His Excellency: George Washington (7 page)

Bouquet could not have been more wrong. Washington immediately wrote Francis Fauquier, who had recently replaced Dinwiddie as governor of Virginia, to register his vehement opposition to the Pennsylvania route and his “moral certainty” that the entire campaign was now doomed. He used much the same language with Speaker of the House Robinson, describing the decision as a corrupt bargain designed to swindle Virginia out of its rightful role as the archway to the west, calling Forbes an “evil genius” in cahoots with the Pennsylvanians, even threatening to go all the way to London in order to expose and discredit him. Throughout the fall of 1758, as Forbes’s army hacked its way across the Alleghenies, Washington kept up a steady stream of criticism: Forbes and Bouquet were both incompetent idiots; the pace of the march, slowed by the need to cut the new road, virtually assured that the campaign would stall in the mountains when the snows came and never reach Fort Duquesne; no one should blame him when this inevitable failure happened and all the world witnessed a repeat of the Braddock fiasco.
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The truth of the matter was that both Forbes and Bouquet were excellent and honorable officers, had very much acknowledged Washington’s expertise, and made the decision about the route for logistical rather than political reasons. (Forbes, it turns out, was dying, probably of cancer, and made the difficult trek in a blanket stretched between two horses.) If anyone were guilty of allowing political considerations to color his judgment, it was Washington, whose Virginia prejudices were blatantly exposed in his letters to Williamsburg. Moreover, his prediction that the expedition would never reach its objective proved wrong. The lead elements of Forbes’s column, including Washington’s Virginia Regiment, reached the outskirts of Fort Duquesne in early November. What happened next might serve as a classic illustration of the unpredictable fortunes of war.

Forbes called a council of war to solicit the advice of his officers about how to proceed. The ghost of Braddock had hung over the campaign from the start, and the officers urged caution. Washington himself argued that an assault would be “a little Imprudent” because no one knew the size of the garrison inside Fort Duquesne. Forbes reluctantly agreed. Matters were now at a stalemate, and Washington expressed personal satisfaction that his intimations of futility were coming true, even though he had a hand in the apparent outcome.
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But on the next day, November 12, the Virginia Regiment encountered a reconnaissance patrol out from the fort. In the skirmish that ensued, Washington stepped between two groups of his own troops that were mistakenly firing at each other, using his sword to knock up their muskets. (Many years later, in 1786, he claimed that his life was in greater danger at this moment than at the Monongahela or at any time during the American Revolution.) The regiment suffered heavy casualties, most the result of “friendly fire,” but captured three prisoners who reported that Fort Duquesne was undermanned and vulnerable. Forbes ordered an immediate assault with Washington and his troops part of the vanguard. (Washington was so concerned about surprise that he ordered all the dogs in the regiment killed before the attack.) But when they reached Fort Duquesne, it was deserted and burning. There was no battle because the French troops, recognizing they were outnumbered, had fled down the Ohio the previous day. It was an empty, anticlimactic victory-of-sorts. Critical of Forbes to the end, Washington complained to Fauquier that not enough troops were left behind to rebuild and garrison the fort, which would probably be recaptured and lead to a repeat of the whole bloody business on the Virginia frontier the following year.
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How to explain Washington’s insubordinate behavior during the Forbes campaign, which proved to be an atypical chapter in his long career as a soldier and statesman? Three overlapping explanations suggest themselves, each perhaps containing a portion of the answer. First, he was still very young, only twenty-six, headstrong about his own prowess as the founder of the Virginia Regiment, and overeager to ingratiate himself with the planter elite in Virginia, which had vested interests in making Braddock’s Road the preferred route into the Ohio Country. Second, he mistakenly regarded Bouquet and Forbes as updated versions of Braddock and Loudoun, imperious symbols of British privilege who thought of American colonists in much the same way colonists thought of Indians, namely as a semicivilized inferior people. He was factually wrong on this score, but his experience of British authority still smoldered, and his own sense of pride gave that experience a special edge of resentment. Third, and finally, he was in emotional turmoil at this moment, because he had fallen in love with one woman and was about to marry another.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

T
HE WOMAN
he was planning to marry was Martha Dandridge Custis, probably the wealthiest widow in Virginia, with an inherited estate of eighteen thousand acres valued at
£
30,000, making her the prize catch of Chesapeake society. (All the other eligible women Washington had previously pursued were also wealthier than he was, extending the male tradition in his line of marrying up.) Washington had begun courting her in the spring of 1758. The preceding year he had launched major renovations at Mount Vernon in anticipation of creating a more suitably lavish household, a risky wager on his future prospects made before he knew of Martha’s availability, but a sign that he was confident that an appropriate consort would turn up soon. He probably proposed in June. The following month he stood successfully for election to the House of Burgesses in Frederick County. On one previous occasion he had permitted his name to be put forward, but had made no concerted effort to win. This time he mobilized his friends to campaign for him and opened accounts with four taverns in Winchester to provide impressive quantities of rum, wine, and beer at the polls. Even as the Forbes campaign was getting underway, he had already decided to surrender command of the Virginia Regiment for a more settled life on the banks of the Potomac with an attractive and much-coveted partner. His thoughts were on the new chapter he planned to open up in his life, east rather than west of the Blue Ridge.
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His emotions, on the other hand, were swirling around another subject altogether. Her name was Sally Fairfax, wife of George William. The evidence is scanty, but convincing beyond any reasonable doubt, that Washington had fallen in love with his best friend’s wife several years earlier. Just when the infatuation began, and whether it ever crossed the sexual threshold, has resisted surveillance by generations of historians and biographers. What we do know is based primarily on two letters Washington wrote to Sally in September 1758 while serving in the Forbes campaign, and one letter he wrote near the end of his life in an uncharacteristically sentimental mood. In the latter he confessed to an elderly Sally that she had been the passion of his youth, that he had never been able to forget her, “nor been able to eradicate from my mind those happy moments, the happiest in my life, which I have enjoyed in your company.”
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The earlier letters of 1758 are convoluted documents, in part because the act of writing them threw Washington into such emotional disarray that his grammar and syntax lost their customary coherence, in part because he deliberately used imprecise and elliptical language to prevent any prying eyes from knowing his secret. Here are the most salient passages:

’Tis true, I profess myself a Votary to Love—I acknowledge that a Lady is in the Case—and further I confess that this Lady is known to you.—Yes Madam, as well as she is to one, who is too sensible of her Charms to deny the Power, whose Influence he feels and must ever Submit to. I feel the force of her amiable beauties in the recollection of a thousand tender passages that I coud wish to obliterate, till I am bid to revive them.—but experience alas! Sadly reminds me how Impossible this is.—and evinces an opinion which I have long entertained, that there is a Destiny, which has the Sovereign Controul of our Actions—not to be resisted by the Strongest efforts of Human Nature.

     The World has no business to know the object of my Love, declard in this manner to you—you when I want to conceal it—One thing, above all things in this World I wish to know, and only one person of your Acquaintance can solve me that, or guess my meaning.—but adieu to this, till happier times, if I shall ever see them. . . .

     Do we still misunderstand the true meaning of each others Letters? I think it must appear so, tho I would feign hope the contrary as I cannot speak plainer without—but I’ll say no more, and leave you to guess the rest. . . . I should think my time more agreable spent believe me, in playing a part in Cato with the Company you mention, & myself doubly happy in being the Juba to such a Marcia as you must make.
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In Joseph Addison’s
Cato
(1713), Marcia is the daughter of Cato, and Juba is the Prince of Numidia, who is required to conceal his secret love for her. Only someone dedicated to denying the full import of this evidence could reject the conclusion that Washington was passionately in love with Sally Fairfax.

The titillating “consummation” question is almost as irrelevant as it is unanswerable. The more important and less ambiguous fact is that Washington possessed a deep-seated capacity to feel powerful emotions. Some models of self-control are able to achieve their serenity easily, because the soul-fires never burned brightly to begin with. Washington became the most notorious model of self-control in all of American history, the original marble man, but he achieved this posture—and sometimes it
was
a posture—the same hard-earned way he learned soldiering, by direct experience with difficulty. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, he wrote no lyrical tribute to the interior struggle entitled “Dialogue Between the Head and Heart,” but he lived that dialogue in a primal place deep within himself. Appearances aside, he was an intensely passionate man, whose powers of self-control eventually became massive because of the interior urges they were required to master.

Nothing was more inherently chaotic or placed a higher premium on self-control than a battle. He had played a leading role in four of them: one a massacre that he oversaw; the other a massacre that he survived; one an embarrassing defeat; the other a hollow victory. Whether it was a miracle, destiny, or sheer luck, he had emerged from these traumatic experiences unscathed and with his reputation, each time, higher than before. He had shown himself to be physically brave, impetuously so at Fort Necessity, and personally proud, irrationally so in the Forbes campaign. His courage, his composure, and his self-control were all of a piece, having developed within that highly lethal environment that was the Ohio Country, where internal shields provided the only defense against dangers that came at you from multiple angles.

One of the reasons he proved clumsy and ineffectual at playing the patronage game with British officials was that deference did not come naturally to him, since it meant surrendering control to a purported superior, trusting his fate and future to someone else. Though capable of obeying orders, he was much better at giving them. Though fully aware of the layered aristocratic matrix ruled by privileged superiors in Williamsburg and London, he was instinctively disposed to regard himself as better than his betters. The refusal of the British army to grant him a regular commission did not strike him as a statement of his own unworthiness, but rather a confession of their ignorance. His only experience of complete control was the Virginia Regiment and—no surprise to him—it was his only unqualified success.

If we are looking for emergent patterns of behavior, then the combination of bottomless ambition and the near obsession with self-control leaps out. What will in later years be regarded as an arrogant aloofness began in his young manhood as a wholly protective urge to establish space around himself that bullets, insults, and criticism could never penetrate. Because he lacked both the presumptive superiority of a British aristocrat and the economic resources of a Tidewater grandee, Washington could only rely on the hard core of his own merit, his only real asset, which had to be protected by posting multiple sentries at all the vulnerable points. Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust. For the rest of his life, all arguments based on the principle of mutual trust devoid of mutual interest struck him as sentimental nonsense.

A few other abiding features were also already locked in place. He combined personal probity with a demonstrable flair for dramatic action whenever opportunity—be it a war or a wealthy widow—presented itself. He took what history offered, and was always poised to ride the available wave in destiny’s direction. Speaking of direction, he looked west to the land beyond the Alleghenies as the great prize worth fighting for. And although he did not know it at the time, the rewards he received for his soldiering in the form of land grants in the Ohio Country would become the lifetime foundation of his personal wealth. Though he was still developing—the sharp edges of his ambitions were inadequately concealed, his sense of honor was too anxious to declare its purity—the outline of Washington’s mature personality was already assuming a discernible shape.

When he resigned his commission in December 1758, the officers of the regiment composed a touching tribute, lamenting “the loss of such an excellent Commander, such a sincere Friend, and so affable a Companion.” Washington responded in kind, observing that their final salute “will constitute the greatest happiness of my life, and afford in my latest hour the most pleasing reflections.” The regiment had been his extended family for more than three years, but now he was moving on to Mount Vernon to establish a more proper family, over which he intended to exercise equivalent control. Whatever he felt toward Sally Fairfax, she was a forbidden temptation who could not be made to fit into the domestic picture he had formed in his head; memories of her had to therefore be safely buried deep in his heart, where they could not interfere with his careful management of his ascending prospects. Whatever he felt toward Martha Dandridge Custis, she did fit, indeed fit perfectly. They were married on January 6, 1759. Writing from Mount Vernon later that spring, he described his new vision: “I have quit a Military Life; and shortly shall be fix’d at this place with an agreable Partner, and then shall be able to conduct my own business with more punctuality than heretofore as it will pass under my own immediate supervision.”
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