under a renewed commission as major and adjutant-general. His brother's will not only named him an executor, but also made him residuary legatee of the estate of Mount Vernon in case his child should die. He had to look to the discipline and accoutrement of the militia of eleven counties, aid his mother in her business, administer his brother's estate, and assume on all hands the duties and responsibilities of a man of affairs when he was but just turned of twenty.

The action of the colonial government in compacting the organization and discipline of the militia by reducing the number of military districts was significant of a sinister change in the posture of affairs beyond the borders. The movements of the French in the West had of late become more ominous than ever; 'twas possible the Virginian militia might any day see an end of that " everlasting peace" which good Mr. Beverley had smiled to see them complacently enjoy, and that the young major, who was now Adjutant-General of the Northern Division, might find duties abroad even more serious and responsible than his duties at home. Whoever should be commissioned to meet and deal with the French upon the Avestern rivers would have to handle truly critical affairs, decisive of the fate of the continent, and it looked as if Virginia must undertake the fateful business. The northern borders, indeed, were sadly harried by the savage allies of the French ; the brunt of the fighting hitherto had fallen upon the hardy militiamen of Massachusetts and Connecticut in the slow contest for English mastery upon the continent. But there was really nothing to be decided in that quarter. The French were not likely to attempt the mad task of driving out the thickly set English population, already established, hundreds of thousands strong, upon the eastern coasts. Their true lines of conquest ran within. Their strength lay in their command of the great watercourses which flanked the English colonies both north and west. 'Twas a long frontier to hold, that mazy line of lake and river that ran all the way from the Gulf of St.

Lawrence to the wide mouths of the sluggish Mississippi. Throughout all the posts and settlements that lay upon it from end to end there were scarcely eighty thousand Frenchmen, while the English teemed upon the coasts more than a million strong-. But the forces of New France could be handled like an army, while the English swarmed slowly westward, without discipline or direction, the headstrong subjects of a distant government they would not obey, the wayward constituents of a score of petty and jealous assemblies tardy at planning, clumsy at executing plans. They were still far away, too, from the mid-waters of the lakes and from the royal stream of the Mississippi itself, where lonely boats floated slowly down, with their cargoes of grain, meat, tallow, tobacco, oil, hides, and lead, out of the country of the Illinois, past the long, thin line of tiny isolated posts, to the growing village at New Orleans and the southern Gulf. But they were to be feared, none the less. If their tide once flowed in, the French well knew it could not be turned back again. It was not far away from the Ohio now ; and if once settlers out of Pennsylvania and Virginia gained a foothold in any numbers on that river, they would control one of the great highways that led to the main basins of the continent. It was imperative they should be effectually forestalled, and that at once.

The Marquis Duquesne, with his quick soldier blood, at last took the decisive step for France. lie had hardly come to his colony, to serve his royal master as Governor upon the St. Lawrence, when he determined to occupy the upper waters of the Ohio, and block the western passes against the English with a line of military posts. The matter did not seem urgent to the doubtingministers at Versailles. " Be on your guard against new undertakings," said official letters out of France ; " private interests are generally at the bottom of them.' 5 But Duquesne knew that it was no mere private interest of fur trader or speculator that was at stake now. The rivalry between the two nations had gone too far to make it possible to draw back. Military posts had already been established by the bold energy of the French at Niagara, the key to the western lakes, and at Crown Point upon Champlain, where lake and river struck straight towards the heart of the English trading settlements upon the Hudson. The English, accepting the challenge, had planted themselves at Oswego, upon the very lake route itself, and had made a port there to take the furs that came out of the West, and, though very sluggish in the business, showed purpose of aggressive movement everywhere that advantage offered. English settlers by the hundred were pressing towards the western mountains in Pennsylvania, and down into that " Virginian Arcady," the sweet valley of the Shenandoah : thrifty Germans, a few ; hardy Scots-Irish, a great many — the blood most to be feared and checked. It was said that quite three hundred English traders passed the mountains every year into the region of the Ohio. Enterprising gentlemen in Virginia — Lawrence and Augustine Washington among the rest — had joined influential partners in London in the formation of an Ohio Company for the settlement of the western country and the absorption of the western trade ; had sent out men who knew the region to make interest with the Indians and fix upon points of vantage for tradingposts and settlements; had already set out upon the business by erecting storehouses at Will's Creek, in the heart of the Alleghanies, and, farther westward still, upon Redstone Creek, a branch of the Monongahela itself.