by Ron Chernow
Everything at the Mansion House Farm—the serpentine walks, the beautiful gardens, the undulating meadows—reflected Washington’s taste. It is noteworthy that, as tensions mounted with Great Britain, his conception of Mount Vernon grew more regal. In its British style, the house reflected his love of the country against which he was about to rebel, suggesting that his hostility to the mother country was a case of thwarted love. “Examples of English taste are everywhere at Mount Vernon,” write the historians Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., and Lee Baldwin Dalzell. “The taste in question also bears the indelible stamp of that most English of institutions—the aristocratic country house.”35
PATSY CUSTIS’S UNTIMELY DEATH meant that Martha Washington would now derive her emotional sustenance from the unpredictable Jacky Custis alone. Myles Cooper continued to ply Washington with favorable reports about his young charge, as had Jonathan Boucher before him. In September 1773 he informed Washington that Jacky’s “assiduity hath been equal to his rectitude of principle and it is hoped his improvements in learning have not been inferior to either.”36 By December Cooper couldn’t keep up these fake progress reports with a straight face and told Washington that he had yielded to Jacky’s wish to quit college and marry. As a military man, Washington knew when he faced a losing battle. Having Jacky’s “own inclination, the desire of his mother, and the acquiescence of almost all his relatives to encounter,” Washington told Cooper, “I did not care, as he is the last of the family, to push my opposition too far and therefore have submitted to a kind of necessity.” 37 One can again feel Washington’s painful frustration in bowing to Martha’s wishes when it came to her incorrigible son.
On February 3, 1774, Jacky Custis, nineteen, wed Nelly Calvert, sixteen, in Mount Airy, Maryland, the home of the Calvert clan. Only half a year had passed since Patsy’s death, and one wonders what Martha Washington thought about the timing of this rushed marriage. She didn’t think it proper to attend the wedding in mourning dress, so her husband carried a congratulatory letter from her to the newlyweds. Jacky had married into a prominent family, the Catholic proprietors of Maryland, who had issued a famous act of religious toleration in 1649. At the same time the family had its own salacious past to titillate Jacky’s imagination. His new father-in-law, Benedict Calvert, was the illegitimate offspring of Charles Calvert, the fifth Lord Baltimore, and lived in a huge mansion graced with Van Dyke portraits of his ancestors. Whatever Jacky’s flaws, Nelly Calvert seemed to be a universally popular young woman. Boucher said rhapsodically that she was “the most amiable young woman I have almost ever known . . . She is all that the fondest parent can wish for a darling child.”38
During their first year of marriage, Jacky and Nelly divided their time between Mount Airy and Mount Vernon, despite the lonely Martha’s wish that they move permanently to Mount Vernon. That May, George and Martha took them to an unusual boat race on the Rappahannock River. As the family unfolded twenty blankets and a picnic barbecue on the riverbank—Washington brought forty-eight bottles of claret to spread good cheer—they watched a macabre sporting event. Two boats, each manned by five or six muscular slaves, raced out to an anchored boat and back, while spectators cheered and placed bets onshore. It was an exceedingly strange vignette: the man who would be fighting for American liberty exactly one year later was being entertained by teams of strong, athletic slaves.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A Shock of Electricity
AFTER THE REVOCATION of all the Townshend duties, except the one on tea, the political world of Williamsburg had reverted temporarily to some semblance of normality. In October 1771 Washington was reelected as a Fairfax County burgess. To safeguard his seat, he paid four pounds to tavern keeper John Lomax to feed a hearty supper to voters; twelve shillings to a Harry Piper, so that his slave Charles could fiddle up a storm for them; and another pound for good measure to a Mr. Young, who sated the hungry electorate with free cakes.
In early 1773 Washington still operated in a world of flagrant contradictions. He stanchly backed measures criticizing Parliament and the North ministry, while also socializing with the royal governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, a redheaded Scot with a large nose and fiery gaze who took office in 1771 with no inkling of just how stormy his tenure would be. In March 1773 Washington supported the burgesses’ decision to form a Committee of Correspondence to harmonize defensive measures with other colonies and to “propose a meeting of deputies from every colony at some central place,” as Jefferson was to recall.1 Still slightly detached from the fray, Washington didn’t serve on the committee and continued to straddle two worlds. Dining with Lord Dunmore and still ravenous for land, Washington badgered him for another five thousand acres in the Ohio Country under the royal proclamation of 1763, the one designed to reward French and Indian War veterans.
There matters stood on December 16, 1773, when a patriotic band, masquerading as Mohawk Indians, heaved 342 chests of tea into Massachusetts Bay. Such was the instinctive respect for private property in the colonies that even Boston firebrand Samuel Adams boasted that the tea party had occurred “without the least injury to the vessels or any other property.”2 The tea tax wasn’t as punitive as is commonly supposed—the cost of tea to the colonists actually declined—but it threatened local merchants by eliminating smugglers and colonial middlemen, entrenching the East India Company’s monopoly. It also perpetuated the hated practice of taxation without representation.
When the news from Boston reached Mount Vernon around New Year’s Day, Washington deplored the methods of the tea party, even if he loathed the tax on tea. It was the next step in a fast-unfolding drama that would fully radicalize him. The administration of the bluff, portly Lord North had decided that Boston should pay for the destroyed tea and that Parliament should assert its supremacy, cracking down on harebrained schemes of independence now beginning to ferment in the colonies. In March Parliament passed the Boston Port Bill, shutting down the port of Boston until the townspeople reimbursed the East India Company for its lost tea. Along with other draconian measures that subverted the Massachusetts charter and clamped military rule on Boston, the harsh new laws were known as the Coercive Acts or “Intolerable Acts.” Such ham-handed reprisals forged new unity among the colonists. Similarly, the tea party convinced many British sympathizers that colonial protesters had become a violent rabble who had to pay a steep price for their inexcusable crimes. General Thomas Gage counseled his superiors in London that the colonists would “be lions whilst we are lambs, but if we take the resolute part, they will be very meek.”3
Washington was in Williamsburg when the thunderclap of the Boston Port Bill burst over the colony. He also learned that three thousand redcoats had landed in Boston, fortifying Gage’s position. During the French and Indian War, Gage had written warmly to Washington, “It gave me great pleasure to hear from a person of whom the world has justly so good an opinion and for whom I have so great an esteem.”4 Such fraternal sentiments between imperial warriors now belonged to a vanished world. Washington blasted military rule in Boston as “unexampled testimony of the most despotic system of tyranny that ever was practiced in a free gov[ernmen]t.”5 He and his fellow burgesses enlisted the Lord on their side, declaring that June 1, the day of the port’s closure, should be observed “as a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer.”6 In what was fast becoming a ritual, Dunmore dissolved the House of Burgesses. That very morning Washington had breakfasted with the governor at his farm outside Williamsburg. It was now plain that the rights of the burgesses dangled by a slender thread that could be severed at will by the golden shears wielded by the all-powerful royal governor.
The next day Washington and other militant burgesses moved to their familiar resort, the Raleigh Tavern, where they poured forth scorn for the Boston Port Bill, ratified a boycott of tea, and endorsed an annual congress with other colonies to protect their collective rights. They reached the critical conclusion that an assault on one colony was an assault on all. In this crazil
y illogical world, Washington and other burgesses threw a ball that evening to welcome the governor’s wife. Quite obviously this was no typical revolt of the poor or dispossessed, but a fissure at the pinnacle of the social structure, involving men long accustomed to rule. Washington was one of twenty-five burgesses still lingering in Williamsburg in late May when a letter arrived from Samuel Adams, beseeching the Virginians to discontinue trade with England. The legislators decided to cease all imports and reconvene on August 1.
Land was never far from George Washington’s thoughts, and he smarted at new British policies that curtailed speculative activities. The Quebec Act transferred the Great Lakes and territory north of the Ohio River to Catholic Quebec, restricting the acreage available to Virginians. Still more jarring was a ruling from London that land grants to French and Indian War veterans under the 1763 proclamation would be limited to British regulars, discriminating against colonial officers and reopening an ancient wound for Washington. “I conceive the services of a provincial officer as worthy of reward as a regular one and [it] can only be withheld from him with injustice,” he observed with contempt.7 As we have seen, the ambitious Washington took these slights personally, and they now tipped him over the edge into open revolt.
To gauge opinion before the August meeting of the burgesses, Washington chaired a gathering of his Alexandria constituents on July 5. Their response to the Boston turmoil was both swift and decisive: they agreed to send 273 pounds sterling, 38 barrels of flour, and 150 bushels of wheat to “the industrious poor of the town of Boston . . . who by a late cruel act of Parliament are deprived of their daily labor and bread.”8 Having dissolved the burgesses, Governor Dunmore ordered new elections, and Washington engaged in the bread and circuses of a fresh campaign on July 17, a gaudy spectacle at odds with the high-minded rhetoric in the air. One observer related how Washington and his ally, Major Charles Broadwater, gave Alexandria voters “a hogshead of toddy,” or punch, followed by a ball that evening that was punctilious in its choice of beverages: “Coffee and chocolate, but no tea. This herb is in disgrace amongst them at present.”9 Washington and Broadwater were swept into office.
On Sunday, July 17, Colonel George Mason arrived at Mount Vernon for an overnight stay, and he and Washington refined a list of twenty-four resolutions that he had brought. The next day the resolutions were presented to their Fairfax County committee and, with Washington in the chair, adopted with minor changes. These Fairfax Resolves, as they became known, reflected the views of the “Country Party” of landed British gentry, who had protested what they saw as the corruption of Britain’s constitution by venal politicians during Robert Walpole’s ministry earlier in the century. The resolves argued that people should obey only laws enacted by their chosen representatives or else “the government must degenerate either into an absolute and despotic monarchy or a tyrannical aristocracy.” Another resolution stated that “taxation and representation are in their nature inseparable.” Still another called for an intercolonial congress to guarantee a common defense. Perhaps the most surprising resolution passed under Washington’s watchful eye was a plea to suspend the importation of slaves into Virginia, along with a fervent wish “to see an entire stop forever put to such a wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade.”10 It was the first time Washington had publicly registered his disgust with the system that formed the basis of his fortune. Because of surplus slaves in Virginia, the resolution wasn’t quite as courageous as it appeared and caused no immediate change in behavior at Mount Vernon. When the Fairfax County citizenry met at the Alexandria Court House on July 18, in what Washington described as a mood of “hurry and bustle,” they adopted the Fairfax Resolves and named Washington head of a twenty-five-member committee to chart future policy responses.11
With the Fairfax Resolves, Washington emerged as a significant political leader a full year before being named to head the Continental Army. No fence-sitter, this conservative planter was a true militant. When the Boston Gazette printed the Fairfax Resolves, Washington’s renown reverberated through the colonies for the first time since the French and Indian War. During this period he allowed his heated opinions to bubble up and boil over as his pronouncements grew more vehement. Later on he had to muzzle his public views for the sake of continental harmony, but during the summer of 1774 he had no qualms about expressing open militance. He scoffed at the notion that the forthcoming congress should submit more petitions to the king when so many had failed: “Shall we, after this, whine and cry for relief?” 12 His slumbering conscience was now fully awakened. All the petty indignities that he had endured at British hands exploded in revolutionary rage as his personal pique was sublimated into something much grander. As the historian Joseph Ellis notes, George Mason probably helped Washington “to develop a more expansive vocabulary to express his thoughts and feelings, but the thoughts, and even more so the feelings, had been brewing inside him for more than twenty years.”13
NOT SURPRISINGLY the acrimonious quarrel with the Crown strained Washington’s relations with the family that had long embodied for him the British Empire, the Fairfaxes. In August 1773, shortly after Patsy’s death, George William and Sally Fairfax had sailed to England to pursue a complex inheritance suit in chancery in London. George and Martha Washington were the last people to see them off, waving farewell at the dock. By this point Sally Fairfax had entered into a period of chronic health problems, including a brush with smallpox. As it turned out, she and her husband never returned to Virginia or set eyes on the Washingtons again. Despite the manifold demands on his time, Washington agreed to oversee the Fairfax affairs in Virginia and got a power of attorney to do so—an act of friendship that lasted until he took command of the Continental Army. The Fairfaxes must have known that their farewell might be irrevocable because they gave Washington the authority to auction off Belvoir’s furniture. It is hard to imagine that the commotion shaking the colonies played no part in their decision to decamp to England, but George William claimed to be an ardent friend of the patriotic cause and denied any political motivation behind their trip.
During the summer of 1774 Washington unburdened his thoughts freely to the Fairfaxes. Black with gloom, he wrote despondently to George William that the Crown was failing to protect Virginia from “cruel and bloodthirsty” Indians in the backcountry, while simultaneously “endeavoring by every piece of art and despotism to fix the shackles of slavery upon us.”14 He made clear that the “cause of Boston . . . now is and ever will be consider[e]d as the cause of America . . . and that we shall not suffer ourselves to be sacrificed by piecemeal, though God only knows what is to become of us.”15 Further souring his mood was that a bitter winter frost had given way to an equally bitter drought. In short, Washington concluded, “since the first settlem[en]t of this colony the minds of people in it never were more disturbed, or our situation so critical, as at present.”16
Washington went on corresponding with George William as if communicating with a kindred spirit. Far different was his tense standoff with his longtime friend Bryan Fairfax, the half brother of George William and a former lieutenant in Washington’s Virginia Regiment. Bryan Fairfax was a grave, austere fellow. In June 1774, when Washington had tried to coax his old foxhunting companion into running with him for the House of Burgesses, it became clear that a political gulf yawned between them. On July 4 Washington sent Bryan a letter that was neither soft-spoken nor conciliatory. Instead of ducking politics out of respect for their friendship, Washington gave an unusually forthright statement of his beliefs. As if the scales had fallen from his eyes, he embraced a conspiratorial view of British intentions. The Crown’s policies weren’t just fumbling or misguided but were part of a settled design to rob the colonists of their ancient liberties. “Does it not appear, as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness, that there is a regular, systematic plan formed to fix the right and practice of taxation upon us? . . . Ought we not then to put our virtue and fortitude to the severest test?”17 George Washingto
n passed here some personal Rubicon. Remarkably, in this fierce letter he argued that the colonists should refrain from purchasing British imports, but not renege on paying debts owed to British creditors, “for I think, whilst we are accusing others of injustice, we should be just ourselves.”18 It was this steadfast sense of fairness, even at the most feverish political moments, that set George Washington apart.
When Bryan Fairfax sent Washington a lengthy reply, defending petitions as the only legitimate means of protest, the hot-blooded Washington didn’t mince words. On July 20 he sent Bryan a truculent letter that recounted the many colonial petitions spurned by Parliament, which had violated both the “law of nature and our constitution . . . I think the Parliament of Great Britain hath no more right to put their hands into my pocket without my consent than I have to put my hands in yours for money.”19 Instead of more petitions, Washington endorsed the nonimportation scheme, “for I am convinc[e]d, as much as I am of my existence, that there is no relief for us but in their distress; and I think, at least I hope, that there is public virtue enough left among us to deny ourselves everything but the bare necessaries of life to accomplish this end.”20 Washington said he would mistrust his own judgment if he didn’t recoil “at the thought of submitting to measures which I think subversive of everything that I ought to hold dear and valuable.”21 Washington’s vision abruptly seemed richer and broader, his words now throbbing with passion. His letters to Bryan Fairfax make clear that, even though he didn’t originate political ideas, he was a quick study who soaked them up rapidly, as he was coached by George Mason and other colonial leaders. His sudden eloquence is striking, as his ideas were forged in the crucible of powerful emotions. In a final blast at Fairfax late that summer, Washington wrote that “an innate spirit of freedom first told me that the measures which [the] administration hath for sometime been, and now are, most violently pursuing are repugnant to every principle of natural justice, whilst much abler heads than my own hath fully convinced me that it is not only repugnant to natural right, but subversive of the laws and constitution of Great Britain itself.”22
