The Washingtons

by Flora Fraser

  Not all on the Potomac were as radical as George and Martha. George William Fairfax was sympathetic to the “cause” but remained absent in England. Washington had failed to convert George William’s brother, Bryan Fairfax of Towlston Grange at Great Falls. Fairfax advocated the resumption of addresses, memorials, and petitions to the Crown and Parliament. Threats, he wrote, had proved useless in the past. Washington replied heatedly: “the Crisis is arrived when we must assert our Rights, or Submit to every Imposition that can be heaped upon us; till custom and use, will make us as tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.” Here was a Virginia plantation owner writing with empathy of the slave workforce; there was provision in the Fairfax Resolves for the abolition of the slave trade. Martha was urging her husband and his fellow delegates to rebel. The question was, how far would the Virginians go to assert the “rights” of which Washington wrote?

  In Philadelphia the Virginia delegates were much to the fore at the Congress, which met in Carpenters’ Hall over the course of seven weeks. All of the colonies except Georgia were represented, and Edmund Pen-

  dleton presided as speaker. He and the six other Virginians were reckoned by one present to be sociable, sensible, and spirited. This was not the case with all the delegates. Strangers to each other, “not acquainted with each other’s language, ideas, views, designs,” they were characterized by the Massachusetts lawyer and delegate John Adams as “jealous of each other—fearful, timid, skittish.” Patrick Henry, holding out for one vote per colony, won popularity when he declaimed on September 6, “I am not a Virginian but an American.” Richard Henry Lee’s more substantial and Ciceronian speeches were also admired. Though Jefferson was not a delegate, he had penned and published at Williamsburg a pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which was widely discussed. Of all the Virginians, George Washington may be said to have aroused most curiosity. The Connecticut merchant and delegate Silas Deane wrote to his wife on September 10 of his fellow delegate’s commanding height, his “easy, soldier like air and gesture,” and his honorable conduct in the French and Indian War. Deane also referred to a story that, though fiction, was current at the Congress. Upon hearing in the House of Burgesses of the Boston Port Act, he reported, Washington offered to “raise and arm, and lead one thousand men himself at his own expense, for the defence of the country, were there need of it…His fortune is said to be equal to such an undertaking,” Deane added, knowing nothing of his hero’s financial worries.

  George served on no committee during the Congress, which wound up with a broad agreement not to import British goods after December 1, 1774, to export no goods to Britain after September 10, 1775, and to meet again the following May 1775. The company with whom he lodged and dined during the Congress were committed to the cause. They included, besides delegates from his own colony, prominent citizens of Philadelphia—the two Drs. William Shippen, Sr. and Jr., financier Thomas Willing, merchant Thomas Mifflin, and lawyer Joseph Reed. Washington was as resolved as any other delegate that resistance must in the future meet any government transgression. On October 9, 1774, he made his position clear in a letter to a fellow officer from his Virginia Regiment days: “it is not the wish or interest of the government [the colonial assembly of Massachusetts] or any other upon this continent separately or collectively, to set up for independence.” But if they faced “the loss of those valuable rights and privileges which are essential to the happiness of every free state,” was it to be wondered that they should defend themselves against such an “impending blow”? It was his opinion, he wrote, that “more blood will be spilt on this occasion”—if the British government pushed matters “to extremity”—“than history has yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America.”

  In Alexandria, Washington and George Mason had taken early steps to ensure that Fairfax County would be well defended, should the need arise. By September, a Fairfax Independent Company had been organized. Volunteer officers included Dr. Rumney, Robert Hanson Harrison, a young lawyer in the town, Washington himself, Lund, and Jacky. In other regiments there was a good deal of latitude allowed in the matter of uniform, and some officers wore plain brown coats. Such was not the case in the Fairfax Independent Company. Washington’s own “Suite [of] Regimentals,” and those for Lund Washington and for Jacky—a “regular Uniform of Blue, turn’d up with Buff [parchment yellow]”—were tailored that autumn. A waistcoat and breeches of the latter shade and white stockings completed a uniform later known as “buff and blue.” For “the men,” as other ranks were known—and for officers on foraging expeditions—hunting shirts, roomy, all-weather wear, were prescribed. Each member of the company was to acquire, besides a stock of gunpowder, “a good Fire-lock and Bayonet, Sling Cartouch-Box, and Tomahawk.” In January 1775 a committee recommended that companies across the county organize and obtain, at general expense—they suggested a poll tax of three shillings—a quantity of gunpowder. Mason’s knowledge of the law made certain that these companies assumed no further appearance than that of the local militias authorized, since first settlement of the colonies, to protect homes and ensure public safety.

  Washington was emerging as an important figure in the Virginia resistance movement. He advanced money for the immediate purchase of ammunition, and in mid-March 1775 he inspected volunteers at Dumfries, on his way to Richmond, where the second Virginia Convention was to be held, far inland from Williamsburg. At that assembly, which met at St. John’s Church on March 23, Patrick Henry proposed that the whole colony be put immediately “into a posture of defence.” His exhortation to those assembled passed into legend: “We must fight!…Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but, as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” Though there were those like Robert Carter Nicholas who urged delay, the vote in favor of arming the colony was decisive.

  Henry and Washington made two of a committee of twelve appointed to bring in a plan for “embodying, arming and disciplining such a number of men as may be sufficient for that purpose.” These numbers were to include companies of foot soldiers sixty-eight strong. Counties on and east of the fall line—the set of rapids and waterfalls in the rivers of Virginia rivers that prevented craft from traveling farther upstream—were, in addition, to supply one cavalry troop or more of thirty men. Williamsburg lawyers worked to frame all such measures as defensive, so as to fall within the law. Just how closely Washington was engaged in this arming of Virginia appears from a letter he wrote, on March 25, to his brother John Augustine. Praising the latter’s efforts in training an “Independent Company,” Washington offered to review and command it, as he was to review and command an independent company forming in Richmond County. He declared that “it is my full intention to devote my life and fortune in the cause we are engaged in, if need be.”

  With extraordinary rapidity, and even before the Second Congress could meet at Philadelphia in May, events occurred almost simultaneously to test Washington’s expressed devotion to “the cause.” Early on the morning of April 21 in Williamsburg, British marines, under orders from Lord Dunmore, began secretly to remove all the powder in the city magazine to the Magdalen, an armed schooner lying in the James. They had removed fifteen half-barrels before they were detected, and thereafter continued despite the alarm. The schooner then delivered its load to the Fowey, an armed man-of-war anchored off Norfolk.

  Civilized uproar broke out in Williamsburg. The city fathers requested the powder’s return, affecting to believe a slave uprising, such as occurred periodically, to be imminent. Dunmore, referring to a nameless “insurrection in a neighbouring county,” asserted that he had sequestered the powder in the city’s own interests. The truth was, as everyone knew, that Dunmore feared that one or more of the many independent companies now forming would seize it. In fact, his action provoked those very volunteer forces. Dr. Hugh Mercer and others i
n Fredericksburg wrote to Washington on April 26 that their Company intended to march, “properly accoutred as light horsemen,” on the colonial capital. They aimed to seize whatever military supplies remained in the magazine.

  Mercer and his fellow volunteers were dissuaded from this hasty action. In the meantime news came from Massachusetts, a colony that the British government had declared to be in a state of rebellion in February. Patriot—and British—blood had now been spilled. In the early hours of April 19, a column of British infantry, seven hundred men strong, had marched on a village, Concord, some sixteen miles west. Their orders, from General Gage in Boston, were to search homes there for military stores. The troops were intercepted at Lexington, six miles short of their destination, by local militia who refused to disperse when ordered by the British to do so. The front ranks of the British column fired and killed eight of the men opposing them. When the troops moved on to Concord, some soldiers conducted the search, as required. But others, at the North Bridge over the river that gave its name to the settlement, were beset by Concord minutemen and militia from other areas who had come to join the fray. In an exchange of musket fire, both militia and infantry suffered losses. The British troops, disconcerted and alarmed, rejoined their comrades and began the long march back to Boston. Reinforcements from the town bolstered their number, but local militia pursued all the way, taking advantage of the scrub and undergrowth to disguise their positions. At the end of the day, a total of seventy-three British soldiers and forty-nine Americans lay dead. The local militia, moreover, were in triumphant possession of Boston Neck, the isthmus connecting the harbor town to Roxbury. The British troops in the city were penned in, and Boston was under siege. It was an extraordinary outcome to a day that had begun with routine orders for a search for powder.

  From Philadelphia, where he had proceeded at the beginning of May to take his place as a delegate at the Second Congress, Washington, on May 31, wrote a long account of the events of the nineteenth to George William Fairfax. He ended: “Unhappy [though] it is…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. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous Man hesitate in his choice?” George’s choice of language would resonate with Fairfax, a Virginia landowner now resident in England. Though Washington foresaw that events might bring a rift between him and his boyhood friend, his duty as a “virtuous man” led him onward.

  At the outset of the Second Congress, held in the State House, the mood following Lexington and Concord was very different from that which had obtained at the first. “There never appeared,” wrote delegate Richard Henry Lee on May 10 to his brother William Lee in Virginia, “more perfect unanimity among any set of men than among the delegates.” A letter of May 3 from Dr. Joseph Warren was read to the assembly on the eleventh. It imparted the news that his “Provincial Congress”—the Provincial Convention of Massachusetts—had authorized the raising of 13,600 men in that colony. They considered, he wrote, “a powerful army, on the side of America…the only means left to stem the rapid growth of a tyrannical ministry.”

  At this warlike Congress, Washington adopted the uniform of the Fairfax Independent Company and was much in evidence. He was made chairman of a “ways and means” committee, created to supply the colonies with ammunition and military stores and to report immediately. News came that British ships were making for the Hudson. There was the fortifying of New York to consider, and companies had to be raised for its defense. Some American officers—Benedict Arnold from Connecticut among them—had, against all odds, seized Fort Ticonderoga at Lake George. The cannons and mortars captured should be moved south and stored, Congress directed. Washington offered counsel to delegates untried in military matters. “Colonel Washington,” wrote John Adams to his wife, Abigail, on May 29, “by his great experience and abilities in military matters, is of much service to us. Oh, that I was a soldier!”

  For all these preparations, though the assembly was committed to aiding the patriots besieging Boston, the question of whether to take up the arms currently being amassed elsewhere against the mother country continued to be debated. After a time, the immensity of the action projected, as much as the volume of correspondence with their colonial assemblies back home, wearied the delegates in Philadelphia, who were by and large still reluctant to credit the king, rather than his ministers, with the measures that oppressed them. A day of fasting and prayer was accordingly prescribed for July 20, in the hope that the Almighty would inspire the king “with wisdom to discern and perceive the true interest of all his subjects, that a speedy end, may be put to the civil discord between Great Britain and the American colonies without further effusion of blood.”

  The militia besieging the British in Boston were no “despicable rabble,” General Gage wrote home. “In all their wars against the French they never showed such conduct, attention, and perseverance as they do now.” But General Artemas Ward, in command of the Massachusetts forces, had no jurisdiction over militia from other parts of New England who had joined the siege. A high command, supplies, powder, and troops were desperately wanted.

  A letter from the Massachusetts Convention was laid before Congress on June 2. It suggested “the propriety” of the assembly in Philadelphia taking on the “regulation and direction” of the army now collecting from different colonies, as it was for the general defense of “the right of America.” It was a bold step. The militia in the different colonies had previously answered to no common authority. Congress, on the fourteenth, agreed to the Provincial Convention’s request and authorized, in addition, the raising of ten companies of “expert riflemen” in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland. They were to be employed as light infantry “under the command of the chief officer of the army” before Boston. The American Continental Army, composed of officers and men drawn from all thirteen colonies and answerable to Congress, was thus born.

  It became a matter of urgency to appoint a “chief officer” of this new army. Next day, the fifteenth, it was proposed that “a General be appointed to command all the continental forces, raised, or to be raised, for the defence of American liberty.” John Adams declared in the State House that he had “but one gentleman” in his mind for that important command—a gentleman from Virginia, “very well known to all of us,” an experienced officer of “independent fortune.” Washington rose and left the chamber. He was to write to Martha on June 18: “You might, and I suppose did perceive, from the Tenor of my letters, that I was apprehensive I could not avoid this appointment.” The resolution that he be appointed was carried by unanimous vote. He returned to the State House the following day to accept the position of commander-in-chief. Expressing his unworthiness for this “extensive and important trust,” he declined the pay that had been voted him: “no pecuniary consideration could have tempted me to have accepted this arduous employment, at the expence of my domestic ease and happiness.” He requested only that Congress would meet his expenses, of which he would keep an “exact account.” To Martha, in his letter of the eighteenth, he wrote: “You may believe me, my dear Patsy…I should enjoy more real happiness and felicity in one month with you, at home, than I have the most distant prospect of reaping abroad, if my stay was to be Seven times Seven years.”

  The commander-in-chief, it was decided, should come to the aid of the “patriots” before Boston with a “Continental army” of 15,000 men. Generals, engineers, and artillery officers were hastily named and their pay agreed. Congress, approving the issue of a new currency, to be known as the Continental dollar, payable in Spanish dollars, put into circulation $3 million. Three days before he set off, Washington wrote to resign his command of the Fairfax Independent Company and of other volunteer troops in Virginia: “I have launched into a wide & extensive field, too boundless for my abilities, & far, very far beyond my experience.” On July 17, John Adams wrote of the new commander to Abigail, “The libe
rties of America depend upon him in great degree.” But Washington knew that Martha depended on him too.

  “I shall feel no pain from the Toil, or the danger of the Campaign,” he wrote to her in his letter of the eighteenth: “My unhappiness will flow, from the uneasiness I know you will feel at being left alone—I therefore beg of you to summon your whole fortitude & Resolution, and pass your time as agreeably as possible—nothing will give me so much sincere satisfaction as to hear this, and to hear it from your own Pen.” A day later he wrote to Burwell Bassett, to entreat him to visit Martha often and invite her to Eltham. He instructed Jacky to keep his mother company and enliven her spirits. The subject was much on his mind. He wrote to his brother John Augustine on the twentieth: “my departure will, I know, be a cutting stroke upon her [Martha]; and on this acct alone, I have many very disagreeable Sensations.”

  Alone at Mount Vernon, Martha Washington must reassert the habit of independence she had last known as a young widow. She must manage fears and anxieties consequent on her husband’s appointment to a dangerous command. In addition, with Lund Washington’s help, she must manage the estate, a domain till now the object of George’s assiduous care. There were good grounds for her husband’s anxiety on her behalf. Neither Washington could have suspected just how resilient Martha would prove to be in the years to come.

  BOOK TWO

  The General and “Lady Washington,”

  1775–1783

  11

  Taking Command, 1775

  “I have sent an Invitation to Mrs Washington to come to me.”

  WASHINGTON HAD TOLD MARTHA, in his letter of June 18, 1775, that should she wish to take up residence in their house in Alexandria while he was in Massachusetts, he would direct Lund Washington to build a kitchen and other offices lacking there. If, on the other hand, she was inclined to spend time among her “Friends below,” he encouraged her to do so. “My earnest, & ardent desire,” he wrote, “is, that you would pursue any Plan that is most likely to produce content, and a tolerable degree of Tranquillity.” There was, understandably, a degree of self-interest in this: “it must add greatly to my uneasy feelings to hear that you are dissatisfied, and complaining at what I really could not avoid.” Martha chose to remain at Mount Vernon for the time being. She would soon become a grandmother—and Jacky a father—if Nelly Calvert Custis’s accouchement in late August or early September was successful. She had no thought of leaving her home until after this interesting event but projected a visit to her “Friends below” thereafter.