Allah, for the sake of my father’s fasts
Do not slay me with a small and shameful death
That of dying in bed.
More than sixty years later, this moment in time was still with Broteer Furro. “The shocking scene is to this day fresh in my mind, and I have often been overcome while thinking on it,” he said as an old man recounting the story in peaceful, smalltown Connecticut. Long after his father’s death, in a place fantastically removed from the African savanna, after having lived a life he could not have imagined, he was able to distill what he took to be the central good about his father:
“He thus died without informing his enemies of the place where his money lay.”
As he watched his father die, watched him be tortured, cut and stabbed and beaten to death rather than give up his wealth, Broteer absorbed the last and most vital lesson he would take from him. Your monetary worth, your honor, your identity as a man: the three things were all bound up together. They were, perhaps, one and the same.
For a boy growing up in Virginia planter country, there was also an honor code to be learned and followed. Curiously, the code that George Washington grew up with was much like that of Broteer Furro’s people. A planter was the elite of Virginia society. The planter’s code of honor had two components. The inward element was one’s conscience: a confidence in the ability to choose right over wrong, not only for oneself but for others. Beyond that, a planter—a gentleman, serene and austere, literally high on his horse—had to exhibit the manners and skills that would win the approval of others and distinguish him as worthy of respect and status.
A proper education was elemental to becoming a planter. In his overall temperament, young George Washington, like George Sackville, was more doer than thinker. He was a big, sturdy boy, and when he could get away from nannying and from overseeing the family’s ten slaves in farm chores—the sticky stripping and prizing of tobacco leaves, working wheat and corn fields—he liked to ride, to hunt, to fish, to revel in, as he said, “the trees and richness of the land,” to wander from the hilltop homestead down to the languid banks of the Rappahannock for a swim. But at the same time he longed for the education he believed was his due. After his father’s death, it became clear that George wouldn’t be going to England as his half-brothers had.
But he was unusually determined, and at some point he decided he would piece together an education for himself. Though throughout his life he would feel keenly the lack of subjects that were considered the mark of true breeding, such as Latin and Greek, and he never learned French, the language of cultivated discourse, he threw himself, probably with the aid of a local teacher, into the study of mathematics, astronomy and geography, and began a lifelong fascination with maps and charting the world. And if he couldn’t have the full substance of a gentleman’s education, he was determined to get the form right. He got his hands on an abridgement of a book called Youths Behaviour, or Decency in Conversations Amongst Men, which was itself a translation of a French work published by the Jesuit order in about 1595. It became his bible, his guide to becoming a gentleman. In ten neat pages of flowing ink, he copied out 110 “rules of civility,” which he would subsequently live by. They started with basic bodily manners that would set a gentleman apart from a commoner. “Spit not in the Fire.” “If You Cough, Sneeze, Sigh, or Yawn, do it not Loud but Privately.”
The contrast that had existed between his parents was sharp in his mind, and while his mother’s behavior could be ill mannered to the point of embarrassment, he had learned from the gatherings his father had hosted that social dining was an arena in which gentlemen set themselves apart from others. Thus in his slightly wobbly hand the boy carefully recorded precepts such as: “Put not your meat to your Mouth with your Knife in your hand, neither Spit forth the Stones of any fruit Pye upon a Dish, nor Cast anything under the table.”
A boy bent on following such rules would not only copy them but practice them, like an actor rehearsing for a role he intended to play for the rest of his life, traipsing, along with an imaginary “person of quality,” from hall to parlor to back room. “In walking up and down in a house,” he copied, “only with One in company, if he be Greater than yourself, at the first give him the Right hand, and Stop not till he does, and be not the first that turns, and when you do turn let it be with your face towards him. If he be a Man of Great Quality, walk not with him Cheek by Joul but somewhat behind him; but yet in Such a Manner that he may easily Speak to you.”
The rules of civility helped the boy to mold a public persona, one guided by dignity, decorum and restraint: “Let your Countenance be pleasant but in Serious Matters Somewhat grave.” “Shew not yourself glad at the Misfortune of another though he were your enemy.”
He didn’t have to go far to start strutting in society. From his house he could hear the horn blast signaling that the ferry across the Rappahannock River was about to depart. He boarded often. The Rappahannock crawled with boat traffic—from canoes to oceangoing vessels—and a mile north, on the opposite shore, sat the fast-growing town of Fredericksburg. Though the site of the town had been explored as far back as 1608—by Captain John Smith, a founder of Jamestown, the original English settlement in Virginia—it had only been incorporated in 1727. The streets George Washington frequented were rough, but they had regal associations: the planters were so eager to express their English identity that they had named all the main thoroughfares after members of the royal family.
Because of its location as a trading center and tobacco depot, Fredericksburg quickly burst its original boundaries. It was a shaggy place, and the government had to pass ordinances against erecting haphazard and highly dangerous structures such as wooden chimneys. Shipments were constantly being offloaded from the dock—from London, from Philadelphia, from Antigua and Barbados—and hauled noisily through the dusty roads: bushels of Indian corn, casks of beer, barrels of flour, firkins of butter, pipes of wine. Tobacco—sweet-smelling hogsheads—was everywhere. Farmers came rolling into town via horse-and oxen-drawn carts laden with it. Tobacco was currency: for every 1,000-pound hogshead, a planter received from one of the English merchants in town a tobacco note, which was used for credit against which he could buy whatever he needed. The rector of St. George’s Church had his salary paid in tobacco.
The big event in Fredericksburg was the twice-yearly fair, where major buying and selling took place. But there were lots of other occasions for people to congregate: lesser fairs, balls, bonfires, election days, horse races. Many featured sideshow entertainment: puppet shows, cockfights, “roape dancings.” George was often on the scene. He danced: jigs, cotillions, reels, minuets. Some events were refined, others raucous. There was music in the air, sung by locals but much of it imported from England. There were songs of love:
Phillis, lay aside your Thinking,
Youth and Beauty should be Gay,
Laugh and talk, and mind your Drinking:
Whilst we pass the Time away. . . .
And songs of lewdness to make the farmers and backwoodsmen howl:
There is a Thing which in the light
Is seldom used, but in the Night
It serves the Maiden Female crew,
The ladies and the good Wives too:
They used to take it in their Hand,
And then it will uprightly stand;
And to a Hole they it apply,
Where by it’s good will it could Dye:
It wastes, goes out, and still within,
It leaves it’s Moisture thick and thin. . . .
And there were romping songs in praise of England and her imperial army:
The Britains through the Woods pursued
The nimble French to take;
And with their Cries the Hills and Dales
And every Tree did shake.
George was keen for diversion, but he was also interested in observing, hoping eventually to climb the social ladder, to audition for a substantial role in society. Yet all
the while, whether he was playing or studying, he seemed to have a hollowness inside him. Virginia planter society considered the father the ground of all things. George Washington lost his father at virtually the same age that Broteer Furro did. In both cases, the death left the son without a foundation. It was the kind of void one could spend a lifetime trying to fill.
Chapter 2
A TIDE IN THE AFFAIRS OF MEN
It was June 1743, late in the millennium, but the sight that greeted George Sackville as he brought his horse to a halt was seemingly out of the Middle Ages. Tens of thousands of soldiers, packed into tidy regiments, with ensigns fluttering, ranged and outfitted by nationality—Hanoverian, Austrian, British—stretched for two miles along the northern bank of the Main River in Bavaria. Sixty yards away, on the opposite shore, and dressed all in glorious white, stood their enemy, the French. A rolling, gathering cheer sounded as the news spread through the allied columns that George II, king of England, had arrived. For the first time in generations, and for the last time in history, an English monarch would lead troops in battle.
Sackville was the king’s personal attendant. Officially, he was a lieutenant colonel in the 28th Regiment of Foot, but he owed his special position not to rank and regiment but to family connections. From earliest childhood he had longed for a military career. When he was still in Dublin, acting as his father’s secretary, he had signed on as a junior officer in the Irish establishment and was fitted for an officer’s uniform. The War of Austrian Succession was on, an arcane European conflict, involving several subwars, at the center of which was a difference of opinion about the succession to the Habsburg throne. More particularly it was an excuse for France and England to square off against each other in their seemingly eternal struggle for dominance. The war engulfed nearly all of Europe, and whatever it may have meant to ordinary Englishmen, for a young aristocrat eager to win personal glory, it provided an array of possibilities.
He celebrated when his call to arms came. And it was no ordinary call. He presented himself to a sixty-year-old man whose flaccid red face was familiar to him not just from its likeness on shillings and half-guineas but from long family association. The monarch’s father, the first King George, had been a family friend and George Sackville’s godfather.
George II was not a bookish man, and not much interested in courtly regalia. He preferred to be in the saddle, leading troops. Until now he hadn’t had the chance; thus the monarch and the young aristocrat were both eager to prove themselves. The two of them, and hundreds of other soldiers, as well as a long retinue of horses, carriages and hangers-on, had made their ponderous way to the coast, boarded ships, and endured the pitching waves of the English Channel.
On reaching the banks of the Main, King George took stock. Even as he did, the French made their first move, cutting off the supply lines of the allied English and German soldiers. The king was forced to order a retreat. The long snake of the allied army made its way along the north bank of the river. As it approached the village of Dettingen, word came that the French had taken positions there. The king ordered his army into position and prepared for a standoff. Then, to his surprise and against military logic, the French line advanced out of the village and toward the allies. There was confusion in the wake of this unorthodox move, but the king seized on what he saw as a tactical error and ordered an attack. In the end, the allies won a victory so decisive, and so special for it being led by a monarch, it was celebrated throughout England. Georg Friedrich Handel, the court composer, wrote an ode in honor of the battle. George Sackville distinguished himself amid the gore and mayhem. As a reward for his valor, he was made aide-de-camp to the king.
Throughout the following year Sackville was on the move with the army—Worms, Ostend, Bruges—gaining confidence and writing letters to his father filled with careful observations about the maneuvers being undertaken by both sides.
By now France was pushing into Dutch territory. In May 1745 more than 100,000 troops faced off on the Flemish plain near the city of Tournai. Serving under the king’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, Sackville led a regiment on a murderous charge. They burst through the enemy line. At the height of the encounter, Sackville found himself flying into a curtain of enemy bullets.
And then he was done: physically thrust backward by an unseen force. Eventually, he realized that he had been shot in the chest. For him the battle was over. He was loaded onto a wagon with the rest of the wounded. The surgeon rooted around inside his body but couldn’t pull the musket ball out; it would stay in him.
Back at the family townhouse in London, he rested. He had carried his uniform with him. He regarded the crisp hole in it as much an emblem of his service as the bullet that had caused it; he would treasure the possession for the rest of his life.
He was exhausted but not cowed—something like the opposite of it. His spirit had been energized by the vital act of sanctioned bloodshed, of war in service to king and country.
While Britain was allied with German states in opposing France on battlefields in Europe, throughout most of the 1740s it was simultaneously fighting Spain over control of parts of the Caribbean and South America. In 1743, as George Sackville was riding across the war-torn Low Countries in the retinue of the king, England’s conflict with Spain reached George Washington’s bucolic Virginia doorstep in the form of another resplendently outfitted officer: his brother. Lawrence and Augustine, his two older half-brothers, whom he hardly knew, had returned from overseas adventures around the time of Gus Washington’s death. George, in his search for a substitute father, was particularly drawn to Lawrence.
Lawrence had seen action in the Caribbean and South America and was full of tales of war. The Battle of Cartagena, in which the British failed miserably but for which they mustered 186 ships and 12,000 soldiers, gave material enough—blasting cannons, heroic sallies, agonizing deaths—for Lawrence to fill the imagination of the boy. Lawrence Washington had a round face and a soft, bland expression, but to George he no doubt seemed fiercely impressive, fully grown and full of life and the world.
And then he was gone. He had inherited the rambling estate where George’s family had previously lived, which they had called Little Hunting Creek Plantation, and was intent on making it his own. He renamed it in honor of his commanding officer at Cartagena, Admiral Edward Vernon. Henceforth, it would be known as Mount Vernon.
More or less from that moment, George’s attention and interest shifted to Mount Vernon. As often as he could get away, he made the 40-mile trip north to his brother’s house overlooking the Potomac River. Lawrence too was determined to move up in planter society, and he took a decisive step in that direction when, three months after their father’s death, he married Ann Fairfax, daughter of one of the richest men in Virginia. The Fairfax family controlled 5.2 million acres of land, an area larger than the entire colony of Massachusetts. They were the drivers of Virginia society, and in marrying into their clan Lawrence Washington instantly fulfilled for himself the dream his father had worked toward his whole life.
George, on his visits to Mount Vernon, became a regular at Belvoir, the estate occupied by Colonel William Fairfax. It was laid out along the lines of a true English country manor. Here before him was all that he aspired to: pomp, dances, powdered wigs, embroidered waistcoats, silk shoes with silver buckles, low bows, the decorous scraping of bow on violin strings, painted cherubs on high. Not only were fine manners on display, he would have encountered at Belvoir a new room that was just coming into vogue, which was intended expressly and exclusively for eating meals. At home there was a room simply called the “hall,” which could be used for eating, preparing meals, socializing or even sleeping. In the new “dining room,” members of the social elite gathered at a long table to enjoy each other’s company.
George became friends with the colonel’s son, George William, an edgy, nervous, somewhat pompous young man who was eight years older. At the same time, he became positively smitten by George William�
�s girlfriend, Sarah Cary, who went by Sally. He kept up a frankly flirtatious relationship with her even after she had become Mrs. Sally Fairfax. But his closest relationship was with the colonel himself. William Fairfax, fifty-two, was a capable man with broad experience of the world—he had served the British Empire as governor of the Bahamas then as tax collector in the port of Salem, Massachusetts—but he had a gentle spirit. His softness may have been due to the fact that, while his family had great power and influence going back more than a century, he himself was of a minor branch, and he lived in the shadow of his illustrious cousin, Lord Thomas Fairfax, the actual owner of the Fairfax patent. Colonel William Fairfax, for all his seeming power, was merely an agent administering his cousin’s vast holdings in Virginia.
The colonel was charmed by the earnest, eager brother of his new son-in-law. He may have seen something of his young self in the boy. As a youth, he too had been trapped by circumstances: he had had powerful family ties but no promise of income, and his aristocratic titles meant he couldn’t train for an ordinary job. He solved the problem by getting a commission in the Royal Navy. Now he proposed the same for his fourteen-year-old protégé. The colonel wrote the necessary letters, and George later said that he had his “baggage prepared for embarkation” onto a vessel, with a career as a British naval officer before him, but at the last minute his mother—who regularly blocked him from pursuing any activity that would keep him from helping her at home—scotched the plan.
Whereupon the colonel changed his strategy and focused on making up for the boy’s lack of formal education. He gave him a history of England to read, so that George was able to develop some context: to comprehend the rise of the island nation, its growing dominion over much of the world and the role the American colonies played in the empire. Colonel Fairfax believed that a man of distinction should have ambition but not show it: he prided himself on his ability to wear a mask of inscrutability. His personal models were the ancient Romans, and he advised young George to read ancient writers, notably Julius Caesar’s Commentaries, in which the ruler detailed nine years of waging war against the Gauls. Manliness, directness, steadfastness, boundless ambition hidden behind an emotionless visage: these were the virtues it extolled. During this time George also read novels, including Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones—its theme of a boy trying to make his way in the world probably struck a nerve—but he seemed to take the Roman writers most closely to heart.
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