Washington’s words reveal his alignment with other Americans, mostly from his own privileged background, who had imbibed the ideology evolved by a diverse but distinct body of English political writers during the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Collectively called the “Country Party,” these reform-minded thinkers among the landed gentry argued that the hallowed English constitution was endangered by the “corrupt” politics of the age, personified by the long-serving “prime minister,” Sir Robert Walpole; their writings provided a lens through which English and American radicals scrutinized the policies of subsequent British ministries, seeing the same dire tendencies that had ruined the virtuous Roman Republic, despite the best efforts of public-minded patriots like Cato, the hero of Joseph Addison’s much-admired play. Key “Country Party” texts warning against impending tyranny included John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters and The Independent Whig and Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke’s periodical The Craftsman. These works, and many more of a similar bent, could be found in the extensive library of Daniel Parke Custis, which Washington inherited upon marrying his widow, Martha Custis, in 1759; he had already begun reading about English history and politics while still a teenager.47
Ironically, the rarefied worldview of Englishmen who believed that their hard-won liberties were in peril resonated most strongly across the Atlantic among disgruntled Americans like Washington, bolstering suspicions of a calculated bid to strip them of their property and so reduce them to “slavery.” Just as Washington’s English-born mentors at Belvoir had provided patterns for his future conduct, so the writings of English political thinkers shaped the way in which he perceived the worsening crisis between colonies and Mother Country.
What Washington and many other Americans were now contemplating was a fight in defense of their cherished freedoms. Viewed from London’s perspective, such resistance would brand them as rebels. The last rebellion against the ruling Hanoverian regime, in 1745–46, had been crushed with signal savagery: on the battlefield of Culloden, in brutal punitive expeditions into the Scottish Highlands, and through a spate of executions. Twenty years later, the heads of men who had served in the Jacobite armies of Bonnie Prince Charlie and been hung, drawn, and quartered for treason were still spiked on Temple Bar overlooking Fleet Street, one of London’s busiest thoroughfares. In the early hours of December 9, 1766, that year’s Annual Register reported, a furtive sportsman “was observed to watch his opportunity of discharging musket-balls from a steel cross-bow, at the two remaining heads upon Temple Bar.” His targets belonged to Francis Townley and George Fletcher, who were among officers of the Manchester Regiment executed on Kennington Common on August 2, 1746.48 In 1775, there was nothing to suggest that a new crop of American rebels would not share their fate.
One man who knew about rebellion from hard personal experience, the former Jacobite Hugh Mercer, had relocated from Pennsylvania to Virginia in 1771. Mercer’s move south came at Washington’s suggestion, and he settled near Mount Vernon at Fredericksburg. The two veterans forged a strong friendship, and both were members of the town’s Freemasons’ lodge. Mercer’s daughter Anne married Robert Patton; their great-great-grandson would become that quintessential American warrior, General George Patton.49
Another British-born veteran of the French and Indian War, Horatio Gates, came to Virginia soon after Mercer, in 1772. Gates was a former regular army officer who had captained a New York independent company at Braddock’s defeat and had been wounded there. He subsequently served as brigade-major to Brigadier General Stanwix at Fort Pitt in 1759. Two years later, when Stanwix’s replacement, Robert Monckton, was appointed major general to command the expedition against Martinique, he took Gates along as his aide-de-camp. Following the capitulation of the island’s key citadel of Fort Royal in February 1762, Gates was awarded the honor of carrying the victory dispatches to London. Despite this mark of distinction, which brought promotion to major, after the peace, Gates’s military career stagnated. Like Washington, Gates felt aggrieved at being denied the recognition that he believed his services merited, eventually choosing to make a new life in the Shenandoah Valley. There he soon established friendships with neighbors, including that seasoned veteran of the Virginia Regiment, Adam Stephen.50
From his Berkeley County plantation, “Traveler’s Rest,” Gates extended an offer of hospitality to another old comrade of the Braddock expedition, Charles Lee, who had come to Virginia in February 1774. Lee too was convinced that he had never received due recognition of his efforts and abilities from the British establishment. After the peace of 1763, Lee followed a rambling and varied military career that had taken him to a Poland torn apart by insurrection, and as far afield as Moldavia, where he had fought with the Russians against the Ottoman Turks in a campaign that helped to convince him of the superiority of guerrilla warfare over more conventional strategies.51
An outspoken advocate of American liberty, in Virginia, Lee soon made his mark on the local political scene: he was in Williamsburg when the news arrived of London’s draconian response to the Boston Tea Party, and in conjunction with another radical, the brilliant young Virginian lawyer Thomas Jefferson, he helped to orchestrate an official day of fasting to express solidarity with the Bostonians. From the Old Dominion, Lee headed north to Philadelphia and New York. Drawing upon his extensive military experience, he published a pamphlet calculated to stiffen the resolve of Americans now bracing themselves for war with Britain. Lee assured them that they had nothing to fear from the redcoats—“debauched weavers ’prentices, the scum of the Irish Roman Catholics, who desert upon every occasion, and a few Scots, who are not strong enough to carry packs”; though “expert in all the tricks of the parade,” such troops were “totally unfit for real service.” In his estimation, the “yeomanry of America” would prove more than a match for the regulars: in just a few months, by concentrating on the basics, such militia could be transformed into a “most formidable infantry.” Lee believed that the Americans had another crucial advantage on their side: unlike “the peasantry of other countries,” they were familiar with firearms from infancy and consequently “expert in the use of them.” Gates warned Lee to moderate his “zeal in the noble cause” while adding that he was himself willing to risk his life “to preserve the liberty of the western world.” Like Gates and Mercer before him, Lee settled in Virginia and was likewise destined to play a leading role as the political crisis intensified into a military conflict.52
During 1774, even as war looked ever more likely, Washington had other concerns. Besides overseeing the steady expansion of Mount Vernon, which acquired a new wing, he was entrusted with the melancholy responsibility of selling off the familiar furniture and furnishings of the far grander mansion at Belvoir. The Fairfaxes—George William and his wife, Sally—had decided to make a new home in England; they never came back. For Washington, their departure marked a break with the past: it was at Belvoir, as a gangling teenager, that he had begun to acquire the polish of the finished gentleman; it was there he had listened to Colonel Fairfax’s inspirational tales of European warfare—and fallen in love with Sally: in different ways, both had exerted a profound influence upon his first career as a soldier.
There was also the still-unresolved matter of the war bounties, both those resulting from Dinwiddie’s 1754 announcement regarding the Ohio lands and those promised by the British government under the 1763 proclamation. When he finally learned, in early 1774, that Lord Hillsborough, the secretary of state for the American colonies, had ruled that only regular soldiers were eligible to apply for the 1763 bounties, it seemed yet another example of anti-American prejudice: echoing the words of the angry letter that he had written to Dinwiddie on behalf of his Virginia Regiment in 1757, he observed: “I conceive the services of a provincial officer as worthy of reward as a regular one, and can only be withheld from him with injustice.” As such a ruling rested upon equal measures of “malice, absurdity, and error,” he could
see no reason to be bound by it.53
In any case, events were now moving with a momentum that suggested such imperial decrees would soon be redundant. That August, Washington returned to Philadelphia as one of Virginia’s seven delegates to the First Continental Congress, summoned to hammer out a pan-colonial response to the escalating dispute with Britain; attended by representatives from every colony save Georgia, this was a show of cooperation that would have been unthinkable during Washington’s twenties, when Americans were notorious for their intercolonial squabbling.
The fifty-six delegates included men who had achieved prominence during the previous decade of periodic resistance to British legislation by openly challenging Parliament’s right to levy taxation: in 1765, besides galvanizing Virginia’s strident response to the Stamp Act, the backwoods lawyer Patrick Henry gained fame—and notoriety—with his warning that, just as Charles I had met his master in Oliver Cromwell, so he didn’t doubt that “some good American would stand up, in favor of his country.” Two years later, equally emotive language had been used by another of the delegates sent to Philadelphia in 1774. In a series of articles known as the “Letters of a Pennsylvania Farmer,” John Dickinson had argued that craven submission to London’s policies would complete “the tragedy of American liberty,” leaving his countrymen no better than the downtrodden peasantry of France and Poland, “in wooden shoes and with uncombed hair.” Other delegates, sharp legal minds John Adams of Massachusetts and John Jay of New York, were to undertake a still greater role in their country’s affairs in coming years.
Even now, old ties exerted their pull. Resolving to form an “Association” imposing a boycott on British imports from December 1, 1774, delegates continued to describe themselves as “His Majesty’s most loyal subjects.” To enforce this pact, “Committees of Observation and Inspection” were to be formed in “every county, city, and town,” picked by those men qualified to elect representatives in their own legislatures.54 This was a crucial development: while the delegates sent to Philadelphia had been drawn overwhelmingly from the traditional leadership strata of landowners, merchants, and planters epitomized by gentry like Washington and the Congress’s president, his fellow Virginian Peyton Randolph, the new committees reflected a far broader membership, giving humble artisans and farmers a heady taste of power and influence.
Washington said little enough during the six weeks of debates, although there is no doubting the strength of his private views. That September, while the Congress was still in session, he received a letter from Robert Mackenzie, who had served as a captain in the Virginia Regiment and was now a lieutenant in one of the British regiments recently sent to overawe the truculent populace of Massachusetts Bay. Back in 1760, when he first tried to transfer to the regulars, Mackenzie had written to Washington for a testimonial. His request was declined, courteously but firmly, because Washington felt such a reference should better come from Mackenzie’s current colonel, William Byrd. Mackenzie had eventually succeeded in securing an ensign’s commission in the 58th Foot, only to be captured by the French as his regiment was on passage to the siege of Havana in 1762. Since then, he had gained a lieutenancy in the 43rd Foot. It was in that capacity that Mackenzie sought to alert his former colonel to the dangerous extremism of the Boston radicals he now found himself billeted among; they were bent upon nothing less than “total independence,” he warned, and needed to be reined in by “abler heads and better hearts.” Indeed, their rebellious behavior and scandalous “attacks upon the best characters” in the colony had obliged General Gage to put Boston in “a formidable state of defense.”55
Washington’s reply showed that he now shared much in common with the very men that Mackenzie was bidding him to shun. Neither the leaders of Massachusetts Bay nor “any thinking man in all North America” were seeking independence from Britain, he wrote. On the contrary, it was the “ardent wish of the warmest advocates for liberty, that peace and tranquility, upon constitutional grounds, may be restored, and the horrors of civil discord prevented.” That said, the colonies would never “submit to the loss of those valuable rights and privileges, which are essential to the happiness of every free state, and without which, life, liberty, and property are rendered totally insecure.” If the ministry in London was determined “to push matters to extremity,” Washington predicted, “more blood will be spilt . . . than history has ever yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America.”56
That civil war grew more likely by the day. In Philadelphia, Washington made some telling purchases: a new sash and epaulettes for his uniform and a book by a veteran officer of the 48th Foot, Thomas Webb, entitled A Military Treatise on the Appointments of the Army.57 When Washington returned from Philadelphia, he found Virginians busily preparing for impending war. The notoriously inefficient county militia was being reorganized into more rigorously drilled “independent companies”; as the Old Dominion’s most illustrious soldier, “Colonel Washington” was in heavy demand to head them. By March of 1775, Washington had been invited to lead five companies, including that of his own Fairfax County—the first to be raised. That same month, a second Virginia Convention was summoned; this ordered that the colony should “be immediately put into a posture of defense.” As war loomed ever closer, so the value placed upon Washington’s experience rose correspondingly: his standing ensured that he was comfortably elected as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, scheduled to open in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775. Some two weeks before then, news reached Mount Vernon that the anticipated rebellion against Britain had already erupted, with murderous clashes on April 19 between redcoats and militia at Lexington and Concord in the countryside surrounding Boston.
Writing to his close friend and former neighbor, George William Fairfax, who was now in England, Washington was adamant that the heavy losses inflicted upon the regulars as they were chivvied back into Boston should convince even the most hawkish British minister that, far from being cowards, Americans were willing to “fight for their liberties and property.” It was indeed unhappy “to reflect, that a brother’s sword has been sheathed in a brother’s breast, and that, the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with blood, or inhabited by slaves.” These were sad alternatives, he acknowledged: “But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?”58
Washington would answer his own question soon enough.
6
His Excellency General Washington
In the wake of the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia resolved that the New Englanders converging upon the chastened and beleaguered redcoat garrison of Boston should form the basis of a truly pan-colonial army. It was momentous decision, and it posed another: who should command it?
Contenders included Artemas Ward, commander in chief of the Massachusetts troops and already leading the thousands of amateur soldiers laying siege to Gage’s army. Like Washington, Ward was a veteran of the French and Indian War; as a local man, he also enjoyed the backing of influential Yankees. Other delegates championed Charles Lee, the veteran British Army officer who had recently settled in Virginia and who boasted impressive credentials as a professional soldier.
Then there was George Washington. Not only was he still widely esteemed for the military and personal reputation that he had established during the 1750s, but his election was urged by some, especially the Massachusetts lawyer John Adams, for hard political reasons. If his own recollection is to be credited, Adams’s oratory was instrumental in swaying his fellow congressmen toward Washington by arguing that the selection of a Virginian would help to dispel a common notion that New England was attempting to dominate the rest of the colonies, thus overcoming traditional provincial rivalries and forging a unified war effort against Britain. As Adams remembered putting it, Washington was:
a gentleman whose skill and experience as an officer, whose independent fortune, great talents and excellent universal character, would command the
approbation of all America, and unite the cordial exertions of all the colonies better than any other person in the union.1
According to the interpretation widely accepted by his biographers, Washington was surprised to be nominated: tormented by doubts of his ability to undertake the job, he accepted only with extreme reluctance and because his sense of duty outweighed his misgivings. In fact, there is considerable evidence that Washington was always a strong candidate and that he exploited opportunities in Philadelphia to bolster his chances, capitalizing upon his enduring reputation to take a prominent role as Congress planned its response to the outbreak of open warfare with Great Britain.2
Just five days into the session, on May 15, Washington was appointed to chair a committee to advise New Yorkers on how to respond if anticipated British reinforcements landed among them. The committee’s recommendations—that they should only resist if attacked—prompted broader discussion within Congress about the respective merits of war and peace, of vigorous resistance versus reconciliation. Divisions between moderate and militant factions led to a compromise on May 25–26: congressional advice that New York should enlist 3,000 men to serve until December 31 was balanced by a further appeal to King George III. Known as the “Olive Branch Petition” and couched in restrained and respectful language, this voiced the delegates’ hopes for a restoration of “harmony” between Crown and colonies. Yet for all its professions of loyalty and devotion, the petition included no hint of concessions by Congress, instead appealing to the king to prevent further bloodshed and repeal the legislation that had sparked trouble in the first place.3
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