Washington- The Indispensable Man

by James Thomas Flexner

  Mary Ball Washington was given neither to acquiescence nor compromise. Orphaned early, she had grown up largely independent, and by the time she married, at twenty-five, she had been an old maid (according to Virginia mores) for a number of years. After the death of Augustine Washington she never married again. The passion of her life became her son George, and it was a very possessive passion. Even when he was Commander in Chief, even when he was President, she objected to his occupations, complaining violently that he was ungratefully neglecting his duties to her.

  After his father’s death, George was cast, under his mother’s demanding eyes, as the captain of a household team made up of his younger brothers and sister. At the age of eleven, himself a substitute father, the mainstay and main victim of a termagant mother, the future father of his country escaped as often as he could. He found a substitute father of his own in his half brother Lawrence, who was his elder by fourteen years.

  Lawrence had already fired George with martial ardor by becoming an officer in an American regiment enrolled in the British regular army for an expedition against the Spanish West Indian stronghold of Cartagena. How the boy, who was all his life to have a passion for military regalia, must have admired his brother’s red uniform! Then there had been the exciting departure, followed by rumors and dispatches concerning the brother’s adventure, and at last a happy homecoming. Lawrence’s complaints of how the officers from Great Britain had humiliated the American regiment did not (although they surely remained in George’s memory) prevent the boy from visualizing for himself a career in the British regular army.

  Probably owing to the passion of his mother, Washington’s childhood schoolbooks have been preserved. At their most advanced, they show him studying elementary geometry and the zodiacal configuration of the stars. Concerning where Washington received instruction there is only one solid piece of evidence. It shows him attending an unnamed school while he was staying at the farm Lawrence had inherited and renamed Mount Vernon, after Admiral Edward Vernon, who had commanded the Cartagena expedition.

  Surely more important to Washington’s education than this or any school was a nearby mansion called Belvoir. Although its inhabitants described it as “a tolerable cottage” in a “wooded world,” Washington considered the handsome brick structure, with its two elaborately furnished sitting rooms, the height of elegance and grandeur. This was the American headquarters of the great English Fairfax family. Under a royal grant, which Virginians were perpetually protesting, Lord Fairfax owned a sizable section of the colony. The master of Belvoir, William Fairfax, was a cousin of his Lordship, his Lordship’s American agent, and consequently one of the most powerful men in Virginia. Perhaps the first indication of George’s unusual qualities was the way in which the young boy was taken into the bosom of the Fairfax clan.

  At Belvoir, the future revolutionary had his first close view of British upper-class life. Even if he did not realize it at the time, the vision was equivocal. However well placed he was now in Virginia, William Fairfax had been born into his aristocratic family as the insignificant younger son of a younger son. Prevented by his elevated caste from struggling for his own living but with practically no inheritance, he had been completely dependent on having the grander members of his family use their influence to keep him employed in ways suited to his station. Although he made his motto “I trust in God I shall never procure the disesteem of any relation,” he was given a tremendous kicking-around before he finally found his seemingly safe position in Virginia. His son George William Fairfax (who might inherit the title and the great estates if certain deaths were not counteracted by births in certain bedchambers) had been so maltreated by toplofty relatives that he had been beaten into a cringing weakling who became a disciple to the much younger—by seven years—George Washington. And when the great Lord Fairfax came himself to Belvoir, he proved to be entirely dominated by three obsessions: a consciousness of power, a hatred of women, and a love of fox hunting. He treated the William Fairfaxes—and also Lawrence Washington, who had married one of William’s daughters—with an offhand mixture of generosity and brutality which they had to put up with since their prosperity depended on his whims.

  His Lordship was taken with young George, who was so naturally gifted at riding to hounds. The Fairfax influence would have got the lad into the British navy—with what effect on future history?—if his mother had not made such a fuss at his deserting her that he unpacked bags already shut. Next, the Fairfaxes propelled him in the exactly opposite direction. He accompanied a surveying party assigned to lay out Fairfax land on the frontier over the Blue Ridge in the Shenandoah Valley. Washington was then sixteen. It was his first real adventure. Here is how he described his initial encounter with a backwoods lodging:

  “We got our supper and was lighted into a room and I, not being as good a woodsman as the rest of my company, stripped myself very orderly and went in to the bed, as they called it, when to my surprise, I found it to be nothing but a little straw matted together, without sheets or anything else, but only one threadbare blanket, with double its weight of vermin, such as lice, fleas, etc., and I was glad to get up, as soon as the light was carried from us. [He does not seem to have wanted to offend the landlord by leaping out of bed.] I put on my clothes, and lay as my companions [on the floor].”* The next day they found a more civilized inn where “we cleaned ourselves to get rid of the game we catched the night before.”

  Washington studied practical surveying; swam horses across a river swollen by snow melting in the mountains; met a party of Indians carrying one scalp who, when inspired by a gift of rum, performed a war dance; got lost in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he encountered a rattlesnake. He found it all exhilarating. During thirty-one days of blustery March and April weather, he gave to the American West a part of his heart he was never to regain.

  Washington had gone along on this trip largely for the fun of it. However, it was clear to the teenager that he had to make some money. He was to write again and again that men judged their condition less by what it actually was than by comparison. Although he never lacked for food or warm clothes, he would have been ashamed to take the friends he was making to his mother’s run-down farm. On one recorded occasion, he could not get away to some dances because he could not buy feed for his horse. And so at the age of seventeen he set himself up as a surveyor over the Blue Ridge. At eighteen, he was able to make his first land purchase: 1,459 acres on Bullskin Creek, a tributary of the Shendandoah.

  When staying at Lord Fairfax’s hunting lodge, he wrote “Dear friend Robin” that he might, “was my heart disengaged, pass my time very pleasantly, as there’s a very agreeable young lady lives in the same house … but as that’s only adding fuel to the fire, it makes me the more uneasy for, by often and unavoidably being in company with her, revives my former passion for your Low Land Beauty, whereas was I to live more retired from young women, I might in some measure alleviate my sorrows by burying that chaste and troublesome passion in the grave of oblivion or eternal forgetfulness,” etc., etc.

  The Low Land Beauty could have been any one of many girls, for Washington was in love with love. He even wrote poetry—and very badly it turned out. He was not, indeed, much of a success with girls. Very tall for his generation—over six feet—with reddish hair and gray-blue eyes, his face massive, his shoulders narrow for his height but his hands and feet tremendous, George exuded such masculine power as frightens young women just wakening to the opposite sex. He enjoyed making playful compliments and flirting in a ritualistic manner, yet his gaiety was seemingly belied by a slowness of speech more suited to the careful expression of profound thought. His lack of surface vivacity allowed other young men to cut him out with many a pretty girl.

  As Washington was beginning to find his way in the world, a slow and excruciating tragedy darkened over him. His beloved brother Lawrence came down with virulent tuberculosis. George accompanied his dying friend to Barbados, in the hope that a tropical climate
would help. This was the only ocean trip Washington ever took, the only occasion on which he went outside the limits of the future United States. He kept a boyish diary, but in all his later writings he never mentioned the journey or used a metaphor that revealed he had been in the tropics. As Lawrence coughed his life away, the experience had been too sad. Washington himself sickened with smallpox. This (since he recovered) was a hidden boon: it made him immune to the greatest killer of the American Revolution.

  In Virginia, as in all the colonies, every community supported a volunteer militia company, presumably a military force but more closely resembling a men’s drinking and political club. Appointed Adjutant General of Virginia, Lawrence had been supposed to see that the militiamen possessed such martial skills as the ability to turn in formation without falling over each other. On Lawrence’s death, George sought the office. He went after it in the Fairfax manner: not by becoming proficient in military matters, but by paying semi-social calls on influential members of the government. Thus following the mores of an aristocratic world, he secured, at the age of twenty, the title of major and the responsibility of training militia in skills he did not himself possess.

  Hardly anyone could have sounded more insignificant if mentioned in the chancelleries of Europe. Yet in his obscure forests Washington was soon to fire the first shots in what became a world war.

  * A change in the calendar during George’s lifetime pushed his birthdate ahead to the 22nd.

  * The spelling and punctuation of all quotations have been modernized.

  TWO

  A Clumsy Entrance on the World Stage

  (1753–1754)

  England and France were engaged in a cold war, each trying to contain the other. The Ohio Valley was among the globally scattered areas claimed by both rivals. France impinged from Canada; the British from across the Allegheny Mountains. Indians inhabited the valley. Although the few white men who traversed the paths and watercourses were mostly French, English land speculators had visions. The highest resident crown official in Virginia, Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie, joined with influential men (including the Fairfaxes) in his colony and in London to secure for their “Ohio Company” a grant of half a million acres.

  What was Dinwiddie’s horror to hear rumors that the French, who controlled the Great Lakes, were fortifying a route from Lake Erie to the Ohio River system so that their troops could float into the areas to the west of Virginia that the Ohio Company wanted. The Lieutenant Governor complained to his sovereign. George II ordered the building of a fort and also that an envoy be sent through the wilderness to search out the French position. If the French were really on land the British claimed, the envoy was to warn the intruders away. If the miscreants would not withdraw, Dinwiddie should use force.

  To find a possible envoy presented Dinwiddie with serious problems. Whoever was chosen would have to travel first north against the rivers and then south with them, for some five hundred miles through an unbroken, Indian-haunted forest. The way back would go quickly if the rivers remained open, but winter was so close that the waters might harden into ice. The paths would then become almost impassable with snow. And no Virginian whose social position was commensurate with acting as a royal emissary possessed wilderness experience.

  Yet the Fairfax connection boasted a physical giant who, even if he had never crossed the Alleghenies, had surveyed in the semi-wild Shenandoah Valley. Furthermore, although only twenty-one, George Washington carried the manifest air of one born to command. He was assigned two interpreters: a Dutchman, Jacob van Braam, whose knowledge of French was testified to by the badness of his English; and a fur trader, Christopher Gist, who was to prove less conversant with Indian tongues than he should have been. Add four backwoodsmen of low degree who acted as “servitors,” some riding horses, and a flock of pack horses, and you had the expedition which in October, 1753, already fighting through heavy snow, descended from the mountains into the wild Ohio Valley. The French wilderness masters, so numerous and so familiar with Indian trails and embassies, would have regarded this tiny, amateur force as comic. Yet the tenderfoot who led it was no ordinary man.

  Washington soon dashed ahead of his party to where the Monongahela joined the Allegheny to form the lordly Ohio. Although “the Forks of the Ohio” (now Pittsburgh) was the strategic position that controlled thousands of miles of wilderness, he found there no signs of humanity except empty trails. For two days he explored by himself through the tangled forest, seeking, despite his military ignorance, the best location for a fort. His judgment was confirmed by both the French and the English, who were in succession to erect major works at the spot he chose.

  After Washington’s expedition had reassembled, they advanced to the Indian village of Logtown where they hoped to pick up an escort of warriors. Washington now met the Iroquois chief the British called the Half-King, who was to play a greater part in his destiny than he could possibly have realized. The greenhorn now tried his hand at the exquisite art of Indian diplomacy: he proceeded brashly and made a fool of himself. He began by reminding the Indians that they had made a treaty of alliance with the British. This the Half-King did not deny, but he went on to state that the treaty had been based on assurances that the British merely wished to trade, having no designs on the land which “the Great Being above allowed … to be a place of residence to us.” He then asked the nature of Washington’s mission to the French.

  Realizing that it would never do to admit that he was claiming the valley for George II but unwilling to make up an excuse, Washington gave a noncommittal reply. He was pleased when the Indian statesman seemed satisfied by the evasion. However, the Half-King soon opined that it would be safer not to provoke the French by having Washington accompanied by a military escort. Three old chiefs, including the Half-King, would go along. One able-bodied hunter would serve to supply the party with meat.

  The weather had abated, and the trip to the first of a sequence of French forts, at the confluence of French Creek with the Monongahela (now Franklin, Pennsylvania), was not arduous. Ordering his Indian companions to camp outside, Washington entered to find gathered in a log room France’s most expert Indian negotiators. They told Washington he would have to carry his message further, and then expressed concern that he had not felt free to bring in his Indians. Washington, who wanted to protect the chiefs from what he considered subversive influences, made lame excuses. The Frenchmen must have been amused at his dismay when the old braves, taking matters in their own hands, filed in, and also at the young Virginian’s inability to stick out the party that followed. (It took years of practice to be able to enjoy the company of drunken Indians.) Washington did, however, stay in the fort long enough to hear the French officers, who were more interested in frightening the tribes than soothing Virginia, announce over their wine that their sovereign intended to establish his control over the Ohio Valley.

  Eventually reclaiming his Indians, Washington proceeded through what he called “excessive” rain and snow some sixty miles up French Creek to Fort Le Boeuf (near Waterford, Pennsylvania). He saw a rectangular log enclosure, almost completely surrounded by swirling water. It bristled with cannon. Washington was received at this outpost hundreds of miles from civilization with ceremony that would have done credit to Versailles. After he had donned the dress uniform of a Virginia major, which he had packed along the Indian trails for the occasion, he met officially with the even more elegantly attired Legardeur de St. Pierre, Knight of the Military Order of St. Louis. The Virginia stripling presented George II’s ultimatum. The elderly Frenchman brushed it aside. No effort was made to hide from Washington the more than two hundred canoes that lay in the snow beside the creek, ready to drift down to the Forks of the Ohio.

  But—it was now mid-December. Drifting home was not possible for Washington. French Creek could, it is true, be fought through, but the Monongahela was frozen solid. Nothing to do but to attempt to traverse the trails! His horses’ legs sank deep into snowdrifts
and were cut at the ankle by sharp crusts of ice. The horses staggered with hunger because all forage was frozen over. Thirst became a horror for man and beast: all water had turned to ice so cold that, if sucked, it would burn the mouth. In midst of the utter desolation, the cavalcade moved more and more slowly.

  Finally Washington, anxious to warn Dinwiddie of an approaching invasion, decided that he and Gist would push ahead on foot. The woodsman objected that the tenderfoot “had never been used to walking before this time.” But Washington overruled Gist’s doubts, and overruled them again by picking up, at an Indian village called Murthering Town, an Indian guide whom Gist distrusted but who offered to lead them on a shortcut through pathless woods.

  The ice-covered wilderness glowed like a hall of mirrors, but dimly, since the high trees shut out the sun. Suddenly they came out into a clearing where sunlight dazzled. The Indian ran ahead about fifteen paces, turned, raised his gun, and fired at his companions. The bullet moved through utter emptiness without changing the history of the world.

  Springing forward, Gist and Washington leapt on the Indian before he could reload. Since the hostile brave might have companions to whom he would betray them, Gist wished to kill him. Washington could not bear to see a man killed. So the brave was sent off in one direction, while Gist and Washington ran in another. For a long time they dared not light a campfire. Moving sometimes separately, sometimes together, ever wary of Indian attack, they reached the Monongahela in two days.

  Civilization lay across the wide river, but they saw to their dismay that no continuous paving of ice awaited their feet. Instead, huge chunks (such as those Washington was to meet again during his advance on Trenton) rushed by in the rapid current. With the “one poor hatchet” they possessed, Washington and Gist built a raft. The minute it was launched, it became caught in the flow of ice. As Washington used a pole to fend off a mighty chunk, he was thrown into the freezing water. Somehow, he managed to climb back. Eventually, Washington and Gist quit their raft and struggled onto an island; their wet clothes froze as hard as armor. It was the frontiersman who had to sit up all night rubbing snow on his frostbitten toes and fingers. Washington slept, if fitfully. At dawn, he saw a lovely sight: the river was now a solid sheet of ice. The opposite shore and civilization were in reach.