America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (12 page)

The battle at what became known as Jumonville’s Clearing (or Jumonville’s Glen) also begged another question: Was young George Washington fit for command? And, in a more controversial modern context, was the “Father of His Country” a war criminal culpable for | 91 \

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the death of Jumonville, as the French eyewitness claimed, or at least permitting the actions of his Indian allies? It is not a question usually posed by history books, which tend to gloss over this phase of Washington’s life and early career, moving almost directly to his leading the troops in the American Revolution.

But the experiences that the twentysomething future general and president had during the “Old War,” as the Revolutionary generation called it, were Washington’s “forge of experience,” in biographer James Thomas Flexner’s apt phrase. Washington’s headstrong—or misguided—and mostly disastrous misadventures in the Pennsylvania wilderness, and later in wartime Virginia, were crucial moments in shaping the skills, personality, and command experience he brought to his leadership of the Continental army more than twenty years later.

That he survived numerous brushes with death during this time might have been viewed by some as proof of his destiny.

In 1754, at the time of Washington’s surprise attack on the French diplomatic party, England and France were officially at peace. But this was a cold-war atmosphere, the relative calm before an all-engulfing storm. Following the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, ending the War of the Austrian Succession (called King George’s War in America), there was a temporary lull in the on-again, off-again fighting that had preoccupied the two countries and their various European and American Indian allies for more than fifty years. Under the treaty’s terms, the British had won some additional Canadian coastal territory from France. Left unresolved was the much larger question of control of a vast and valuable swath of North America’s largely unexplored interior, the Ohio River Valley.

Things would soon come to a head over this prized piece of American real estate, claimed by both countries. Sparsely inhabited by In-

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dians—mostly members of the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, along with bands of Shawnees and Delawares forced from their coastal homelands—the vast Ohio Valley had begun to lure settlers from the colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Most of them were Scots-Irish and German squatters, homesteading on the unsecured land in a largely uncharted wilderness. Approximately two hundred thousand square miles of territory that encompasses parts of modern Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia and smaller portions of several other states, the Ohio River Valley was richly forested and watered by a system of rivers that eventually emptied into the Mississippi River. (The Ohio River rises at modern Pittsburgh and empties into the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois.) Ripe for settlement, the territory was also teeming with enormous reserves of highly prized beaver, by this time largely extinct in Europe. And the fur trade with the Indians who lived there—a source of great fortunes made in Europe and America—was a crucial piece of the spoils that finally brought the two countries to war.

When it came, the war gave George Washington his first taste of command, a harsh introduction to combat, and a measure of celebrity that carried him to leadership of the Continental army in 1775—along with some up-close and personal experiences of how disastrous and un-glorious the business of war could actually be.

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b a r e ly a y e a r before the brief ambush that altered the destinies of America and Europe, the twenty-one-year-old Washington had no actual experience or training as a soldier. He was a young man of relatively modest circumstances and precious little formal education. Although he possessed a small farm, it yielded little income and was still | 93 \

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in the hands of his overly controlling, widowed mother, Mary Ball Washington. Young Washington’s only brush with military life had come through the war stories told by his half brother Lawrence, fourteen years his senior.

The firstborn of Augustine “Gus” Washington’s first marriage, Lawrence Washington had joined a regiment of Virginia volunteers assigned to a British navy ship during the War of Jenkins’ Ear, a conflict between Spain and England begun in 1739, but eventually part of the larger War of the Austrian Succession.5 Lawrence Washington commanded a marine detachment on the flagship of Admiral Edward Vernon, known as “Old Grog,” who had earned everlasting infamy as the man who ordered his sailors’ daily ration of rum diluted with water. This cost-saving measure was also meant to reduce the incidence of drunken brawls, but British tars cursed Vernon’s name, and “three-water rum,” meted out in two daily rations, became the British navy standard.

Although Admiral Vernon was a hero early in the war, he commanded during one of the greatest British naval disasters in history at the battle of Cartagena (off Colombia, South America). In a catastrophic campaign in the spring of 1741, the British lost some eighteen thousand men—more than half of them from tropical diseases—and fifty warships were destroyed. Aboard Vernon’s flagship, Lawrence witnessed this debacle. When he returned home, Lawrence Washington was given command of training Virginia’s militia—a largely honorary post. Dashing in his dress uniform, Lawrence enthralled his younger half brother with exciting tales of naval cannons boom-ing, glorious combat, and the spit-and-polish romance of the officer’s life. Most likely, he skirted the less appealing realities of what he had seen—the ravages of typhoid, yellow fever, scurvy, and dysen-

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tery, and the routinely brutal life of sailors on board British warships.

Soon after Lawrence’s return, in 1743, when George was eleven, his father, Gus Washington, died. As the oldest son, Lawrence received his father’s larger plantation, Little Hunting Creek, renaming it Mount Vernon in honor of the admiral with whom he had served. As the oldest son of his father’s second marriage, young George was willed the smaller Ferry Farm, which would remain in his mother’s hands until George came of age at twenty-one. Although he lived there with his mother, George was far happier with Lawrence at Mount Vernon, and he spent most of his time with his older brother, who essentially became his surrogate father.

Unlike Lawrence and his other half brother, Augustine junior, George was not sent to England for schooling. Instead, he received a rudimentary grammar school education in Virginia. His schoolboy notebooks contain his careful copying of a popular colonial-era combination of Miss Manners and
How to Win Friends and Influence People.

A collection of 110 maxims,
Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation
was composed by a Jesuit priest in 1595 to instruct French aristocrats. Its pithy advice and tips on etiquette were translated into English in 1640. Whether young George was honestly devoted to these principles or merely setting them down to hone his penmanship is uncertain. But he did have a lifelong appetite for such maxims, and there is little question that throughout Washington’s adult life, he publicly exhibited the sort of ordered civility that had been prescribed by this strict set of principles for “decent behavior,”

among which were included these rules: 1st Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.

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2d When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usually Discovered. . . .

24th Do not laugh too loud or too much at any Publick Spectacle. . . .

66th Be not froward [
sic
] but friendly and Courteous. . . .

87th Let thy carriage be such as becomes a Man Grave Settled and attentive to that which is spoken. Contradict not at every turn what others Say. . . .

98th Drink not nor talk with your mouth full neither Gaze about you while you are drinking. . . .

110th Labor to keep alive in your Breast that Little Spark of Celes-tial fire Called Conscience.

Lawrence suggested that “boy George” become a midshipman in the Royal Navy, and plans to send him to England were set in motion.

But in a decision that may well have rewritten the course of history, Washington’s cantankerous and, by every account, extremely controlling mother put her foot down. She was said to believe—correctly, it seems in retrospect—that an American farmer’s young son would be considered little more than a country bumpkin by the English and could never rise through the rigidly stratified, aristocratic world of the Royal Navy. An English uncle agreed, and a disappointed George un-packed his bags.

His next few years were largely spent in Lawrence’s orbit, and when Lawrence married Ann Fairfax, daughter of Colonel William Fairfax, young George Washington gained entree into one of the richest and most powerful families in Virginia’s plantation ruling class. Although far from poor, and with substantial holdings in land and slaves, the Washingtons were still not counted among Virginia’s most elite families. The first Washington to settle in Virginia was John—George’s | 96 \

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great-grandfather—who left England for America in 1657, following the English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I in 1649.

At this time, Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate held rein and Puritans exerted sway over the defeated royalists and Anglicans—known as “Cavaliers.” John Washington’s father, an Oxford-trained Anglican minister, was one of those who lost his job under Cromwell’s Round-head regime.

Virginia’s population would explode under a “Cavalier migration”

as those loyal to the throne and the Church of England fell from political grace. During the 1650s, as David Hackett Fischer put it, “Virginia’s Royalist immigrants were refugees from oppression, just as New England’s Puritans themselves had been.”6

Having settled in Virginia, George Washington’s great-grandfather earned the name Conotocarious, meaning “town taker,” from some local Indians. It was neither a polite nor admiring honorific.

Apparently John Washington had swindled some of the Indians out of land. The taste for acquiring land seems to have run thick in the Washington bloodlines, and John Washington and Washington’s own father eagerly added to their real estate holdings. When Gus Washington died, he left behind an estate of some ten thousand acres and forty-nine slaves, along with a small iron foundry. Impressive, perhaps, but far from aristocratic.

The connection to the Fairfaxes gave Lawrence—and George by extension—a leg up in that world. The titular head of the family, Thomas, Lord Fairfax, was Virginia’s largest single landholder—although mostly an absentee landlord. He remained in England and his cousin, Colonel William Fairfax, managed the Fairfax properties, a grant totaling some five million acres. When the childless bachelor Lord Fairfax did arrive from London for a visit to his Virginia hold-

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ings, his immediate and single-minded interest was in fox hunting. An experienced rider, the strapping, six-foot-tall George was invited to ride with his lordship. Suddenly, the unschooled and quiet teenager was transported into a whole new world of wealth and privilege.

Colonel William Fairfax, Lawrence Washington’s father-in-law, also took a liking to young George Washington, and he was invited to join a surveying party, accompanying George Fairfax, the colonel’s son, on an expedition into the wilderness of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley beyond. Perhaps, as he set off, Washington may have recalled Rule 56 from
Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior:
“
Associate yourself with Men of good Quality if you Esteem your own Reputation; for ’tis better to be alone than in bad Company.” Align-ing himself with powerful and wealthy friends would be a hallmark of Washington’s career. If not to the manor born, Washington had learned the necessary eighteenth-century networker’s skills.

Spending days on horseback, putting his native mathematical skills to use in learning the science of surveying, and encountering the rough backwoods families who were homesteading in the unmapped—and largely unregulated—wilderness, Washington was captivated and completely at home. He filled an early journal with a record of his experiences. Among other adventures, Washington reported on an encounter with Indians: Wednesday 23d Rain’d till about two oClock & Clear’d when we were agreeably surpris’d at the sight of thirty odd Indians coming from War with only one Scalp. We had some Liquor with us of which we gave them Part it elevating there Spirits put them in the Humour of Danc-ing of whom we had a War Daunce. There Manner of Dauncing is as follows Viz. They clear a Large Circle & make a great Fire in the | 98 \

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Middle then seats themselves around it the Speaker makes a grand Speech telling them in what Manner they are to Daunce after he has finish’d the best Dauncer Jumps up as one awaked out a Sleep & Runs & Jumps about the Ring in a most comicle Manner.

— G e o r g e Wa s h i n g t o n
“Journal of My Journey”

Washington put his newly acquired surveying skills to profitable use. By the time he turned eighteen, he was earning more money from surveying than he could as a farmer. And like his own father and his father before him, the young surveyor was converting cash into property, buying land whenever he could. His first purchase was a 1,459-acre plot. The teenager had become a land speculator.

The next great turn in Washington’s life came when Lawrence fell ill. Having returned from the war with a hacking cough, Lawrence was diagnosed with consumption—what is now called tuberculosis. In October 1751, the half brothers sailed for Barbados in the hopes that the climate would improve Lawrence’s health. Lasting four weeks— George Washington’s only sojourn outside America—the trip was at first idyllic. Washington enthusiastically filled his personal journal with reports of sighting dolphins and other sea creatures. Then George himself took ill, in his case with the severe fever and telltale red pustules that accompany smallpox. George Washington was fortunate to survive this brief bout with one of the greatest killers in American history. His mild case effectively inoculated Washington against a viral disease that would prove to be the deadliest threat during of the American Revolutionary era, a seven-year epidemic that took vastly more lives than actual combat did. 7