Finding a Path
George Washington’s American roots were planted in the wake of the bitter civil wars that racked the British Isles during the mid-seventeenth century. This confrontation between Crown and Parliament, between “Cavaliers” and “Roundheads,” was the modern world’s first “revolution”: in 1649, it cost the stubborn Charles I his head and led to the establishment of a short-lived republic, or Commonwealth, under his nemesis, the formidable Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.
This era of protracted bloodshed, dislocation, and upheaval saw sporadic emigration across the Atlantic to England’s existing North American outposts—the colonies composing New England, strung along Massachusetts Bay, and to the south, Virginia and Maryland on the Chesapeake. The fact that both of George Washington’s great-grandfathers settled in Virginia in the decade before the restoration of Charles II in 1660 has led to the suggestion that they were part of a distinctive “Cavalier” migration to that colony, involving loyal supporters of the ousted Stuarts who were out of step with the triumphant Cromwellian regime and keen to rebuild their fortunes among like-minded exiles overseas.1
It is by no means certain that George Washington’s ancestors fit the “Cavalier” profile. On the maternal side, considerable confusion clouds the fundamental political allegiance of William Ball, who reached Virginia in 1657, the year before Cromwell’s death, and settled in Lancaster County.2 By 1677, he held the rank of major in the county militia, a responsibility that suggests previous military experience. But while genealogists maintain that William fought for the Royalists at the pivotal English Civil War battles of Marston Moor in 1644 and Naseby in the following year, this is hard to reconcile with their accompanying claim that he had soldiered “under Fairfax.” If this was true, then William’s loyalties must have been radically different from what tradition maintains: Sir Thomas Fairfax was the outstanding Parliamentarian general of the civil wars, beating Prince Rupert at Marston Moor and commanding the New Model Army that crushed King Charles at Naseby.
The Royalist credentials of John Washington are slightly stronger, although he was scarcely some swashbuckling bravo. By a remarkable coincidence, like William Ball, he, too, arrived in Virginia in 1657, coming over as a ship’s mate. John had been obliged to go to sea some years earlier after his father, the Reverend Lawrence Washington, was expelled from his living in the pro-Roundhead eastern county of Essex, allegedly for drunkenness, a trait for which the puritanical Parliamentarians had little tolerance. The reverend’s disgrace entailed a sharp drop in wealth and status for the family, but in Virginia John set about restoring both.3
John Washington was perhaps twenty-five years old when he first made landfall in what was already known as “the Old Dominion.” That term reflected Virginia’s status as England’s first American colony, established by a band of adventurers at Jamestown back in 1607, thirteen years before the more sober Pilgrim Fathers made landfall and founded Plymouth Colony to the north.
In the half century since its foundation, Virginia had experienced mixed fortunes. A last-ditch attempt by the local Powhatan Indians to eject the invaders in 1622 had almost succeeded in wiping out the colonists, while diseases along the unhealthy James River, where the first settlement had been established, had exerted a slower, but no less damaging, attrition. Despite such hazards, and the barrier to natural growth posed by an overwhelmingly male population, the colony had survived, and by the time Washington’s English ancestors arrived, it was becoming a more stable society, based upon a single, lucrative cash crop: tobacco.
Both Virginia’s expanding population and the increasing profitability of the tobacco harvest resulted from the same factor, a steady influx of unfree laborers. These were not yet the black African slaves with whom Virginia was to become so closely associated, but poor whites, indentured servants who received their sea passage from England in exchange for several years of unpaid toil for tobacco planters before finally earning their freedom and the chance to farm land of their own. During the course of the seventeenth century, it has been estimated, more than three-quarters of the 120,000 English emigrants to the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Virginia and its neighbor Maryland, which was founded in 1634, were bound servants.4
English emigration reached a peak between 1630 and 1660, the period within which Washington’s forebears set foot in Virginia. Significantly, neither of them were indentured servants, but free men, members of the minor gentry or solidly respectable yeoman class, with enough capital to invest in their own ventures. Settling at midcentury, both John Washington and William Ball also reached the Old Dominion after it had weathered its stormy infancy and offered opportunity to men of substance and ambition. Free immigrants like them would dominate the future economic and social life of the Chesapeake, founding dynasties that yielded the region’s political leadership.
Thanks to a good marriage to Anne Pope, John Washington prospered in a modest fashion. Exploiting the opportunities offered by the New World, he became a justice of the peace and also acquired responsibilities in local government and the military. It was as a colonel of militia that John Washington became embroiled in a controversial episode that would resonate into the lifetime of his great-grandson.
Although the last embers of Powhatan resistance had been stamped out during a brutal war fought between 1644 and 1646, the steady expansion of settlement inevitably sparked fresh friction with neighboring tribes. In 1675, a party of militia sent to chastise Doeg Indians who had killed a settler in a dispute over straying hogs ended up slaying fourteen friendly Susquehannocks by mistake. As tit-for-tat violence escalated, Colonel John Washington was placed in command of militia from Rappahannock and ordered to bring the Susquehannocks to heel.
Joining forces with Maryland militia, Washington’s men blockaded a Susquehannock stronghold on the northern bank of the Potomac at Piscataway Creek. Five Indian chiefs emerged to parley with the besiegers. They denied responsibility for recent killings of colonists, blaming the bloodshed on Seneca warriors raiding from the north. But the Virginians remained unconvinced: several Susquehannocks had been apprehended close to where settlers had been murdered and were found in incriminating possession of the victims’ clothing. In consequence, the five chiefs were summarily executed, clubbed to death in cold blood. Whether this retribution was exacted by Colonel Washington and his Virginians or the Marylanders remains unclear; when the killings drew the wrath of Virginia’s governor, Sir William Berkeley, each party blamed the other. Whatever his precise role in that brutal episode, John Washington’s ruthlessness and his notorious hunger for Indian land were remembered by the Susquehannocks themselves and perpetuated in the grim soubriquet they apparently gave to him: “Caunotocarious”—variously rendered as “town taker,” or the more sinister “devourer of villages.”5
By his death in 1677, the unscrupulous but determined John Washington had been able to accumulate a respectable estate of 5,700 acres, leaving most of it to his eldest son, Lawrence. As an attorney, Lawrence handled the interests of London merchants trading with Virginia’s tobacco producers. He also continued his father’s efforts to embed the family within Virginia’s establishment, marrying Mildred Warner, whose father was one of the King’s Council, which advised the colony’s royally appointed governor. But Lawrence lacked John’s restless energy and insatiable appetite for land: when he died in 1698, aged just thirty-nine, he had augmented his inheritance by barely a few hundred acres. Lawrence also left a widow and three children, John, Mildred, and Augustine.
The second son, Augustine, who was just three when his father died, was to become George Washington’s father. Given his ranking in the family pecking order, Augustine’s share of the Washington fortune was small. Yet he, too, lost no time in building upon it. In 1715, he married Jane Butler, whose own inheritance gave them another 1,700 acres of land. Augustine gradually bolstered this core, buying a farm on the south bank of the Potomac River, between Bridges Creek and Popes Creek, and later building a house there. Erected at a cost of 5,000 pounds of tobacco, it was a substantial brick-built mansion that emulated the far more imposing homes of Virginia’s great planters.
Like his father, Augustine prospered in an unspectacular fashion, methodically acquiring property and the status that went with it: he built a gristmill on Popes Creek and became a justice of the peace, church warden, and sheriff. And he added more land, including a 2,500-acre tract farther up the Potomac, where Little Hunting Creek emptied into the broad, sluggish river. This was bought from his sister, Mildred, and had been her inheritance. Quite literally, Augustine had other irons in the fire: he was active in the development of iron ore and smelting. He and Jane had three children—Lawrence, Augustine, and Jane—and they seemed set for a happy and prosperous future together. But in May 1730, when Augustine was thirty-five, he returned from a business trip to England to learn that his wife had been dead for six months.
Now a widower with three children on his hands and a home and business to oversee, Augustine acted swiftly in finding Jane’s replacement. His choice, Mary Ball, was the only child of Joseph Ball—the son of Major William Ball—and the much younger Mary Johnson. Mary Ball’s father had died at the age of sixty-one, when she was only three. Like the first Washingtons in Virginia, the Balls had prospered in a slow but steady way, and Joseph was able to leave his daughter 400 acres of land, plus three slaves and some livestock. A final bequest—“the feathers in the kitchen loft to be put into a bed”—is a reminder of the humble aspirations of Virginians below the strata of the wealthiest planters.6 Mary’s mother married again, was widowed once more, and died when Mary was just twelve, leaving her orphaned but in possession of yet more land and property. Allied to her role as helpmeet, this made her a worthwhile catch for Augustine Washington.
In March 1731, the couple married. Augustine was thirty-six, Mary thirteen years younger. Within a year, on February 11, 1732 (or February 22, according to the Gregorian calendar adopted by Britain in 1752), a son was born to them in the house on Popes Creek. He was named George, just like the king in London.
The Virginia into which George Washington was born was very different from the colony his great-grandfathers had encountered during the 1650s. The “Old Dominion” was now the most venerable of no fewer than thirteen British colonies ranged along North America’s eastern seaboard, from Nova Scotia down to South Carolina; they would be joined by a fourteenth, Georgia, in 1733. By midcentury their combined population numbered about one and a half million and was rising rapidly. Britain was not the only colonial power on the continent: France had settlements in Canada and Louisiana, while Spanish Florida bordered Georgia. Both components of New France together contained barely 70,000 people, and all of Spanish North America—including the Mexican borderlands—mustered perhaps 10,000 settlers; in population terms, these territories were therefore insignificant when set alongside the English-speaking colonies, yet they belonged to traditionally hostile powers and posed obstacles to expansion. And, of course, the vast interior west of the Appalachian Mountains was still inhabited by aboriginal Indian tribes; by the arrival of Washington’s ancestors, epidemic illnesses and catastrophic warfare had already winnowed their populations to just 10 percent of what they had been before first contact with European fishermen, but while willing enough to exploit the incomers as trading partners, the survivors were determined to keep their remaining hunting grounds.
Populous and thriving, by the 1730s, Britain’s older established colonies had already matured into increasingly sophisticated societies, capable of governing themselves with a minimum of interference from London, some 3,000 miles in distance, and three months away by round-trip. These provinces formed the core of what was already being styled the “British Empire” and were prized for their valuable raw materials and the growing markets they offered for the Mother Country’s own manufactured goods. Despite the value placed upon colonial trade, at the time of Washington’s birth Whitehall’s authority was far from overriding. Most colonies, including Virginia, had a royally appointed governor; as the monarch’s local representative, he was intended to enjoy viceregal status and wield appropriate power. Within each colony, the governor’s chief support was the legislative and executive council, a body of about twelve eminent appointees who were expected to orchestrate political support for Crown policies. From London’s perspective, the governor and his loyal council would work together to dominate colonial politics, whipping the locally elected “assemblies” into line. The reality was very different.
Taking their lead from events across the Atlantic, where the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–89 had seen the authoritarian James II ejected, and the more biddable Dutchman William of Orange invited by Parliament to take his place as King William III, the lower houses of assembly had emerged as the dominant force in provincial politics, eclipsing the governor and his council. Closely linked to the rise of these parliament-like assemblies was the formation of distinct colonial elites who craved political power to match their increasing wealth and social prominence. By the late seventeenth century, the older colonies like Virginia were already home to major landowners who identified their fortunes with the success and prestige of their colony. Such gentry, whose influence was bolstered by an intricate network of intermarriage, monopolized political life. They alone were rich enough to offer the free food and drink required to buy the votes of the white freeholders who elected representatives to assemblies like Virginia’s House of Burgesses.
By 1732, another dramatic change had occurred within Virginian society. The original workforce of indentured servants—who for all the risks and hardships they faced had come to the Chesapeake through personal choice—had been largely replaced by another composed overwhelmingly of involuntary laborers.
During the late seventeenth century, an economic upturn in England had slowed the flow of servants seeking to better their prospects in Virginia or Maryland. After 1718, Britain’s new policy of transporting reprieved felons to the American colonies, in particular the Chesapeake, went some way to meeting the tobacco planters’ continuing demands for unpaid manpower. Lesser criminals were required to labor for seven years before becoming free; in the case of felons convicted of crimes carrying the death penalty, fourteen years or even a life term might be applied. Those who came home early risked the gallows. By 1775, when war between Britain and her American colonies brought the one-way traffic to an abrupt end, an estimated 50,000 convicted criminals had been sent across the Atlantic, accounting for a quarter of all British immigrants.7
Ranging from hardened professional footpads and burglars lucky to escape the noose to starving children snared for petty thievery, this unwanted influx prompted howls of protest from the colonial elites, who blamed the convicts for an imported crime wave. Indeed, to the Pennsylvanian journalist Benjamin Franklin this “deluge of wickedness” upon Virginia, Maryland, and his own colony epitomized the “sovereign contempt” with which the “Mother Country” was capable of viewing its American “children.” Writing in 1751 under the suggestive pseudonym “Americanus,” Franklin advised his fellow colonists to retaliate by exporting “rattle-snakes for felons.”8
Despite the outcry they provoked, these batches of English “transports” were insignificant when set beside the incoming waves of African slaves. Just a few hundred strong in 1650, a century later slaves numbered some 150,000, accounting for 40 percent of the Chesapeake’s population. Subjected to a harsh work regime and brutal punishments and with precious little prospect of ultimate freedom, black slaves were increasingly regarded as inhuman brutes by their masters. This racist stance was adopted to justify an institution that flew in the face of the freedoms that Englishmen had fought so hard to win for themselves; bolstered by a dread of servile revolt, it also helped to promote solidarity between the Chesapeake’s planters and a growing band of poor whites whose failure to achieve material success left them disgruntled and potentially rebellious.9 In Virginia, even the lowliest former convict knew only too well that life could be much, much worse. George Washington was to grow up within a society in which the contrast between “liberty” and “slavery” could not have been starker.
Before long, young George was joined by a sister, Betty, and a brother, Samuel. But life in the Old Dominion remained precarious, particularly on the sultry, low-lying Tidewater, where river-borne fevers helped to keep the headstone carvers and grave diggers busy. Before he was three, George’s half sister Jane was dead. In 1735, Augustine Washington moved his family to his new estate fronting the Potomac at Little Hunting Creek. There, in the home that would later become known as Mount Vernon, two more brothers were born: John Augustine, or “Jack,” in 1736, and Charles a year later.
George’s half brothers, Lawrence and Augustine junior, were both far older than he and away at school in England, where their father had also been educated. Lawrence returned home in 1738, by now a worldly-wise gentleman of twenty. George idolized him, and, for all the great difference in their ages, they became firm friends. Later that year, Augustine acquired another tract of land, this time on the Rappahannock River some two miles from the expanding village of Fredericksburg. Moving once again, he ensconced his growing brood in a two-story wooden building, named Ferry Farm from the nearby river crossing.
In the following year, war erupted between Britain and her old imperial rival, Spain. The conflict would be remembered by the strange name of “The War of Jenkins’s Ear” after the English sea captain whose mutilation at the hands of vindictive Spanish coast guards provided a convenient excuse for hostilities. Coming after a generation of peace and dangling the alluring prospect of pilfering the Spanish Empire, the war was popular in Britain and its American possessions alike. The conflict promptly produced a hero for the British public: by his daring capture of Spain’s imperial outpost at Porto Bello in November 1739, Vice Admiral Edward Vernon generated a wave of patriotic fervor that saw him celebrated in poems and plays and on plates and punchbowls.10
Across the Atlantic, eleven colonies from Massachusetts to North Carolina contributed enough recruits to fill a sprawling four-battalion formation eventually totaling more than 4,000 men. Most, although by no means all, of the rank and file in this so-called American Regiment were volunteers; in Virginia, which contributed four companies, justices of the peace were authorized to conscript those able-bodied men who lacked employment, sweeping up vagrants, former indentured servants, and others considered undesirable and expendable. While the field and staff officers, along with one lieutenant per company, were to be British and appointed from London, all the other officers, including the captains, would be Americans. A total of eighty-eight blank king’s commissions were sent across the Atlantic to be awarded to such “men of interest in their country” as the colonial governors deemed worthy.11
There were not enough of the coveted royal commissions to meet the demand, but Lawrence Washington mustered sufficient influence to secure the captaincy of one of the Virginian companies. Unorthodox in size and composition, the “American Regiment” was nonetheless a regular British Army unit, and Lawrence’s commission was signed by King George II himself.12 The regiment’s proud continental title was also significant: it reflected an unprecedented display of cooperation, not simply between the American colonists and Great Britain, but between the individual colonies themselves.
Colonel William Blakeney, the English officer sent across the Atlantic to supervise the regiment’s enlistment, was clearly impressed by the enthusiasm for the expedition that he encountered in New York. But the colonel also noticed a colonial trait that hinted at tensions to come: “From the highest to the lowest, the inhabitants of these provinces seem to set a great value on themselves, and think a regard is due to them, especially in the assistance they are able to give the Mother Country on such occasions.” He added a warning: “and, as they are a growing power, should they be disappointed in what is promised them, and which they expect, future occasions of the like nature may suffer for it.”13
The expedition’s first target was the city of Cartagena, on the coast of what is now Colombia. Mustering at Jamaica in the autumn of 1740 under the command of the famed Vice Admiral Vernon and his army colleague Brigadier General Thomas Wentworth, the formidable Anglo-American armada reached Cartagena in the following spring. There, it initially made some headway but swiftly lost all momentum in the teeth of a combination of factors: unexpectedly determined Spanish resistance, friction between the naval and army commanders, and, above all, the Caribbean’s array of lethal diseases. The unacclimatized invaders suffered appallingly. By the time it was finally called off in 1742, the expedition had cost the lives of more than 10,000 of the 14,000 soldiers ultimately involved. Just a fraction of them were killed in action, with the majority felled by malaria, yellow fever, or dysentery. Losses among the American Regiment were correspondingly high: for some of the colonies, nine out of ten of those who had set off with such high expectations of glory and booty never came home.14
One man who lived to tell the tale was Captain Lawrence Washington. His survival, when so many others died, probably owed much to his appointment to command the men of his regiment serving as marines, and berthing aboard Admiral Vernon’s flagship, the eighty-gun HMS Princess Carolina.15 As Vernon’s crew had been on station in the Caribbean for more than a year and were already “seasoned” to its diseases, Princess Carolina offered a healthier environment than the troopships fresh from England and North America and the filthy camps established onshore.
Writing to his father from Jamaica in May 1741, as the survivors of the bungled Cartagena expedition regrouped for a strike against Cuba, Lawrence gave some hint of his experiences, observing: “War is horrid in fact, but much more so in our imagination.”16 Yet the hard facts of the Caribbean campaign were horrific enough. It is possible that Captain Washington had described them in previous letters home, of which he had “writ many” without any reply; or perhaps he made a conscious decision to spare his family an account of the ghastly sights he surely witnessed as Cartagena’s harbor grew noisome with the floating bodies of the dead thrown overboard from the hospital ships, “affording prey to carrion crows and sharks, which tore them in pieces without interruption.” This grisly detail was recalled by another eyewitness, Tobias Smollett, who served as a surgeon’s mate aboard the fleet and drew upon his experiences at Cartagena in both his 1748 novel Roderick Random and in a factual account published in 1756.17
In his surviving letter, Lawrence Washington likewise failed to mention an episode early in the siege of Cartagena when he had participated in a hazardous amphibious assault. Unaware of this incident, George Washington’s biographers have concluded that his half brother never experienced combat during the campaign. In fact, Lawrence helped to lead troops in a celebrated feat of arms: given his influence as a role model for young George, this is surely significant. Once again, Smollett provides the missing information, describing the skirmish in his nonfiction narrative of the campaign. On March 17, 1741, the army officers had sought Admiral Vernon’s assistance in destroying a troublesome battery guarding the harbor, known as the Barradera. As Smollett reported:
In compliance with this request, a detachment of 300 sailors, supported by a body of soldiers that still remained on board of the fleet, were conveyed thither at night in boats, under the command of Captains Boscawen, Watson, Coats, Washington, Mr. Murray, and Lieutenant Forrest, who attacked the battery with great valor, repulsed the enemy, and spiked up the cannon.18
Admiral Vernon, who claimed to have hatched the plan himself, praised the attack on March 18 as a “bold, resolute and well-executed enterprise,” although the only officers he named in his dispatch to the governor of Jamaica were his own sailors; already at loggerheads with General Wentworth, he had no wish to glorify soldiers, “our gentlemen of parade.”19
In his influential published account of the siege, Vernon’s chief engineer, Captain Charles Knowles, agreed that the Barradera assault was “as bold, and surprising an enterprise, as is to be met with,” although he, too, failed to include Lawrence Washington among the officers who led it. This omission may have been deliberate, as Knowles was clearly prejudiced against the American Regiment. From the very outset the Americans were despised, he wrote. While the troops from England were “raw and undisciplined,” the Americans were even worse; many of the soldiers were Irish and therefore suspected of being “Papists” like the Spaniards, while even their officers were held in scorn, “composed of blacksmiths, tailors, shoemakers, and all the banditti that country [America] affords.”20
The perceptive Smollett took a more balanced view of the American Regiment’s potential. During the bloody and futile attempt to storm the fortress of St. Lazarus on April 9, 1741, he recalled, the Americans had been placed in the rear of the assault troops, relegated to carrying scaling ladders and woolpacks to fill up the fort’s ditch. When the attack stalled, the Americans refused to bring their burdens forward. However, as Smollett added, “though they would not advance as pioneers, many of them took up the firelocks which they found on the field, and, mixing among the troops, behaved very bravely.” In Smollett’s considered view, the expedition’s failure was not attributable to any lack of courage among the ordinary soldiers and sailors but resulted from “a low, ridiculous, and pernicious jealousy” between the navy and army officers, and especially the commanders. General Wentworth was “wholly defective in part of experience, confidence and resolution.” As for Admiral Vernon, Smollett raged, he was “of weak understanding, strong prejudices, boundless arrogance, and over-boiling passions.”21
Unlike those veterans who returned embittered by their experience of the whole botched venture, Lawrence Washington viewed Vernon in a more benevolent light. His close contact with the admiral, from whom, as George remembered “he had received many distinguished marks of patronage and favor,” explains the veneration in which he held him, which endured despite the expedition’s dismal outcome.22
Lawrence’s yarns of fighting the “Dons” on the Spanish Main no doubt fired the imagination of his devoted half brother. They must have provided a welcome distraction from young George’s homely existence, a world still largely bounded by mundane horizons and limited expectations. Very little is known of George’s childhood, a void that allowed early hagiographers like Parson Weems to let their imaginations run wild and spin improbable tales intended to establish his saintly character. Despite the enduring legend, there is no evidence that six-year-old George ever confessed to wantonly taking an ax to one of his father’s prized cherry trees.23
From the ages of about seven to eleven, George was probably tutored at home at Ferry Farm, and he then attended a school at nearby Fredericksburg. He certainly learned the rudiments of reading and writing, but spelling remained a problem for the rest of his life. This weakness in letters, which was shared by his poorly educated mother, was counterbalanced by a marked aptitude for figures, inclining him toward trigonometry and a precocious interest in surveying.
Augustine Washington died on April 12, 1743. He was forty-eight—a fair age for a Washington. By then he had accumulated more than 10,000 acres, split into at least seven tracts. None of Augustine’s children were neglected in his will, but Lawrence, as the eldest son, naturally received the largest share, including the plantation on Little Hunting Creek. Renaming the property Mount Vernon in honor of his revered patron, Lawrence undertook major rebuilding. He commemorated this work by laying a carved cornerstone that proudly recalled his recent services as an officer of the king. Its design featured a heart, Lawrence’s initials, and a pair of halberds; these were the ax-like pole arms carried by sergeants in the British Army and an unmistakable expression of the householder’s martial credentials.24
While Lawrence upgraded Mount Vernon, eleven-year-old George, the third son and by a second marriage, had to be content with Ferry Farm and a share of the household slaves and other possessions. Ultimately, George’s own inheritance made little difference, as his mother did not relinquish it to him when he came of age. Disinclined to remarry, Mary Ball Washington stayed put at Ferry Farm for another eighteen years after her son’s twenty-first birthday, running the property down through poor management. Self-willed, selfish, and apparently utterly indifferent to her son’s growing fame, she was a bane. Despite the best efforts of later apologists to cast her in a more sympathetic light, it is clear that George Washington’s mother was a stultifying presence, one who not only denied him a happy and loving childhood but irked him far into his adult years.
For George, the grief resulting from the unexpected death of his father was compounded by the implications for his own future. Above all, it quashed any hopes that he, too, would enjoy the benefits of an English gentleman’s education and the opportunity to experience the fabled Mother Country at first hand. It was a bitter disappointment, a blow that would have a lasting impact. Meanwhile, George continued his schooling locally: his surviving exercise books show that, while much attention was devoted to the practicalities of life among the Virginian gentry—copying out the most common legal documents, for example—some effort was also made to convey the social skills expected of his class. When he was aged about twelve, George carefully transcribed a document that was destined to influence him for the rest of his life. Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation was a handbook on manners for the aspiring gentleman, listing 110 maxims that laid down the ground rules of etiquette. Besides blunt injunctions against spitting into the fire, crushing fleas in company, and blowing one’s nose at the table, the Rules of Civility offered advice on the tricky art of interacting with others, whatever their social rank. Throughout there was a strong emphasis on decorum and self-control. For example, Rule 1 read: “Every action done in company, ought to be with some sign of respect, to those that are present”; while Rule 40 cautioned: “Strive not with your superiors in argument but always, submit your judgment to others with modesty.” Imbibed by Washington at an impressionable age, the Rules of Civility offered crucial guidance, providing a firm foundation for his future conduct.25
George was soon given an opportunity to put such guidelines to the test. With his father gone, the dashing Lawrence now played an even greater part in his life, as both a friend and a mentor. Once in full possession of Mount Vernon, Lawrence swiftly married Anne Fairfax, the daughter of Colonel William Fairfax, whose impressive mansion, Belvoir, was just four miles away. This was a development of immense significance for George, granting him access to the very highest level of Virginian society. At Belvoir and Mount Vernon alike, the awkward youngster began to acquire some of the finer social graces expected of a gentleman, while enjoying welcome respites from his mother’s baleful company at Ferry Farm. In addition, like Lawrence Washington, the English-born Colonel Fairfax was a combat veteran. As a teenager during the War of the Spanish Succession, he’d served in both the Royal Navy and British Army under his cousins, Captain Robert Fairfax and Colonel Martin Bladen; increasingly adopting the role of surrogate father, he, too, offered a source of wartime anecdotes calculated to kindle a precocious interest in soldiering.26
The importance of Belvoir for George’s prospects was greatly enhanced in 1747, when he was fifteen, with the arrival from England of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, the colonel’s cousin. A former cavalryman, this hard-riding, fox-hunting, misogynistic aristocrat was proprietor of Virginia’s Northern Neck. Inheritance of a royal grant, given back in 1649 by the exiled Charles II to one of his staunch supporters, John Culpeper, had made Fairfax the effective overlord of a great wedge of land totaling more than 5 million acres, sandwiched between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, and stretching back almost 200 miles from Chesapeake Bay to their headwaters in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Denied the English education experienced by his half brothers Lawrence and Augustine, at Belvoir George Washington encountered the next-best thing, mixing with its English-born residents, receiving their advice, and observing at first hand the refined Old World manners and elegant material culture that long-established Virginian dynasties still aspired to. In this rarefied enclave, it is possible that George may have deliberately imitated the speech patterns of his mentors, Colonel and Lord Fairfax, cultivating an English accent.27
Lord Fairfax’s patronage soon provided George with a crucial professional opportunity and his first taste of a new and exciting environment. In March 1748, when a surveying party was sent into his Lordship’s western domains as part of an ongoing initiative to nail down the boundaries of frontier land that was being sporadically and illegally settled, George was invited to go along. By then the sixteen-year-old had applied himself so diligently to his mathematical texts that he was already capable of running simple surveys and could look to a lucrative career as a land surveyor.
Two years earlier, when George was fourteen, there had been talk of a very different future, as a midshipman in Britain’s Royal Navy. As Washington much later recalled, he came close to becoming a sailor of the king: the scheme, which was championed by Lawrence, and which perhaps owed something to his admiration for Admiral Vernon, had progressed to the point where George’s baggage was ready for his departure; it only foundered at the last moment because his contrary mother, on the advice of her brother Joseph, suddenly turned against it with a passion.
While George made the 1748 trip as a traveling companion to George William, the son of Colonel Fairfax, it nonetheless provided a chance to learn more about surveying at first hand from a team of acknowledged experts. George’s journal of the month-long expedition, which ranged beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Shenandoah Valley, is the earliest surviving record of his candid thoughts and reactions.28 His impressions are revealing, reflecting what was to be an enduring obsession with the vast North American interior, and especially the potential that it offered for financial exploitation. In the Shenandoah Valley, for example, George was struck by the “most beautiful groves of sugar trees . . . and richness of the land.”
It was all very different from Ferry Farm or Mount Vernon. After one long day out with the surveyors, George stayed at the home of Captain Isaac Pennington, over the Blue Ridge. Still attuned to Tidewater notions of comfort and cleanliness, George stripped himself as usual before getting into bed, only to find that it was “nothing but a little straw matted together without sheets or anything else but only one thread bare blanket with double its weight of vermin such as lice, fleas etc.”
On March 23, arriving some forty-five miles to the northwest at Colonel Thomas Cresap’s fortified trading post at the mouth of the Potomac’s South Branch, Washington and his companions came face-to-face with another, far more exciting, feature of frontier life. Cresap’s post lay on a well-worn tribal trail, and they were “agreeably surprised at the sight of thirty odd Indians coming from war.” Washington’s first glimpse of “undomesticated” Indians amid their own natural environment clearly intrigued him, inspiring a detailed and unusually spirited description in his otherwise humdrum diary. A gift of liquor encouraged the Indians to perform an enthusiastic and striking “war dance.” Forming a large circle around a great fire, George wrote, “the best dancer jumps up as one awaked out of a sleep and runs and jumps about the ring in a most comical manner.” While the others followed his lead, the musicians began to play, beating time on a drum made from a pot half full of water with a deerskin stretched across it, and shaking a gourd “with some shot in it to rattle and a piece of an horses tail tied to it to make it look fine.”
Some days later George and his companions encountered a very different group of frontier folk, “a great company of people—men, women and children” who followed them through the woods as they went about their surveying, proving more irritating than entertaining. These Germans, who had drifted down from Pennsylvania, were squatting on his Lordship’s lands and were anxious at the prospect of being evicted from their homesteads.
Such non-English settlers were a new phenomenon in the 1740s, the spearhead of a fresh influx of immigrants from Europe who mostly bypassed the long-inhabited coastal settlements in search of land and freedom on their hazardous frontier fringes. Besides the Germans encountered by Washington’s party, the backcountry of Virginia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania was also attracting the so-called Scotch-Irish from Ulster, tough folk well suited to their dangerous new surroundings. Taken together, this incursion was slowly changing the ethnic balance of the hitherto overwhelmingly “English” colonies. To Washington and his companions, the German incomers were no less alien than the aboriginal warriors of the interior. Indeed, he believed them to be “as ignorant a set of people as the Indians. They would never speak English but when spoken to they all speak Dutch [sic].”
For much of the trip the party camped out in all weathers, dining on the wild turkeys they shot. Young George was roughing it in the wilderness and enjoying the experience. On April 8, after negotiating rugged, mountainous terrain, they camped in the woods “near a wild meadow.” George wrote: “After we had pitched our tent and made a very large fire we pulled out our knapsack in order to recruit ourselves. Every [one] was his own cook. Our spits was forked sticks. Our plates was a large chip. As for dishes we had none.” Having tasted, and relished, the wild frontier that would go far to shape his emerging character, George returned safe to Mount Vernon on April 13, 1748.
Later that same year, the impressionable teenager first met a young woman who was to exert an equally dramatic influence upon him. His friend George William Fairfax married the vivacious Sarah Cary and brought her home to Belvoir. Known as Sally, she was two years older than George Washington. From that time until almost the end of his life, Sally Fairfax was destined to enjoy a special place in George’s affections. Although the loss of virtually all the correspondence that passed between them complicates the issue, as will be seen, the few surviving letters suggest strongly that Sally held a powerful and lasting attraction for George and that he swiftly fell deeply in love with her.29
George now pursued his interest in surveying to support himself and to accumulate more land of his own. By 1749, aged just seventeen, he was running professional surveys and over the coming three years conducted some 190, nearly all of them involving new grants on the frontiers of Lord Fairfax’s Northern Neck domain. Here once again the Fairfax factor was to prove vital for George Washington’s prospects: not only was surveying a profitable profession in its own right, yielding a higher annual income than that enjoyed by most Virginian planters or tradesmen, but it provided excellent opportunities for him to acquire prime tracts of land ahead of rivals. In his short spell of active surveying, it has been estimated that George earned something approaching £400; equating eighteenth-century sums to modern values is notoriously difficult, but in an age when a skilled artisan with a family to support might hope for an annual wage of £35, this clearly amounted to a tidy sum. In the same three-year period, by either purchase or grant, he acquired 2,315 acres of good-quality land in the Lower Shenandoah Valley, equaling that held by the far older Lawrence at Mount Vernon.
George took a break from surveying in September 1751 when he accompanied his beloved half brother to the island of Barbados, in hopes that the Caribbean climate would ease his increasingly troubling cough. It is likely that Lawrence Washington was suffering from one of the era’s great killers: tuberculosis, or “consumption.” In May 1749, he had been excused from attending Virginia’s House of Burgesses, where he represented Fairfax County, “for the recovery of his health” and that summer sailed for England in search of a cure. When Lawrence returned with no improvement to his condition, it was resolved that he would try the warmer climate of Barbados instead and that George should go with him.
This was George Washington’s one and only sea voyage, and it left a strong impression upon him. His journal of the trip to Barbados, which survives only in tattered fragments, notes the porpoises, which sported alongside the ship and which were often gaffed and served up for supper, and the changing weather conditions. Washington swiftly acquired a smattering of nautical jargon, and his journal is full of abbreviations suggesting that a life before the mast might not have been such a bad idea after all.
The Washington brothers arrived at the island’s leading settlement of Bridgetown in early November 1751, to be welcomed by the prominent merchant and planter Major Gedney Clarke, whose sister Deborah was married to Colonel William Fairfax. Yet again the Fairfax connection had its uses, introducing the new arrivals to such genteel society as Barbados boasted. It was Major Clarke who recommended a doctor to examine Lawrence; his diagnosis was encouraging, giving hopes of a cure. That same day, November 5, George and Lawrence rode out to seek lodgings for their stay. It was the cool of the evening, and, as George enthused in his journal, they were “perfectly enraptured with the beautiful prospects, which every side presented to our view.”30
Such tranquil vistas were deceptive. Barbados was Britain’s second-oldest Caribbean colony, established back in 1627. Sugar was the dominant crop, its intensive cultivation driven by a growing taste for tea and coffee in Great Britain and her North American possessions alike and by the widespread popularity of powerful rum distilled from molasses. But like the tobacco that soothed pipe smokers throughout Britain’s empire, this sweetness came from the bitter experience of enslaved Africans. By the early 1750s, black slaves outnumbered the island’s white population by more than three to one, leaving the planters in perpetual fear of an uprising. As a Virginian who had grown up surrounded by tobacco plantations, Washington was already familiar with the institution of slavery. Yet the Barbados version was notoriously harsh. Slaves toiled for long hours in the cane fields under a broiling sun. It was backbreaking work, and they were only kept to it by the lash and by a far more savage array of punishments for runaways and troublemakers. If George Washington noticed these brutalities, he failed to mention them in what survives of his journal, although, with his keen interest in military matters, he did remark on the island’s fortifications; on November 13, 1751, he dined at Bridgetown’s fort, tallying up the thirty-six guns mounted within the ramparts and another fifty-one in batteries outside.31
Just days later, George was “strongly attacked with the smallpox,” a disease that took a heavy toll on his contemporaries, and particularly the young. Decades later, when he was among the most famous Americans of his generation, Benjamin Franklin still grieved for his son, “a fine boy of four years old” who had succumbed to smallpox in 1736. Franklin regretted bitterly that he had never inoculated his little boy, a risky procedure to be sure, but better than leaving him totally defenseless against the disease.32 Smallpox survivors were often left disfigured with deeply pitted complexions—the “pox-fretten” faces that feature so often in newspaper advertisements describing runaway servants, deserters, and other miscreants. Washington was unusually lucky: in exchange for nothing more than a few shallow scars on his nose, he gained lifetime immunity from one of the era’s worst scourges.
But Lawrence’s persistent cough only worsened. After four months on Barbados, while George headed home to Virginia, he sailed on alone to Bermuda in hopes its climate would work a cure. That, too, was a futile effort: the invalid returned to his beloved Mount Vernon and died there in June 1752, still in his early thirties. Another Washington had found an early grave, and George had lost a much-loved friend and mentor.
Following Lawrence’s death, George gradually abandoned the profession of surveying. Not even the great expanse of the Northern Neck was limitless, and the same Fairfax power that had given such a boost to George’s career barred him from carving out an extensive territory of his own like surveyors elsewhere on Virginia’s frontier. Surveying was a practical skill that Washington would never forget, and one that he would occasionally return to, but it was no longer the focus for his ambition: that turned increasingly to soldiering.
Undoubtedly encouraged by Lawrence’s example and his tales of Caribbean campaigning, George actively sought a military position for himself by following his half brother’s lead. Lawrence Washington’s status as a bona fide combat veteran had gained him the post of adjutant general for Virginia, which involved responsibility for overseeing the efficiency of the colony’s militia, composed of those freeholders expected to turn out and fight in a military crisis; his deputy was George Muse, an Englishman who had settled in Virginia and a fellow survivor of the ill-fated American Regiment’s stint in the Caribbean. As Virginia’s sporadic Indian wars of the previous century were now a distant memory and there had been no external threats to the colony since then, by the mid-eighteenth century its militia had long since lost its true role; aside from “patrols” intended to monitor and intimidate the slaves and bound servants, it functioned more as a social club than a fighting force to be reckoned with.33
The militia adjutancy was nonetheless prestigious and offered a useful financial return for a minimum of effort. Learning in the spring of 1752 that the office was to be split up into districts, George asked Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Robert Dinwiddie, to consider him for the adjutancy of the familiar Northern Neck. Instead, on December 13, he was commissioned adjutant for Southern Virginia, an office that carried the honorary rank of major, and yielded a handsome annual salary of £100. Allied to his Fairfax connections and accumulating landholdings, this enhanced status gave another sign that, as he entered his twenties, George Washington was a young man of ambition, keen to make a name for himself. His chance to do so came soon enough.
At the very time that George was lobbying Robert Dinwiddie for his militia adjutancy, the governor was becoming increasingly concerned about growing French interest in the Ohio Valley, a region that Britain and France both claimed as their own. Tensions there arose from mutual concerns: the French feared that an English presence on the Ohio, or, as they styled it, “La Belle Rivière,” would hammer a wedge between New France’s two distinct and far-flung territories, Canada and Louisiana, so they determined to safeguard communications between them by constructing a cordon of forts. For their part, the English worried that the French thereby sought to hem them behind the daunting natural barrier of the Appalachians and exclude them from the valuable fur trade with the Ohio’s Indian inhabitants. While courting them as economic partners, both European powers underplayed the fact that these same tribes regarded the contested area as their own homeland and had no intention of budging.
The Ohio’s native peoples—Shawnees, Delawares, and also Iroquois migrants known as “Mingos”—were fiercely independent. During the previous half century these Indians had been attracted to the depopulated Ohio both by its abundant game and because it offered a refuge from imperialism—not simply the imported European variety, but also that espoused by the Iroquois Confederacy. Spanning what is now Upstate New York, the Six Nations of the Iroquois regarded the Ohio region as a fiefdom, seeking to control its inhabitants through intimidation and the presence of their own envoys. By the early 1750s, however, Iroquois influence was waning, while the Ohio villagers increasingly exploited their strategically important location to trade with the French and British colonists alike.34
Given the ongoing rivalry between Britain and France, which had already generated three major wars between 1689 and 1748, a further clash was viewed as inevitable. The likelihood that friction in the Ohio Valley would spark the next conflict was increased in 1752, when the arrival of a new governor-general of Canada, Ange de Menneville, Marquis de Duquesne, heralded the onset of a more deliberate and aggressive policy of French expansion into the contested region.35
In the spring of 1753, Duquesne dispatched a force of 2,000 men, under Pierre de La Malgue, sieur de Marin, to build a chain of forts linking Lake Erie with the Forks of the Ohio, where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers join that waterway, and where modern Pittsburgh stands. By May, a first fort had been constructed at the Presque Isle portage, while a road was pushed south to another strongpoint at Fort Le Boeuf, on a branch of French Creek. With a fortified trading post already established farther south, at Venango, it required only a fort at the Forks themselves to complete the system.
Monitoring this encroachment upon what was ostensibly Virginian territory, Governor Dinwiddie reported his concerns to the Board of Trade, the body officially responsible for colonial affairs in London. Besides his position as a British official obliged to resist French expansionism, Dinwiddie had other, more selfish reasons for seeking action: in his late fifties and with decades of experience as a British imperial administrator, he was a leading member of a group of land speculators, the Ohio Company, that aimed to erect a fort of their own at the Forks of the Ohio as a hub for trade and settlement.
The Crown’s response, received by Dinwiddie on October 22, 1753, outlined the stance to be adopted for the future: if any person, Indian or white, erected a fort within the province of Virginia, Dinwiddie should require them to depart in peace; if that approach failed and such “unlawful and unjustifiable designs” continued, the interlopers must be driven off “by force of arms.” On no account should Dinwiddie become “the aggressor” by using troops outside “the undoubted limits of His Majesty’s province.”36
Learning that Dinwiddie intended to warn the French, Major Washington rode to Williamsburg and volunteered to carry the letter. Dinwiddie lost no time in accepting his offer. It was the beginning of a relationship that would prove crucial for propelling George Washington on his chosen path as a soldier. The tall young Virginian and the stubby, aging Scot made an odd pair, yet they shared a determination to resist French encroachments at all costs. On October 30, Dinwiddie commissioned Washington to place himself in the midst of the escalating imperial rivalry and deliver a summons “to the commandant of the French forces on the Ohio.” Besides handing over Dinwiddie’s letter, Washington would also be responsible for calling together those local Indian leaders who were believed to be sympathetic toward Britain and securing their help. Not least, he was to gather intelligence regarding the French dispositions and intentions.37
All this would involve a grueling round-trip across punishing terrain in the depths of winter, roaming for hundreds of miles within territory claimed by King George’s inveterate enemies. Although lacking any diplomatic or military experience, the twenty-one-year-old Washington was physically well suited to the challenges ahead. No description of his appearance in 1753 survives, but he cannot have looked very different six years later when a letter attributed to his close friend George Mercer described him as “being straight as an Indian” and “measuring 6 feet 2 inches in his stockings,” which meant that he was literally head and shoulders above most of his male contemporaries. His impressive height was balanced by a rangy and powerful physique, “padded with well developed muscles.” Broad shouldered and “neat waisted,” Washington had large hands and long legs, his strong thighs well fitted for gripping horseflesh; indeed, he was “a splendid horseman.”38 The Ohio trip would draw upon all his reserves of strength and stamina.
Washington left Williamsburg on October 31, the very day he received Dinwiddie’s orders.39 On his way west he recruited a small, motley escort. At Fredericksburg on November 1, he was joined by a Dutchman, Jacob Van Braam, a former soldier who had recently advertised himself as a teacher of French and would serve as Washington’s interpreter in that language. After gathering supplies and horses, another fortnight’s travel by a newly constructed road brought the pair to the Ohio Company’s trading post at Wills Creek, on the boundary of Virginia and Maryland, where the Potomac nudged the foothills of the Alleghenies. There they picked up the renowned frontiersman and explorer Christopher Gist. Aged about forty-seven, the tough and resourceful Gist was the party’s essential guide and expert on Indian affairs. Another four experienced woodsmen were hired as “servitors.”
Washington’s band set out the next day, November 15, but their progress into the wilderness was hindered by the “excessive rains and vast quantity of snow that had fallen.” It took them a week to reach the cabin of the Scottish gunsmith and Indian trader John Fraser at Turtle Creek, some ten miles from the Forks of the Ohio. Washington soon viewed the Forks themselves with his surveyor’s eye, considering the site “extremely well situated for a fort,” enjoying “absolute command” of both the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers. In Washington’s opinion, it was certainly a far better location than that already earmarked by the Ohio Company, two miles below the Forks. There they called upon Shingas, a pro-British chief of the Delawares, inviting him to attend a council to be held at Logstown, a key Indian trading village of the Ohio Valley, situated fourteen miles farther off.
When they reached Logstown on November 24, Washington discovered that the “Half-King,” one of the most important of the Indians that Dinwiddie had instructed him to meet, was away at his hunting cabin. The Half-King was Tanaghrisson, an adopted Seneca who had been appointed by the Iroquois League to uphold its dwindling authority on the Ohio. As his title made clear, Tanaghrisson’s personal authority was limited. As soon as he arrived the next evening, Washington invited him and the locally based interpreter John Davison to his tent. Washington was keen to hear the Half-King’s own account of his journey to the French fort at Presque Isle in September 1753 and his dealings with the commandant there, the sieur de Marin.
Along with other representatives of the Ohio tribes, on that occasion Tanaghrisson had delivered a forceful warning against French expansion. In the version reported to Washington, he had not minced his words, articulating concerns common to many Indian tribes:
Fathers, both you and the English are white. We live in a country between, therefore the land does not belong either to one or the other; but the Great Being above allowed it to be a place of residence for us; so Fathers, I desire you to withdraw, as I have done our brothers the English, for I will keep you at arm’s length.
The Indians would “stand by” whoever paid most heed to their words. But, as the Half-King recalled, the hard-bitten Marin had rejected his claims and threats with contempt, making a threat of his own: “If people will be ruled by me they may expect kindness but not else.”
The next day, November 26, 1753, the great council that Washington had convened was held in the Long House at Logstown. On behalf of Governor Dinwiddie, their “brother,” he called upon the “Sachems of the Six Nations,” Virginia’s esteemed “friends and allies,” to inform them of his mission and to seek their help in fulfilling it: he needed “young men to provide provisions for us on our way, and to be a safeguard against those French Indians, that have taken up the hatchet against us.” After considering Washington’s words, Tanaghrisson rose and, speaking for all, voiced his feelings of brotherhood. Washington would get his escort, but he must wait while the proper preparations were made: the ceremonial “speech belts” of prized wampum beads previously given by the French must be collected, so that they could be returned to them, while it was also imperative that Washington’s escort should include representatives of all the key nations of the region—Mingos, Shawnees, and Delawares.
Washington was impatient to push on but, as Tanaghrisson was insistent, “found it impossible to get off without insulting them in the most egregious manner” and so reluctantly agreed to stay. Although a novice in wilderness diplomacy, Washington already knew enough to appreciate that the “returning of wampum, was the abolishing of agreements; and giving this up was shaking off all dependence upon the French.” It was now, or in following weeks, as Washington later recalled, that he was “named by the Half-King . . . and the tribes of nations with whom he treated—Caunotaucarious (in English) the Town taker.” As already seen, this was the name reportedly given to his great-grandfather, John Washington, by the Susquehannocks some seventy-five years earlier. Like the Senecas, by whom Tanaghrisson had been adopted, the Susquehannocks were an Iroquoian people, so it’s certainly not impossible that the title could have been remembered and transmitted orally down the generations. Another possibility is that Washington drew upon his family’s traditions and deliberately resurrected the name himself in a bid to impress the Half-King, and the other Indians he met that winter, with his own warrior heritage.40
On November 28, Tanaghrisson returned as promised, now accompanied by Monacatoocha, a pro-English Oneida also known as “Scarouady”; another representative of the Six Nations in the Ohio Country, his warrior status was delineated by tattoos—a tomahawk on his chest and a bow and arrow on each cheek.41 Along with two other sachems, the Half-King and Monacatoocha now wanted to know exactly what business they were to be going upon. It was a question Washington had long anticipated, and his carefully rehearsed answers “allayed their curiosity a little.”
Monacatoocha also conveyed fresh and alarming intelligence of French designs on the Ohio. He had recently heard that the French had summoned all the Mingos and Delawares to Venango, explaining that they had intended to be down the river that autumn and only the onset of winter had stopped them; they would move in the spring, and in still greater numbers. The Indians should not meddle, unless they wished that great force to fall upon them. According to Monacatoocha’s informant, the French were prepared to fight the English for three years. If the end of that time brought stalemate, the Europeans would join forces to “cut off” the Indians and carve up their lands among themselves. This menacing speech had been delivered by Captain Philippe Thomas de Joncaire, the French commandant at Venango—Washington’s next destination.
Chafing at all the frustrating delays but acknowledging the need for them, Washington resumed his journey only on November 30. An Indian assembly the night before had resolved that just three of the chiefs, along with one of their best hunters, would escort his party onward: a greater number would rouse French suspicions, bringing the risk of bad treatment, they reasoned. When Washington’s little band left Logstown, it was accompanied by the Half-King Tanaghrisson, the Cayuga Jeskakake, an Iroquois chief named White Thunder, and a Seneca called Guyasuta, or “Hunter.”
They reached Venango on December 4, after a trip of more than seventy miles, meeting nothing remarkable on the way save for more hard weather. Seeing the white flag of the Bourbons flying from a house, Washington approached without hesitation to find the commandant. Captain Joncaire advised Washington that, as there was a general officer at the next post up the line, Fort Le Boeuf, he would need to journey there for an answer to Dinwiddie’s letter. Meanwhile, Joncaire and his fellow officers treated Washington with the courtesy that the age expected from one gentleman to another, but with blunt frankness: yes, they intended nothing less than to take full possession of the Ohio, and, by God, they would do so. As the wine flowed more freely, they boasted that, while it was true that the English could raise two men for every one of theirs, Washington’s countrymen were too lethargic to thwart French plans.
A veteran soldier of New France, and vastly experienced in Indian affairs, Captain Joncaire was old enough to be Washington’s father; yet he clearly warmed to the self-confident and vigorous young Virginian: by his very presence at Venango, Washington had shown he was a kindred spirit, ready to risk the hazards of the wilderness and not to be confused with those who railed against French plans from the safety of the council chambers and taverns of Williamsburg and Philadelphia.
On December 5, heavy rain prevented Washington’s party from moving onward. The wily Joncaire exploited this hiatus to summon Tanaghrisson, whom Washington had been keen to keep out of his company. When the Indians came into his presence, Joncaire deployed all his charm, wondering that they could be so near without coming to visit him. Gifts were offered, and alcohol disappeared so fast that, as Washington noted, “they were soon rendered incapable of the business they came about.”
The next morning, and none the worse for wear, the Half-King asked Washington to stay and hear what he had to say to the French. True to his pledge, when he met Joncaire, Tanaghrisson formally handed over the French speech belt, but the captain refused to receive it: like Dinwiddie’s summons, it must be delivered to the senior commander at the next fort.
When Washington’s party continued north on December 7, it was accompanied by “Monsieur La Force,” the commissary of stores, whose mastery of Indian languages gave him immense influence among the tribes, and three other soldiers. This stage of their journey, covering about sixty miles, took four days: they were delayed by driving rain and snow and the swamps they were obliged to negotiate because French Creek was swollen so high and rapid that it was “impassable either by fording or rafting.” Even under these trying circumstances Washington viewed the ground with an eye to its future exploitation: “We passed over much good land since we left Venango, and through several extensive and very rich meadows, one of which was near 4 miles in length, and considerably wide in some places,” he noted.
They reached Fort Le Boeuf on the December 11 and once again received a cordial reception. Washington presented his credentials and Dinwiddie’s letter to the commandant, Captain Jacques Legardeur, sieur de Saint-Pierre. Washington was clearly impressed: a Knight of the Military Order of St. Louis, Saint-Pierre was “an elderly gentleman” with “much the air of a soldier.” Washington’s assessment was accurate: Saint-Pierre came from an old, established Canadian military dynasty, and his own active service went back to 1732. A noted explorer of the west, he had fought against the formidable Chickasaws of the Mississippi Valley from 1737 to 1740, and the no less fearsome Mohawk allies of the English on the New York frontier during the War of the Austrian Succession.42 Saint-Pierre postponed consideration of Dinwiddie’s letter until the commandant at Fort Presque Isle, Louis Le Gardeur de Repentigny, could be summoned to look over it with him. When they had done so, Washington and his interpreter Van Braam were called in to check their translation.
On December 13, Saint-Pierre held a council of war, and its deliberations gave Washington a chance to stroll around the fort and make a remarkably detailed report of its dimensions and armament: there were four projecting bastions, each mounting two six-pounder cannon; another four-pounder was set before the gate, ready to repulse any break-in. According to the best estimate he could obtain, the garrison consisted of about 100 men, plus officers. Washington also ordered his followers to make a careful tally of the canoes intended to ferry the French to the Forks with the spring. There were “50 of birch bark, and 170 of pine,” not to mention many others roughly “blocked out” ready for finishing.
It was not until the evening of December 14 that Washington finally received Saint-Pierre’s answer to Dinwiddie’s summons: that was a matter for the governor of Canada, the commandant said, who would be better able “to set forth the evidence and the reality of the rights of the King, my master, to the lands situated along the Belle Rivière, and to contest the pretensions of the King of Great Britain thereto.” Dinwiddie’s letter would therefore be forwarded to him, with Saint-Pierre guided by the marquis’s response. Meanwhile, he assured Dinwiddie that he had no intention of withdrawing. He wrote: “I am here by the orders of my General, and I entreat you, Sir, not to doubt for a moment that I have a firm resolution to follow them with all the exactness and determination which can be expected of the best officer.” He added: “I have made it a particular duty to receive Mr. Washington with the distinction owing to your dignity, his position, and his own great merit.”43
For all his elaborate courtesy, and the “plentiful store of liquor, provisions etc.” that he put into Washington’s canoe for the return journey, the canny Saint-Pierre “was plotting every scheme that the Devil and man could invent, to set our Indians at variance with us, to prevent their going ’til after our departure.” As Washington anxiously recorded: “I can’t say that ever in my life I suffered so much anxiety as I did in this affair.”
On December 16, despite a last French effort to persuade the Half-King to stay through the “power of liquor,” Washington badgered the chief to leave with him. Clutching his polite but uncompromising rejection of Dinwiddie’s request, Washington made the return journey from Fort Le Boeuf in appalling weather, first by canoe, then overland. The going was harder than ever, with the passage down the corkscrewing course of French Creek “tedious and very fatiguing”; several times it seemed their canoe would be holed on rocks, while they were often obliged to get out and toil in the icy water to heave it over the shoals. Where the creek was frozen solid, they were forced to portage, or manhandle, their canoe for a quarter of a mile across a neck of land.
Exhausted, they reached Venango only on December 22. From there, Washington intended to continue by land, riding the horses sent ahead with three of the “servitors.” But White Thunder “had hurt himself much, and was sick and unable to walk,” obliging Tanaghrisson to ferry him onward by canoe. Fearing that once he had set off, Joncaire would use all his wiles to win over the Indians, Washington cautioned against such “flattery” and “fine speeches.” Tanaghrisson assured him he was immune to French advances.
The party’s horses were now “so weak and feeble” from their exertions that they could not carry anything but essential baggage, and Washington proceeded on foot. As the snow fell more heavily than ever, the packhorses grew weaker and slower by the day. Washington remained keen to deliver his report to Dinwiddie without delay, and on Boxing Day he left the baggage to follow as best it could and pushed on through the woods with the hardy and reliable Christopher Gist. Both men were wrapped up in Indian-style “matchcoats,” with packs on their backs and guns in their hands.
Now moving through lands prowled by pro-French Indians, they faced fresh hazards. Near the ominously named Murdering Town, a warrior took a potshot at them from just fifteen yards off. Thankfully, he was no sharpshooter. Neither Washington nor Gist was harmed, and they collared the Indian as he struggled to reload his gun. Incensed, Gist wanted to kill the would-be assassin on the spot, but Washington intervened, and he was turned loose. Anticipating pursuit from more hostiles, the pair now pushed on through the night without stopping, traveling on the next day until it was dark. They were bought up short by the Ohio (today’s Allegheny), which, despite the intense cold, was only partially frozen. To cross over, Washington and Gist cobbled together a ramshackle raft. With just one “poor hatchet” between them, that took a day’s work. Jumping aboard their craft, they were barely halfway across when it jammed fast in the ice. As Washington was using his setting pole to jerk the raft free, the current threw a floe against it with such force that he was tumbled off into the deep, freezing water. Grabbing onto the raft, he clawed his way out. Unable to reach shore, Washington and his companion spent the night on an island, chilled and soaked. It was now colder than ever, and Gist was badly frostbitten. But despite his ducking, Washington miraculously remained unscathed. The next morning, the ice was thick enough for them to reach dry land, and they headed for Fraser’s cabin.
There they encountered evidence that the anticipated frontier war was already beginning. They met a band of friendly Indians who had abandoned their raid to the south after discovering a massacred family of seven, the scalped bodies of adults and children alike strewn about and gnawed by hogs. Signs indicated that the killers were Ottawas, a tribe from beyond the Great Lakes known for strong French affiliations and a taste for human flesh. In coming years, such grim vignettes would become depressingly familiar along the exposed Pennsylvanian and Virginian frontiers.
Washington and Gist continued on their way on January 1, 1754, and by January 6 were back at Wills Creek, “after as fatiguing a journey as it is possible to conceive,” chiefly owing to the unrelenting “cold wet weather, which occasioned very uncomfortable lodgings.” It was all a contrast to the hospitality and congenial company of Belvoir, where, despite his professed desire to see Dinwiddie without delay, the weather-beaten Washington broke his journey to take a day of “necessary rest” among his Fairfax friends.
Reaching Williamsburg on January 16, Washington presented Dinwiddie with the French commandant’s response, amplified by his own verbal account of events and his rough journal of “the most remarkable occurrences that happened to me.” Washington’s report and the detailed map that he drew to accompany it confirmed Dinwiddie’s belief that the French threat to the Ohio was no mere chimera. To bolster his case, Dinwiddie quickly decided to print Washington’s journal. Transcribed from his field notes inside twenty-four hours, this was subsequently published as a pamphlet in Williamsburg and London and, in the fashion of the age, reprinted entire or in part by magazines and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic.44 Reaction to its contents was mixed: while the Ohio Company’s backers took comfort from Washington’s confirmation of French designs upon that region, others suspected a cynical ploy to promote the company’s interests.
Regardless of its reception, the widespread dissemination of Washington’s Ohio journal brought him a first taste of international fame. Here was a genuine tale of danger and hardship among exotic “savages” to rival any novel. At just twenty-two, Washington had been catapulted from an obscure officer of the colonial militia to a bold adventurer whose name resonated with power brokers in London and Paris.