George Washington
Page 53
12. To John Stanwix, 4 March 1758, GWP.
13. General Ledger A, 1750–1772, 37, Financial Papers of George Washington, Library of Congress, www.financial.gwpapers.org; Flora Fraser, The Washingtons: George and Martha, “Join’d by Friendship, Crown’d by Love,” New York: Alfred A. Knopf (2015), 24; Thomas A. Lewis, For King and Country: The Maturing of George Washington, 1748–1760, Edison, NJ: Castle Books (1993), 243–45.
14. Martha Custis to Cary & Co., 1758, in Joseph E. Fields, ed., Worthy Partner: The Papers of Martha Washington, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press (1994), 25–26.
15. To Richard Washington, 18 March and 5 April 1758, GWP; to Thomas Knox, 17 March 1758; to John Blair, 2 April and 9 April 1758, GWP.
16. To John Stanwix, 10 April 1758, GWP.
17. Note 6, to John Stanwix, 4 March 1758, GWP; Flexner 1:186; Freeman 2:278, 2:301.
18. From John Stanwix, 10 March 1758, GWP; to John Stanwix, 4 March 1758, note 6, GWP.
19. Stanley Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America, New Haven: Yale University Press (1933), 308n.; Bernhard Knollenberg, George Washington: The Virginia Period, 1732–1775, Durham: Duke University Press (1964), 45–46; Flexner 1:122, 185; Longmore, 35, 53.
20. Freeman 1:134; Lease of Mount Vernon, 17 December 1754, GWP; Thomas L. Purvis, Revolutionary America 1763 to 1800, New York: Facts on File (1995), 96 (Table 4.181); John J. McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States, Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society (1992), 333. From his military positions in Virginia, Washington was then earning approximately £550 a year, before paying considerable expenses, including the lease on and expenses of Mount Vernon. Flexner 1:137.
21. R. T. Barton, “The First Election of Washington to the House of Burgesses,” Proceedings of the Virginia Hist. Society, 1891, 115, 117.
22. The early biographer with a gift for fabricating stories about Washington was Parson Mason Locke Weems, who published The Life of Washington within a year of his subject’s death. The quotation comes from Eugene Parsons, George Washington, A Character Sketch, Milwaukee: H. G. Campbell Publishing Co. (1898), 5.
23. As one scholar emphatically put the case, “Washington has become not merely a mythical figure, but a myth of suffocating dullness, the victim of civic Elephantiasis.” Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington: Man and Monument, Boston: Little, Brown & Co. (1958), 6.
24. “Recollections of John F. D. Smyth in 1784,” in William S. Baker, Early Sketches of George Washington, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. (1894), 91. Smyth was a former British soldier who settled in Maryland after the Revolutionary War.
25. Chernow, 684.
2. BEGINNINGS
1. Charles Arthur Hoppin, The Washington Ancestry, Greenfield, Ohio (1932), vol. 1, 110–25, 130–31, 162–201; Edward D. Neill, John Washington, and Robert Orme, “The Ancestry and Earlier Life of George Washington,” PMHB, 16:261 (1892); Freeman 1:14–26.
2. Colin Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington, New York: Oxford University Press (2018), 19–22; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia: 1740–1790, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (1982), 11–12, 53; Albert H. Tillson Jr., Gentry and Common Folk: Political Culture on a Virginia Frontier, 1740–1789, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky (1991), 7.
3. J. G. Rosengarten, tr., Achenwall’s Observations on North America 1767, reprinted from PMHB (January 1903), Philadelphia (1903), 14; Edward Kimber, Itinerant Observations in America, Newark: University of Delaware Press (1998) (Kevin J. Hayes, ed.), 46.
4. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, Four British Folkways in America, New York, Oxford University Press (1989), 247; Isaac, Transformation, 15, 44.
5. Freeman 1:30–32; Flexner 1:10; “General Washington,” New England Hist. and Genealogical Reg. 11:1, 4–5 (1857).
6. Freeman 1:151, 1:168; Devereaux Jarratt, The Life of the Reverend Devereaux Jarratt of Bath Parish, Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Baltimore: Warner & Hanna (1806), 14.
7. Carl Bridenbaugh, Seat of Empire: The Political Role of Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg, Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg (1958), 3.
8. Interview with Thomas A. Reinhart, Director of Architecture, Mount Vernon, August 21, 2017.
9. George Washington Parke Custis, Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, New York: Derby & Jackson (1860), 129; Eugene Parsons, George Washington: A Character Sketch, Milwaukee: H. G. Campbell Publishing Co. (1898), 9–10; Chernow, 11; Flexner 1:20; Freeman 1:xix.
10. A recent biography of Mary Washington offers an important corrective to the unfavorable portrayals of her over the last fifty years. Martha Saxton, The Widow Washington: The Life of Mary Washington, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2019). A similar view is reflected in Craig Shirley, Mary Ball Washington, New York: HarperCollins (2019).
11. Custis, Recollections, 131 (quoting Lawrence Washington of Chotank).
12. “General Washington,” New England Hist. and Genealogical Reg., at 11:4.
13. Longmore, 10–11. The Greek general Xenophon insisted that a skilled horseman must soothe the horse, treating the animal with gentleness. “When [the horse] is induced by a man to assume all the airs and graces which he puts on of himself when he is showing off voluntarily, the result is a horse that likes to be ridden, that presents a magnificent sight, that looks alert.” Xenophon, The Art of Horsemanship (tr. Morris H. Morgan), Boston: Little, Brown & Co. (1893), 37, 56. Jefferson to Walter Jones, 2 January 1814, PTJ; Sara Agnes Rice Pryor, The Mother of Washington and Her Times, New York: Grosset & Dunlap (1903), 34–36. In colonial Virginia, horse thieves were the felons most often sentenced to death, while one traveler called Virginians “excessively fond of horses.” Jane Carson, Colonial Virginians at Play, Williamsburg: University Press of Virginia (1965), 102 (quoting J.F.D. Smyth, A Tour in the United States of America, London: G. Robinson [1784], 1:23); another traveler, pointing out that no self-respecting Virginian would walk to church services, added that “their churches looked like the outskirts of a county horse-fair.” Kimber, Itinerant Observations in America, 55.
14. The Rappahannock flowing past Ferry Farm has changed over the centuries, and is considerably narrower today. The Embrey Dam, built upstream in 1855, diverted much of its flow into a canal for hydropower purposes, though the dam was dismantled in 2004. Also, river dredging has deposited fill onto either shore, obscuring a bay that existed at the foot of the Ferry Farm property in Washington’s time.
15. Philip Levy, Where the Cherry Tree Grew, New York: St. Martin’s Press (2013), 42–56.
16. His other half-brother, Austin, remained longer in England to study law. Flexner 1:16.
17. Freeman 1:64–70.
18. Lawrence Washington to Augustine Washington, 30 May 1741, New York Public Library (cited in Freeman 1:67). Edward Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life, New York: Random House (2005), 6.
19. To Lawrence Washington, Note, 5 May 1749, GWP.
20. Augustine Washington Will, 11 April 1743, GWP; Jack D. Warren Jr., George Washington’s Journey to Barbados, St. Michael: The George Washington House Project (2001), 21.
21. William Fairfax to Lawrence Washington, 10 September 1746, in Jared Sparks, The Life of George Washington, London: Henry Colburn (1839), 2:109.
3. THE SCHOOL OF FAIRFAX
1. E.g., Zagarri, Humphreys, 6; “Washington’s School Copy-Book 1745,” beginning with August 13, 1745, and Book 2, 32, et seq., published online by the Library of Congress GW/LOC Digital Collection. In The Widow Washington: The Life of Mary Washington, 138–39, Martha Saxton concludes that Washington attended school in Fredericksburg and also when he visited his half-brother Austin in Westmoreland County. Jonathan Boucher, who tutored Washington’s stepson in the early 1770s, claimed that Washington was taught “by a convict servant whom his father bought for a sch
oolteacher.” Jonathan Boucher, Reminiscences of an American Loyalist, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. (1925), 49; Moncure Daniel Conway, Barons of the Potomac and the Rappahannock, New York: Grolier Club (1892), 62–66. If true, that report would be sufficiently embarrassing that Washington might have chosen not to mention it, but it is not entirely credible. Washington was eleven years old when his father died, and the work in his copybooks seems very sophisticated to be performed by one that young. Moreover, Boucher was a Loyalist during the Revolution with a strong antipathy toward his former employer. David Humphreys, who began and abandoned a biography of Washington in the 1780s with Washington’s participation, recorded that Washington was taught by a “domestic tutor.” Zagarri, Humphreys, 6. A pious woman throughout her life, Mary Washington read religious texts closely. Saxton, The Widow Washington, 66–68, 166, 182, 273; Mary V. Thompson, In the Hands of a Good Providence: Religion in the Life of George Washington, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press (2008), 19–22.
2. George H. S. King, “Washington’s Boyhood Home,” WMQ, 17:265, 269–73 (1937); Kevin J. Hayes, George Washington: A Life in Books, New York: Oxford University Press, 29; Barnet Schecter, George Washington’s America: A Biography Through Maps, New York: Walker & Co. (2010), 30; Freeman 1:197; George Washington, “School Copy-Book,” vol. 2, 1745, 30–53, 64, GW/LOC Digital Collection.
3. Hayes, George Washington: A Life in Books, 39–41.
4. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington, 8; Flexner 1:31; Adrienne M. Harrison, A Powerful Mind: The Self-Education of George Washington, Sterling, VA: Potomac Books (2015), 26, 67; Hayes, George Washington: A Life in Books, 14–15. The biography of the Duke of Schomburg—one of Europe’s leading soldiers of the previous century—made such an impression that Washington named one of his slaves Schomburg. Hayes, 43. Seneca’s Morals, London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones (1818), 174, 227.
5. Lord Fairfax also won a legal dispute that doubled the size of his holdings in Virginia. Freeman 1:520–25. An extensive history of the Northern Neck Proprietary appears as an eighty-two-page appendix to the first volume of Freeman’s exhaustive biography of Washington. Freeman 1:447–529.
6. Archaeological exploration of the Ferry Farm site has confirmed Mary’s commitment to imbuing fine manners in her fatherless children. Laura J. Galke, “The Mother of the Father of Our Country: Mary Ball Washington’s Genteel Domestic Habits,” Northeast Hist. Archaeology 38:29 (2009); Karin Calvert, “The Function of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America,” in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press (1994), 270–73; Saxton, The Widow Washington, 142–45. Late in life, proposing that an Englishman buy Belvoir, Washington retained some of his early enthusiasm for the estate, calling it “one of the most beautiful seats on the river.” To John Sinclair, 11 December 1796, GWP; Freeman 1:200; Peter R. Henriques, “Major Lawrence Washington Versus the Reverend Charles Green: A Case Study of the Squire and the Parson,” VMHB 100:233, 236 (April 1992).
7. To John Augustine Washington, 28 May 1755. The intimacy between the two families was evident when Colonel Fairfax, in a dispute with the local Anglican minister, lodged the incendiary accusation that the cleric took liberties with Lawrence’s wife (the colonel’s daughter) before marriage; since Ann Fairfax married at fifteen, the charge was close to child abuse. Taking his father-in-law’s part, Lawrence won legislation dissolving the church’s governing body (the vestry); then he and Colonel Fairfax were candidates for the new vestry. When both lost, the colonel took his complaint to an ecclesiastical tribunal. Virginia’s governor finally brokered a settlement that left the minister in place. The great loser was Lawrence’s wife, whose reputation lay on Virginia tongues for more than a year. Her husband, though, had demonstrated deep loyalty to the Fairfax interest. H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1758–1761, Richmond: The Colonial Press (1909), 7:133, 7:136, 7:139, 7:148; Freeman 3:87; Henriques, “Major Lawrence Washington Versus the Reverend Charles Green,” 256.
8. Freeman 1:194–95; William Fairfax to Lawrence Washington, 9 September 1746, and Robert Jackson to Lawrence Washington, 18 September 1746, in Conway, Barons of the Potomac and the Rappahannock, 236–40.
9. Joseph Ball to Mary Washington, 19 May 1747, reprinted in Freeman 1:198–99; Zagarri, Humphreys, 8. A Fredericksburg acquaintance noted Mary’s opposition to George entering the navy, writing to Lawrence, “She seems to intimate a dislike of George’s going to sea, & says several persons have told her it’s a very bad scheme.” Saxton, The Widow Washington, 148–49.
10. Zagarri, Humphreys, 7; Custis, Recollections, 134, 519.
11. Stuart E. Brown Jr., Virginia Baron: The Story of Thomas 6th Lord Fairfax, Berryville, VA: Chesapeake Book Co. (1965), 14–25; Lewis, For King and Country, 8–9; Louis Knott Koontz, Robert Dinwiddie: His Career in American Colonial Government and Westward Expansion, Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Co. (1941), 143; Sarah S. Hughes, Surveyors and Statesmen: Land Measuring in Colonial Virginia, Richmond: Virginia Surveyors Foundation (1979), 72, 84. Andro Linklater’s Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy, New York: Walker (2002), offers an informative study of the challenges and perils of surveying during the early period of European settlement in America. Note especially 31–36, 70–73.
12. Stephen H. Spurr, “George Washington, Surveyor and Ecological Observer,” Ecology 32:544, 545–46 (1951).
13. Spurr, 118–21, 109; Brown, Virginia Baron, 111; Albert H. Tillson Jr., Accommodating Revolutions: Virginia’s Northern Neck in an Era of Transformations, 1760–1810, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press (2010), 61.
14. William S. Baker, ed., Early Sketches of George Washington, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. (1893), 13 (recollections of George Mercer); Custis, Recollections, 171, 484; Baker, Early Sketches, 13 (Mercer), 77 (John Bell).
15. Diary, 15, 16, and 21 March 1748, GWP.
16. Rufus Rockwell Wilson, ed., Burnaby’s Travels Through North America, New York: A. Wessels Co. (1904), 73; James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press (1991), 6; Warren E. Hofstra, “‘And Die by Inches’: George Washington and the Encounter of Cultures on the Southern Colonial Frontier,” in Harvey and O’Brien, George Washington’s South, 72–73; Diary, 23 March and 4 April 1748, GWP.
17. Diary, 26 March and 8 April 1748, GWP; Freeman 1:223.
18. George Washington Papers, Series 4, General Correspondence: Fairfax County, Virginia, June 13, 1748, Election Poll, Library of Congress, GW/LOC Digital Collection; McIlwaine, Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1742–1747, 1748–49, vii–ix. A candidate had to own either twenty-five acres and a house or one hundred acres of empty land in the county, or a house and lot in a town in the county. Charles S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (1952), 29.
19. Kenneth Bailey, The Ohio Company of Virginia and the Westward Movement, 1748–1792, Glendale: Arthur H. Clark Co. (1939), 22–24; Koontz, Robert Dinwiddie, 157–62; Kenneth Bailey, “George Mason, Westerner,” WMQ, 23:409 (October 1943). Of twenty-five members of the Ohio Company in its early days, twenty were or had been members of the House of Burgesses, while nine served on the colony’s Executive Council at some time. As one scholar has noted, “It would have been difficult to assemble a more formidable roster of men of colonial business and politics.” Bailey, 36.
20. Edmund S. Morgan, Virginians at Home: Family Life in the Eighteenth Century, Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg (1952), 5.
21. McIlwaine, Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1742–1747, 1748–49, 323, 387; to Lawrence Washington, 5 May 1749, GWP.
4. HIS BROTHER’S KEEPER
1. To Lawrence
Washington, 5 May 1749, GWP.
2. Freeman 1:232; Augustine Washington to Lawrence Washington, 19 July 1749, George Washington Papers, Series 4, GW/LOC Digital Collection; Mary G. Powell, The History of Old Alexandria, Virginia: From July 13, 1749 to May 24, 1861, Richmond: William Byrd Press (1928), 32; William Fairfax to Lawrence Washington, 16 July 1749, in Conway, Barons of the Potomac and the Rappahannock, 262–63.
3. Editor’s Note, “George Washington’s Professional Surveys,” 22 July 1749–25 October 1752, GWP; Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Virginia, Charleston: Wm. R. Babcock (1852), 237; Freeman 1:234; Sarah S. Hughes, Surveyors and Statesmen, 93. The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg issued surveyor certificates for the colony. Because Washington was not in Williamsburg in the first half of 1749, the editors of the Washington Papers speculate that Colonel Fairfax actually acquired Washington’s commission from the college.
4. To Thomas, Lord Fairfax, October–November 1749, GWP; to Richard, 1749–1750, GWP; Editor’s Note, “George Washington’s Professional Surveys,” GWP.
5. Freeman 1:240–42.
6. Land grant, from Thomas, Lord Fairfax, 20 October 1750, GWP and Editorial Note.
7. Editorial Note: To Anne Fairfax Washington, September–November 1749, note 6, GWP; Memorandum, 1749–1750, GWP.
8. Jane Carson, Colonial Virginians at Play, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press (1965), 53, 84; T. H. Breen, “Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling Among the Gentry of Virginia,” WMQ 34:239, 247–49 (April 1977); Albert H. Tillson Jr., Accommodating Revolutions: Virginia’s Northern Neck in an Era of Transformations, 1760–1810, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press (2010), 20; Custis, Recollections, 131; Chernow, 134; John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon, New York: Bloomsbury Press (2009), 72; to Thomas Knox, January 1758, GWP; Flexner 1:38–39; Freeman 1:226. In colonial Virginia, gambling was illegal for those in the working classes, like fishermen, farmers, apprentices, laborers, or servants. Carson, Colonial Virginians at Play, 53. Such legislation might be seen as paternalistic protection of the lower orders, or as an attempt to keep them working.