The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  But nobody forgave the transgression of Harry’s son, Henry Lee IV. Conventionally enough, Henry married the orphaned heiress next door, Ann McCarty of Pope’s Creek, whose 2,000 acres bordered Stratford. Ann spruced up threadbare Stratford munificently, bore a daughter Henry modestly allowed was “said to be beautiful,” and brought along her younger sister Betsy, whose guardian Henry became. But at a high-spirited family party, Henry’s beautiful two-year-old plunged down Stratford’s steep front steps to her death, just as Colonel Phil’s son had done forty years earlier.140

  Ann, inconsolable, found solace in morphine—and died of it alone in a Paris garret at age forty-three. Henry found solace in Betsy, who believed he had made her pregnant, though no one knows if that part of the story was true. Betsy complained, and a public scandal ensued. Henry didn’t see what was such a big deal. Couldn’t a moment of “unguarded intimacy . . . surprise” anyone into sex with his twenty-year-old sister-in-law and ward? He couldn’t understand why “recent events here have shattered my amicable and social relations.” It was totally unfair: “for one transgression, one fatality rather, I am left in total darkness.” But there were two transgressions: Henry had also squandered Betsy’s fortune, of which he was guardian, and to pay her back he had to sell Stratford in 1822. When the buyer died six years later, the house went on the auction block. The new owner, for $11,000: Henry D. Storke and his wife—Henry Lee IV’s ward Betsy McCarty, who presided as mistress of Stratford for half a century, until she died in 1879.141

  BY THEN, of course, Light-Horse Harry’s fifth son, General Robert E. Lee, whom Harry had abandoned when he was six, had broken up the union his forebears had toiled to create, had won his amazing string of victories from Second Bull Run to Chancellorsville in 1862 and 1863, had stood on the field at Gettysburg apologizing to the few bloodied survivors who made it back from Pickett’s doomed and foolhardy charge that he had ordered, had surrendered, in resplendent full-dress uniform, to the muddy and bedraggled General Grant at Appomattox, and had been buried in the chapel at Virginia’s Washington College (later Washington and Lee), where he had dutifully toiled as president to support his wife and four spinster daughters.142 Eight months into the Civil War, before all these great and tragic events unfolded, he wrote to his wife, “I wish I could purchase ‘Stratford.’ That is the only other place that I could go to, now accessible to us, that would inspire me with feelings of pleasure and local love. You and the girls could remain there in quiet. It is a poor place, but we could make enough cornbread and bacon for our support, and the girls could weave us clothes.”143

  As if life at Stratford had ever been uneventful.

  3

  George Washington: In Pursuit of Fame

  FOR WE WHO BELIEVE that great men, not impersonal forces, make history, George Washington is Exhibit A. As the Revolution’s commander in chief, president of the Constitutional Convention, and first president of the United States, he was luminously the Founding’s indispensable man, in biographer James Flexner’s pitch-perfect phrase. A pragmatic visionary—that familiar American combination—he conceived from his hard-won experience in the French and Indian War the central Founding ideas of an American union under a strong executive three decades before the Constitutional Convention, and his hardships in the Revolution led him to forge that vision into a plan. An ambitious entrepreneur, he shared the “spirit of commerce” he knew was America’s ruling passion, and he eagerly foresaw a nation where industry and trade, not just farming, would provide opportunity for all and would generate the wealth he thought key to national power and security, a vision he fulfilled in his two terms as president. He had a born leader’s knack of attracting brilliant, like-minded young men to work with him to fill in the details and make his dream a reality. They were visionaries together, but he was the visionary in chief.

  He was indispensable, too, for the force of his character along with his accomplishments as general, lawgiver, and statesman. He inspired, reassured, and steadied his subordinates and his countrymen at every critical moment from the first stirrings of revolt in the 1760s until he stepped down as chief executive in 1797. He embodied the spirit of the nation, before the nation existed except as an idea, and for three decades, the power of his example emboldened Patriots to make that idea come true.

  Part of what makes his life story so gripping is that he shaped himself into the world-historical figure he became, in the quintessentially American tradition of men who spring, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, from their own Platonic conception of themselves. But his self-conception was extraordinary: it began as a worthy ideal and evolved into a magnificent one. In his fiercely ambitious youth, he sought to win acclaim for his heroism and savoir faire. In his maturity, he strove to be, in his own conscience even more than in the eyes of others, virtuous, public-spirited, and (though his ethic wouldn’t allow him to claim the word) noble. He did hope, however, that posterity would recognize and honor the purity of his motives; and Americans, who owe him so much, do him but justice in understanding not only what he did for them but also what greatness of soul he achieved to do it.

  THOUGH SELF-CREATED, Washington was not self-made in the sense of raising himself from “poverty and obscurity” to “affluence” and “celebrity,” as Benjamin Franklin boasted of doing.1 His father, Augustine Washington—a genial, powerfully built six-footer whose seafaring English grandfather had run aground on the Virginia coast in 1656 and decided to stay—had inherited 1,100 acres along the Potomac, then married 1,750 more with his first wife. He prospered both as a planter and as part owner and manager of an ironworks across the river in Alexandria. But Augustine died young, at forty-nine, when Washington was eleven, and as a third son, George inherited only the 260-acre Ferry Farm opposite Alexandria, a few lots of land, and ten slaves, enough to set him up as a modest planter. It wasn’t enough to let him follow his two elder brothers to their fine English boarding school, and all his life he felt shame at his “defective education,” whose details no one knows.2

  “My father died when I was only 10 years old,” Washington wrote when he had become world famous; and that he remembered himself as younger than he was suggests how vulnerable and bereft he had felt.3 With good reason: from every indication, his mother, Augustine’s second wife, was unloving and exploitative at best, mentally unbalanced at worst, a potentially soul-destroying burden for a fatherless boy—or a spur to assert his worth all the more forcefully. “Of the mother,” recalled one of Washington’s playmates, “I was more afraid than of my own parents”—though he also acknowledged her kindness.4

  Washington’s later dealings with her, from which we have to infer the past, display frostily correct dutifulness on his part, belittling, ungrateful complaint on hers. Having twice tried to thwart his military career, she dismissed his martial exploits by saying, “Ah, George had better have stayed at home and cultivated his farm.”5 In 1772, after letting her have Ferry Farm rent-free for three decades, he bought her a pretty house in Fredericksburg, lent her money she never repaid, and gave her an allowance. Nevertheless, in 1781, as the Revolutionary War was ending, she asked the Virginia Assembly for a pension, saying she was “in great want,” a move that Assembly speaker Benjamin Harrison knew would so mortify Washington that he sent the general a warning letter, so he could quash the scheme.6 After years of such antics, Washington wrote to remind her how generously he had treated her, to assure her that “whilst I have a shilling left you shall have part, if it is wanted, whatever my own distresses may be,” and to reproach her for causing him to be “viewed as a delinquent, & considered perhaps by the world as [an] unjust and undutiful Son.”7 When told that Fredericksburg had planned a ball to honor Washington and his French allies for their victory at Yorktown and that “His Excellency” had agreed to come, Mrs. Washington sneered, “His Excellency! What nonsense!” After her death in 1789, her son the president left her grave unmarked.8

  But when his father died, the eleven-year-old luckily fou
nd refuge in an alternative, exemplary world. His idolized half brother, Lawrence, fourteen years older and resplendent in the uniform of an army captain with a royal commission, had inherited most of his father’s 10,000-acre estate, including a house overlooking the Potomac that Lawrence renamed Mount Vernon and made his home. Three months after his father’s death, Lawrence married the girl next door—though next door was Belvoir, a grand brick mansion shimmering on the water four miles downstream, and the girl was Ann Fairfax, daughter of Colonel William Fairfax, who as agent for his cousin Lord Fairfax’s 5-million-acre Virginia holdings was himself a powerful grandee.9 So Washington, who often stayed at Mount Vernon, also became a frequent visitor at Belvoir; he was a favorite of Colonel Fairfax, who saw his rare worth, and a close friend of his shy son, George William Fairfax, eight years older. From a home where his mother could barely spell—“My dear Georg I was truly unesy by Not being at hom,” she once wrote, “it was a onlucky thing”—he was translated as if by Scheherazade’s magic carpet to the world of the British aristocracy, with its stately rooms and its polished silver, mahogany, mirrors, and manners.10 “I considered,” he wrote nearly forty years later, “that the happiest moments of my life had been spent there.”11

  He set about acquiring some polish himself, absorbing through the essays and plays of Addison and Steele, and the novels of Fielding and Smollett, the eighteenth-century’s ideal of the English gentleman, with good breeding, good sense, and a good heart.12 At fifteen, he copied out a translation of a 1595 French etiquette guide, which counseled readers to speak concisely and to the point, to “bedew no mans face with your Spittle,” to let everyone speak without interruption or constant contradiction, to cultivate a “Grave Settled” manner, to hide their feelings, and to show social superiors unrepublican deference.13 Most of these precepts stuck with him, especially those regarding economy of speech and gravitas of manner, and his own intense concern with appearances soon blossomed into a lifelong passion for clothes: at seventeen or eighteen he wrote down his first of many meticulously detailed designs, this one for a “Long Waisted” frock coat with lapels “5 or 6 Inches wide” sporting “six Button Holes” each—and on and on for a hundred more words.14

  BELVOIR OFFERED a more concrete route to self-improvement too. Washington advised Jack, one of his four younger siblings, to “live in Harmony and good fellowship with the family at Belvoir, as it is in their power to be very serviceable upon many occasion’s to us young beginner’s”—as he knew from experience.15 When he was fourteen, his brother Lawrence and Colonel Fairfax tried to land him a coveted berth as a Royal Navy midshipman, but his mother dashed the plan on the lip of success. So, in an infant colony where land was wealth, and with a head for figures sharpened by hundreds of pages of exercises in geometry, compound interest, and weight and measure problems, Washington took his father’s kit of surveying instruments and apprenticed himself to a surveyor, earning his first fee at fifteen. When the fabled Baron Fairfax crossed the ocean to view his colonial principality firsthand, the rich landscape kindled both his foxhunting and his property-development ardor, and he resolved to build a hunting lodge in the Shenandoah Valley and start selling his beautiful acreage there. His cousin the colonel recommended the sixteen-year-old Washington to survey the lots and his own son as the agent to sell them, and in March 1748 the two friends mounted their steeds and sallied forth across the Blue Ridge.16

  The monthlong adventure that Washington recounts in his vivid journal made a frontiersman of him. Even sleeping involved drama. The first Tuesday night, he undressed in the dark and got into bed, to find himself on loose straw under “only one Thread Bear blanket with double its Weight of Vermin such as Lice Fleas &c.” He learned to sleep in his clothes. Straw bedding, he learned another night, burns fast; a servant luckily awoke to douse the blaze before it broiled him. The explorers shot wild turkeys, saw a “Rattled Snake,” and met a party of sad Indians coming home from war with but one scalp, whom they comforted with liquor, which “put them in the Humour of Dauncing . . . in a most comicle Manner” to the music of a deerskin drum and a gourd rattle. A group of Dutch settlers struck him “as Ignorant a Set of People as the Indians,” since they spoke Dutch, not English. His appraising eye, however, didn’t miss the lush groves of sugar maples, and it lingered over a stretch of “Land exceeding Rich & Fertile” that “produces abundance of Grain Hemp Tobacco &c.”17

  The next year Lord Fairfax had him appointed Culpeper County’s official surveyor, Virginia’s youngest ever—a striking testament to the baron’s faith in his seventeen-year-old protégé’s genius, which he saw as clearly as the colonel, though he also valued Washington’s flair for foxhunting. But laying out plots on Fairfax’s Shenandoah domain took up most of the young surveyor’s time and paid him so well that in 1750 he bought 1,500 Shenandoah acres himself, which tenants farmed for their eighteen-year-old landlord. With 2,315 acres by the time he was twenty, he was on his way as a high-rolling land speculator.18

  NO ONE CAN EXPLAIN how Shakespeare, say, captured truth and beauty with such clarity that it enlightens us every time we ponder it; or how Mozart or Handel did what Salieri or Schütz did, but with such an ineffable intensification as to move us to tears. There’s a similar mystery with Washington. We can describe how he developed those inborn gifts of character and charisma, as the sociologists call a genius for leadership that inspires confidence, but no one can say where he got them. Washington would credit Providence, and I can’t do better.

  Whatever the spark was that the Fairfax cousins saw in Washington—some mix of will, focus, courage, and honor—Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie, the Crown’s highest resident official in Virginia, saw too when the young surveyor called on him in Williamsburg in January 1752, bearing letters of recommendation that gained him an invitation to dinner and then an appointment as major in the Virginia militia a couple of weeks before his twenty-first birthday, February 22, 1753. Certainly he looked the part: “Six feet high & proportionably made,” he wrote to his London tailor, “rather Slender than thick . . . with pretty long arms & thighs,” narrow shoulders and chest compared with his wide hips, big hands, piercing gray-blue eyes above a long, straight nose, powdered brown hair tied in a queue, a firm mouth clenched ever tighter as age decayed his teeth, and with “a Constitution hardy enough to encounter and undergo the most severe tryals, and I flatter myself resolution to Face what any Man durst,” he boasted to Dinwiddie.19 As strong as his father, he was also, as Jefferson later marveled, “the best horseman of his age and the most graceful figure that could ever be seen on horseback.”20

  Late that fall, the neophyte major put his hardihood and wilderness experience to the test by volunteering for a mission that “I believe few or none would have undertaken,” he wrote, and that set earthshaking events in motion. British and French imperial ambitions were on a collision course in the Ohio Valley when France made plans to build a string of forts there to enforce its claim to the territory, and the British responded with plans for outposts of their own, along with an ultimatum demanding the French troops’ peaceable departure from the region. Washington’s mission: to deliver the ultimatum.21

  AS HE RECOUNTS in a gripping pamphlet that made him famous on two continents after its publication, he set out on October 31, 1753, and by mid-November, when the diplomatic party reached western Maryland and began to make its way into uninhabited country, winter had blown into the wilderness, and “the face of the Earth was covered with snow and the waters covered with Ice.”22 By November 22, he had reached the Forks of the Ohio, where Pittsburgh later rose, and two days later he arrived at an Indian settlement twenty miles farther northwest. While waiting for a Seneca chieftain called the Half King, to request an escort to the French headquarters just below Lake Erie, Washington learned from four French deserters that a chain of French forts stretched from New Orleans to the Great Lakes, and two of the planned Ohio Valley forts had already been built, tightening the noose southeastward around
land Britain claimed.23

  The Half King arrived with plenty to report. His enmity for the French, whom he accused of eating his father, was at a full boil, for a French commander had just stingingly insulted him. The Half King had reminded the officer of the French promise to stay off Indian land, he told Washington. “I saw that Land sooner than you did,” the Frenchman contemptuously retorted; “it is my land, & I will have it.” The Half King’s views didn’t interest him. “I will not hear you: I am not afraid of Flies or Musquito’s; for the Indians are such as those,” he said. “I have Forces sufficient to . . . tread under my Feet all that stand in Opposition.” So Washington—on whom the Half King officially bestowed the prophetic, long-remembered Indian name “Connotaucarious,” the Town Taker—knew what the French and at least some of the Indian tribes had in mind.24

  The next day, with the aplomb of a practiced diplomat, the twenty-one-year-old major assured an Indian council of the esteem “your Brother the Governor of Virginia” held for such good friends and allies as they, and he asked their help in getting to the French. The Half King pledged “a Guard of Mingoes, Shawnesse, & Delawar’s,” though in the end only he and three shamans accompanied the party. On December 4, seventy miles later, they reached a French outpost, whose three officers told them that the commander of the next fort was the proper recipient of their message. The Frenchmen invited Washington to dinner, and, having “dos’d themselves pretty plentifully with” wine, which “gave license to their Tongues,” they told him just what the Half King had heard: “it was their absolute Design to take Possession of the Ohio, & by G— they wou’d do it,” for they had “an undoubted right to the river from a Discovery made by one La Sol [La Salle] 60 Years ago.”25