Between the Wars
On his twenty-seventh birthday, February 22, 1759, George Washington assumed his seat in Virginia’s House of Burgesses. Four days later, he stood in the chamber to receive the formal thanks of the House “for his faithful services to His Majesty, and this colony, and for his brave and steady behavior, from the first encroachments and hostilities of the French and their Indians, to his resignation, after the happy reduction of Fort Duquesne.”1
This public acknowledgment of Washington’s efforts as a soldier over the previous five years must surely have given him considerable satisfaction: while he had failed to secure the British officer’s commission that he craved and had enjoyed precious little opportunity to slake his lust for glory on the battlefield, his hard years of military service had not gone unrecognized.
In 1759, as his devoted biographer Douglas Southall Freeman maintained, Washington was “Virginia’s most distinguished soldier,” and this immense prestige had a profound impact upon his prospects within the Old Dominion. Indeed, Washington’s soldiering had propelled him from obscure planter augmenting the income from his run-down Rappahannock farm with his earnings as a local surveyor to one of the most respected men in Virginia, consulted by the colony’s leadership. Colonel Washington’s growing renown as defender of Virginia’s frontier had clearly contributed to his decisive victory in the previous summer’s Assembly elections, although the £40 he spent to treat thirsty voters to 160 gallons of beer, rum, wine, punch, and cider no doubt helped.2
Washington’s wartime reputation landed him the greatest prize of all: the standing and confidence to court and marry a woman who was reputedly the wealthiest widow in Virginia. When he wed Martha Custis it is highly likely that Washington was still in love with Sally Fairfax, the unattainable wife of his friend and neighbor. From that point forward, however, he seemingly suppressed those feelings and focused wholeheartedly upon his bride and the new family she brought with her.
Among the socially privileged ranks of Anglo-American society in the mid-eighteenth century, financial considerations mattered in marriage. But there was a growing assumption that such unions should also be “companionate,” based upon a genuine affinity that might ripen into love. Soon after her husband’s death, Martha Washington destroyed virtually all of the private correspondence between them, so the precise nature of their relationship is difficult to establish. Yet such evidence as survives suggests that it conformed to the “companionate” model and was characterized by genuine intimacy: after sixteen years of marriage, as he contemplated the daunting task of commanding Congress’s Continental Army against Britain, Washington assured his wife of his “unalterable affection” for her. The fact that the Washingtons had no children of their own need not indicate a lack of passion; it is possible that Martha’s last delivery had left her unable to conceive; as likely, although this, too, is conjecture, “the Father of his Country” was sterile.3
Without doubt, marriage immediately transformed Washington’s prospects, catapulting him into the front rank of Virginia’s planters. In addition to his existing holdings of 5,000 acres worked by 49 slaves, the Custis connection brought another 17,000 acres, 300 more slaves, and a handsome townhouse in Williamsburg, altogether assessed at £23,000.4 In terms of Washington’s personal fortune and status, therefore, despite the many frustrations and disappointments he had experienced, his decision to follow the lead of his half brother Lawrence and thrust himself forward for a military career had undoubtedly been the right one.
As the tribute paid him by his regimental officers and the thanks of his fellow Burgesses both made clear, Washington had gained special credit for his determination in seeing the job through from start to finish. Had he retired in 1757, amid the prevailing mood of wrangling, war weariness and defeatism, the story might have been very different, with all his previous efforts squandered. As it was, Washington resigned in the wake of an unexpected and much-trumpeted victory when Virginia’s readiness to support the war effort had been transformed by Pitt’s generosity: in the ensuing mood of euphoria, all the old gripes about Washington’s shortcomings as commander of Virginia’s forces were forgotten.
While there is no doubt that in 1759 Washington’s standing in Virginia was higher than ever, it is nonetheless true that his celebrity beyond the Old Dominion fell far short of the expectations raised by his high profile in 1754–55. As the war against New France moved toward its climax, the Anglo-Americans had other heroes, both dead and alive, to occupy the limelight. Among the martyrs was Lord Howe, “the darling” of the colonists, killed at Ticonderoga in 1758. Those still living included another young brigadier general, James Wolfe, who had emerged as the popular hero of the victorious siege of Louisbourg that same summer. Howe and Wolfe were both British, of course, but even Freeman’s claim that Washington deserved recognition “as the most conspicuous native-born American provincial who had followed a career of arms” is debatable: by early 1759, if newspaper coverage is any indicator, that title belonged more rightfully to a rough and daring New England frontiersman of humble Scotch-Irish parentage, the ranger Major Robert Rogers.5
In 1759, Washington apparently turned his back on a military career for good. Nowhere in his writings did he mull over what he had learned during the years since he’d volunteered to carry Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie’s summons into the Ohio Country; perhaps, as a new life stretched before him, such reflections seemed irrelevant. But given what the future held for Washington, it is worth considering the long-term significance of his experiences during that time.6
As a veteran officer, Washington now knew that war was not all “charming,” whistling bullets. Soldiers were more likely to die from dysentery or smallpox than the enemy’s lead or steel, while Fort Duquesne had fallen to the methodical chock of felling axes, not shrieking war cries and crashing cannon fire. With hard experience, boldness had given way to caution, manifested in a growing willingness to seek the opinion of others through formal councils of war. Courage and leadership on the battlefield mattered, to be sure, but victory also hinged upon other, less glamorous, factors: discipline, training, planning, logistics, and, not least, the maintenance of harmonious relationships between frontline soldiers and rear-echelon civilians. Though he failed to acknowledge the fact at the time, in all of these areas Washington’s personal experience of command bequeathed invaluable lessons.
As colonel of the original Virginia Regiment, Washington gradually created a formation that was, by 1758, as well trained and disciplined as any in the provincial service and, judging by its combat record, worthy of acceptance into the regular British Army. For Washington, the antithesis of his own trustworthy regiment was the unruly and unreliable colonial militia; this preference for the long-service professional soldier and disdain for the short-term amateur—which overturned his countrymen’s ingrained prejudice against “standing armies”—would continue to dominate his attitude toward the waging of war.
While basing his own standards of military perfection upon those established by the British Army, Washington knew that even the red-coated professionals were not invincible: he had seen them run at Braddock’s defeat, their proverbial discipline eventually dissolved by an alien environment and unfamiliar enemy. Hence, from the outset, his own bluecoats were drilled in regular and irregular tactics; and, in common with the most forward-thinking officers like Henri Bouquet, Washington sought to devise realistic military formations capable of coping with wilderness conditions.
As commander of his own regiment, Washington had absorbed key lessons in leadership, learning how to motivate officers and men, gaining their respect while maintaining the distance required by rank. He had acquired familiarity with the nuts and bolts of practical soldiering, watching the dense paragraphs of Humphrey Bland’s Treatise of Military Discipline transformed into the reality of files, platoons, and companies drilling and sweating on the parade ground. Washington had not flinched from the responsibility of imposing discipline, depriving miscreants of the skin off their backs and, upon occasion, of their lives.
From his experience of serving under Generals Braddock and Forbes, Washington had also gained an insight into the mindset of two contrasting British commanders, the first bullish and authoritarian, the second tactful and patient, but no less determined in pursuit of his objectives. For all their differences in temperament, both men had faced the challenge of organizing an army and the logistical nightmare of pushing it across the interior wilderness. Although the final outcome of their campaigns was very different, Braddock and Forbes had each surmounted immense difficulties to come within striking distance of their objective.
Perhaps the most important lessons of all arose from Washington’s own mistakes. Woefully inexperienced but keen to win a name for himself, in 1754 he had displayed a rashness that looked set to cost him his life and reputation when he stood and fought against the odds at Fort Necessity. After 1755, while in command of the troops defending Virginia’s frontiers, Washington showed poor judgment in spending far too long away from his men; they had endured danger and hardship while he pursued his own selfish career objectives, enjoying the comforts of Williamsburg, Philadelphia, and Boston. In Washington’s absence, morale and discipline had suffered, justifying some of the “Virginia-Centinel’s” barbed criticisms.
During that same period, Washington regularly clashed with his civilian superior, Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie, deploying his own political patrons, the powerful Fairfaxes and the Assembly’s speaker, John Robinson, as allies to outflank him; through this sniping, Washington eventually alienated the long-suffering royal official who had launched his career and shared many of his objectives. Under the command of Forbes, Washington was guilty of further indiscretion, disloyalty, and factionalism; he was lucky to be given a chance to redeem himself. Yet it is significant that Washington seized that opportunity and salvaged his reputation as an officer and gentleman; as will be seen, unlike many young men in his position he learned from his errors, making it difficult to overemphasize the importance of those same years in shaping his character.
In early April 1759, Washington left Williamsburg for Mount Vernon along with his bride, his stepchildren, Jacky and Patsy, and their servants and baggage. In preparation for married life Washington had added an extra storey to the original building. It remained sparsely furnished and simply decorated; it would be Martha’s task as Mount Vernon’s new mistress to transform it into a stylish and comfortable home. Meanwhile, Washington devoted himself to the role of gentleman farmer, taking an unusually keen interest in his plantations and their productivity. While the sprawling Custis domains on the York River were entrusted to a competent overseer, Washington assumed personal responsibility for the five farms, encompassing about 4,000 acres, that composed the Mount Vernon estate. In doing so, he undertook a range of duties as demanding as those expected of a regimental colonel on active service.7
Like his soldiering, Washington learned his farming on the job. Keen to preserve the land and its fertility, he experimented with alternatives to the Virginian staple crop of tobacco. In his efforts to do so, he ordered the latest books from London, works distilling the techniques that were driving England’s “agricultural revolution.” Drawing upon them, he was prepared to dabble and diversify. By 1765, Washington was also cultivating hemp, wheat, and corn. Although his hemp and flax proved unprofitable, production of the other crops—which could be sold on the domestic market, so avoiding costly shipping fees and commissions for London agents—rose over the next three to four years.
While Washington pored over his seed catalogs, the war against New France ground on. During 1758, the Anglo-Americans had gained the initiative, but the conflict was far from won. For example, although John Forbes had captured the Forks of the Ohio, the French still held hopes of retaking them. In the spring of 1759, Captain Lignery remained at Venango, where he massed reinforcements for projected counterattacks on Loyalhanna and Fort Pitt; by early July, he commanded some 700 Frenchmen and many more Indians. As it happened, this powerful force was diverted north to Niagara after intelligence arrived that a British army was en route to attack that crucial fort. In late July, Lignery arrived to find Niagara already besieged by the Anglo-Americans and a strong contingent of Iroquois, who had finally been persuaded to abandon their long-standing neutrality. The results of this shift were immediately apparent. Despite dwindling influence within the Ohio Country, in their own backyard on the New York frontier, the Six Nations remained a force to be reckoned with, and all but a handful of Lignery’s tribal allies promptly abandoned him rather than clash with them. When he attempted to break through the siege lines at La Belle Famille, his force was halted by British firepower, then hounded into flight by Six Nations warriors. Fort Niagara surrendered the next day, so marking the real end of Bourbon influence on the Ohio; after burning their contentious forts at Venango, Le Boeuf, and Presque Isle, the French withdrew westward to Detroit.8
That September, as Washington’s good friend George Mercer reported, the victors were busy securing their gains with a “very respectable” new fort at “Pittsburgh,” built of brick and capable of withstanding bombardment and holding a formidable garrison.9 The region’s Indians, the same Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingos who had recently ravaged the frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania, now seemed reconciled to the new regime. As another of Washington’s former officers, Robert Stewart, informed him, they were inclined “to enter into and cultivate a strict and permanent friendship with us,” meekly delivering up the captives they had taken in years of raiding. This change of heart was just as well: both the Delawares and the Shawnees were more numerous and powerful than previously imagined, even after the war casualties they’d suffered. According to Stewart, these same Indians held Washington above all others responsible for their losses: “Both those nations are greatly incensed against you, who they call the Great Knife and look on you to be author of their greatest misfortunes,” he reported.10
Coming from fellow warriors, Washington’s latest appellation was a compliment of sorts, no less menacing than “Devourer of Towns.” Very similar terms—“Big Knives” and “Long Knives”—were employed by the Ohio Indians as a catchall name for Virginians; this suggests that Washington, through his long stint of frontier service, had come to personify the Old Dominion’s war effort not only in the eyes of his fellow Virginians, but for Indians, too. The name also testifies to Washington’s unusually close acquaintance with the region’s tribes, stretching back to his diplomatic mission in 1753.
As Stewart realized, for all their apparent tranquility, the Ohio Indians remained a dangerous enemy if angered. This fact had been clear to General Forbes. In February 1759, as he lay dying in Philadelphia, he summoned his dwindling strength to warn the new commander in chief, Jeffery Amherst, of the importance of treating the Indians fairly and with respect. Forbes, who was by now reduced to a “most shocking and deplorable” sight, believed that Indian affairs were not generally understood, while those with the necessary expertise—men like Sir William Johnson, Britain’s superintendent of the northern Indians—used it for their own selfish ends. Forbes pleaded: “I beg in the mean time that you will not think triflingly of the Indians or their friendship; when I venture to assure you that twenty Indians are capable of laying half this province waste, of which I have been an eye witness.”11
Amherst would have done well to heed Forbes’s advice, but in 1759 he was preoccupied with the ongoing conquest of Canada. Besides Niagara, by August his troops had captured the Champlain Valley fortresses of Ticonderoga and Crown Point. The most significant—and famous—success came in September, when a detached force, under the command of the fiery young Major General Wolfe, seized Quebec. The decisive battle before the walls of the city on September 13 cost Wolfe his life, adding poignancy to an unexpected victory that sparked unprecedented celebrations on both sides of the Atlantic and providing a dramatic emotional highpoint for what became known as the annus mirabilis.
Unlike Amherst’s forces, which included thousands of provincials, Wolfe’s Quebec army had been composed almost entirely of veteran redcoats. Nominally British units, they also mustered a significant minority of officers and rank and file recruited in America, including both men born in the colonies and recent immigrants. For example, the 48th Foot had received an influx of local manpower both before and after its blooding under Braddock; returns compiled in 1757 show that some 12 percent of its rank and file were “Natives of America”; the number of men recruited on that continent among former indentured servants and transports from Britain would undoubtedly have been higher. The 48th’s lieutenant colonel in 1759 remained Ralph Burton, who had been wounded in command of the regiment while fighting alongside Washington on the Monongahela. Another survivor of Braddock’s defeat, and a former ensign in the Virginia Regiment who went on to distinguish himself at Louisbourg and Quebec as a lieutenant in the Royal American Regiment, was Alexander Stephen, the brother of Washington’s tough right-hand man, Adam Stephen.12
Both the joint British-American nature of Wolfe’s victory and its cost in human terms were brought home to Mount Vernon by the fate of William Henry Fairfax, for whom Washington had helped to secure an ensign’s commission in the 28th Foot. Young “Billy” came through the siege of Louisbourg unhurt but was mortally wounded at Quebec during the climactic battle on the Plains of Abraham; Wolfe had been leading Billy’s regiment in a bayonet charge when he received his own fatal injuries. There was a sad footnote in 1761, when the fifty guineas that Washington had loaned Billy three years earlier toward his expenses were repaid by his brother, Bryan.13
At the close of the annus mirabilis, patriotic Britons on both sides of the Atlantic were drawn more closely together than ever before, anticipating a glorious future for a mighty Protestant empire.14 Blood shed by men like Billy Fairfax and James Wolfe had helped to cement the bond. The spirit of joint endeavor and shared sacrifice was epitomized by the decision of the colony of Massachusetts Bay to vote £250 to pay for a monument to young Lord Howe in Westminster Abbey. It was unveiled on July 14, 1762, in testimony, as its inscription stated, of “his services and military virtues” and of the affection he had inspired among the officers and soldiers of Massachusetts. Work on the monument was supervised by the late Lord Howe’s younger brother Richard, now Fourth Viscount Howe, who’d distinguished himself for his fighting spirit as a captain in the Royal Navy. Deeply touched, “Black Dick” Howe intended to erect an obelisk as a reciprocal gesture of affection for his dead sibling and of gratitude to those Americans who cherished his memory; this was no less dear to another hard-fighting brother, Colonel William Howe, who had led Wolfe’s light infantry in a daring commando-style assault up the cliffs above Quebec on the memorable September 13, 1759. In coming years, as military opponents of George Washington, both Richard and William Howe were destined to play as important a role in British-American affairs as their much-lamented brother, George Augustus.15
By the time Lord Howe’s monument was finished, the sense of transatlantic unity and promise had only strengthened as Anglo-American armies completed the methodical conquest of Canada in 1760 and then proceeded to snap up Bourbon possessions in the Caribbean, taking the rich French sugar island of Martinique in early 1762 and, after Spain belatedly entered the conflict, capturing the fabulously wealthy port of Havana that same summer. All these conquests prompted fresh celebrations in British North America; they seemed prescient of a new era of prosperity for the colonies within an expanded British Empire and under a benevolent young king, George III, who had ascended to the throne upon his grandfather’s death in 1760.
Given these stirring times and the reports from all battle fronts that filled pages of newspapers like the Virginia Gazette, it is perhaps unsurprising to find hints that Washington had not completely forgotten his own dreams of military glory. His enduring interests were reflected in an invoice he sent to the London merchant Robert Cary on September 20, 1759 ordering busts to embellish Mount Vernon. These could not have been any more martial: two great captains of antiquity, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and four commanders who had made their names in Washington’s own century—Charles XII of Sweden; Frederick the Great of Prussia; John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough; and Marlborough’s fellow victor at Blenheim, Prince Eugene of Savoy. In addition, and continuing his distinctly warlike approach to interior decorating, Washington requested “2 furious wild beasts of any kind,” posed “as if approaching each other and eager to engage.” Washington’s military tastes were clearly untypical: while Cary was able to supply a pair of suitably belligerent lions, which remain in place at Mount Vernon, there were no busts available in the sizes required by Washington of any of the six military heroes. Poets, and philosophers, both ancient and modern, could be supplied instead, but Colonel Washington wasn’t interested in them; apparently, only soldiers reflected the warrior image he sought to project.16
Washington’s duties in Virginia’s House of Burgesses also brought reminders of a conflict in which he had recently fought. In November 1759, he served on a committee that considered the petitions of men of his old regiment who had now fallen on hard times. Christopher West had enlisted in the Virginia Regiment in September 1754 and was captured by the Indians in February 1756. After two years of captivity in Canada, he had been sent from Quebec to England to be exchanged for a French prisoner. At long last, “after many hardships,” West managed to rejoin his regiment and now sought compensation for his “lost time.” On Washington’s recommendations, the House agreed to allow West £32 to cover his pay during his captivity, with any further arrears to be settled by the regiment’s paymaster. Another petitioner must have struck an even stronger chord with Washington: in November 1758, Daniel McNeil had been wounded in a skirmish with the enemy at Fort Ligonier—probably the Loyalhanna “friendly fire” incident in which Washington had come so close to losing his life. McNeil’s injuries left him incapable of supporting his wife and three small children. After Washington and his fellow burgess Francis Lightfoot Lee examined his claim, it was resolved to grant him an immediate payment of £10, plus £5 per year for future subsistence.17
Although he had retired from active service, Washington’s experience continued to make him a valued pundit on Virginia’s military affairs. In 1760, a fresh Indian war had erupted, this time with the powerful Cherokees, whose growing alienation had been clear ever since they’d forsaken the Forbes expedition. That spring, Cherokee gunmen blockaded a fort built within their territory on the Little Tennessee River; yet another outpost named after the unlucky Lord Loudoun, it was garrisoned by men of the South Carolina Independent Companies and provincial troops from the same colony. When Lieutenant Governor William Bull of South Carolina appealed for help, Virginia’s Assembly voted to complete its regiment to 1,000 men under Colonel William Byrd and mount a relief expedition. Washington was notified too late to attend the crucial vote, and the absence of his expertise was mourned by Major Robert Stewart. In his opinion, Washington’s advice would probably have prevented “an expedition that a thousand circumstances concur in rendering impracticable.” Stewart believed it was madness to send raw, new-raised troops into the mountainous country of the “warlike and formidable” Cherokees, who in “their numbers and mode of warfare have so vast a superiority.”18
Stewart’s doubts were shared by his former commander. Besides the Virginian contingent, a force of regulars under Washington’s old comrade of the Forbes campaign, Colonel Archibald Montgomery, had marched to the relief of Fort Loudoun. Writing to a London correspondent, Washington believed that, while the French were now “so well drubbed” that there seemed little doubt that the conquest of Canada would be completed that summer, the Cherokees were a different matter. Healthy and in high spirits when they left Charleston, Montgomery’s men had already “penetrated into the heart of their country,” but their commander needed to be wary, as he had “a crafty subtle enemy to deal with that may give him most trouble when he least expects it.”19
Both Stewart and Washington were correct in their analysis. On August 9, 1760, with no prospect of help in sight, the starving garrison of Fort Loudoun was obliged to surrender. Montgomery’s force had fended off a Cherokee ambush near the settlement of Etchoe on June 27 but, with scores of wounded to care for, lacked the transport to push onward with enough supplies to complete its mission; Byrd’s command moved so sluggishly that it was still inside Virginian territory when the fort fell.
Amherst subdued the heartland of Canada as easily as Washington had predicted, but it took another expedition to bring the defiant Cherokees to heel. This was commanded by none other than James Grant, the same officer who had been overwhelmed and captured outside Fort Duquesne in September 1758. Exchanged in time to join Montgomery’s expedition, Grant now knew the Cherokees and their daunting mountains and had no intention of underestimating either. Like Forbes before him, Grant was sympathetic to the Indians, informing Amherst: “If both sides were heard . . . the Indians have been the worst used.” Most of the Cherokees regretted recent killings and would gladly make peace if possible, Grant added.20 But Amherst was unconvinced by such claims: the Cherokees must be severely punished before there could be any talk of peace. Grant was obliged to obey. His 1761 punitive campaign, which ravaged the Cherokees’ towns, was a model of its kind, using packhorses to penetrate the tribe’s mountainous homeland and deploying seasoned veterans who were no longer unnerved by war whoops. Grant’s advance was screened by a small but highly effective corps of scouts: these were an unusual mixture of northern and southern Indians—Mohawks and Mahicans, Catawbas and Chickasaws—leavened with white rangers and volunteers from the regulars.21
Grant’s motley scouts were led by Captain Quintin Kennedy of the 17th Foot, who had been wounded at Braddock’s defeat as an ensign in the 44th and had since made a name for himself as one of the British Army’s leading practitioners of American bush fighting. Kennedy’s corps included yet another survivor of Braddock’s campaign, the Iroquois warrior Silver Heels, who had alerted Washington to the presence of Ensign Jumonville’s party in 1754. Having helped him to ignite a global war, Silver Heels had seen far more of the ensuing conflict than Washington. Striking up a friendship with the ambitious and energetic Kennedy, Silver Heels had followed him to war on the New York frontier and then against the Cherokees in the Carolinas. There his experiences highlighted the cultural differences between the tribal allies. On May 6, 1761, when Grant’s expedition reached Fort Ninety Six, eight Chickasaws came into camp and performed the war dance. A British officer, Captain Christopher French of the 22nd Foot, reported how “one of them observed that Silver Heels a Seneca Mohawk Indian who came with us from New York was a looker on, [and they] desired he would dance, which after some difficulty [on] account of his not being understood by them, he did.” After the Cherokees were subdued by Grant’s deliberate scorched-earth strategy, Silver Heels joined Kennedy on the expedition sent from the mainland against Martinique. Kennedy commanded the four companies of rangers that spearheaded the successful assault on the island in January 1762. Having escaped numerous hazards since 1755, like many other British veterans Kennedy swiftly succumbed to the West Indian climate; but Silver Heels survived and accompanied the slaves and other plunder that the captain had sent back to New York.22
Just as colonial Americans seemed increasingly “British” in identity as the war entered its final, victorious phase, for their part, some Old Country soldiers reciprocated by relating ever more closely with the people they had been sent to protect. They consciously adopted the “American” label to distinguish themselves from officers serving in Germany, who were believed to receive greater recognition; this gave an interesting twist to George Washington’s persistent gripe that colonial officers received second-class treatment compared with Britons.
Writing from London in October 1760, where he had been sent with Major General Amherst’s dispatches announcing the final conquest of Canada, Major Isaac Barré revealed an affiliation with the Americans that was destined to grow far stronger in coming years. Barré, who had served as Wolfe’s adjutant general at Quebec and was shot in the face during the firefight on the Plains of Abraham, bitterly informed Amherst that “any seam or scar” received in Germany was “called a mark of honor, when the same in a poor American is either unnoticed or supposed to be got by inoculation.”23 Two years later, when the British were besieging Havana, another Quebec veteran, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Fletcher of the 35th Foot, told his sister that, while officers who had “stayed at home in peace and quietness” had monopolized the promotion list, those on active service had been shamefully shoved aside: “You will no doubt call us a parcel of growling Americans,” Fletcher wrote, adding that they had good cause to be so.24
This intriguing “Americanization” was also apparent in the tactics adopted by the British Army. By the Caribbean campaigns of 1762, the veteran redcoats were employing unconventional techniques that would have shocked Braddock. Enemy strongpoints on mountainous Martinique had fallen to fluid and headlong assaults by light infantry, grenadiers, and rangers, plus a handful of Indian warriors like Silver Heels. The general who assumed command of the victorious Martinique army for the attack on Havana observed: “They have conquered in a few days, the strongest country you ever saw, in the American way, running or with the Indian whoop.” As that “growling American,” Colonel Fletcher of the 35th, put it in another letter home, these highly aggressive tactics had worked wonders in intimidating the opposition: “Our North American manner of attacking the enemy equally surprised as well as frightened them to such a degree that none of them . . . could be prevailed upon, either to attack or defend.”25
When the Seven Years’ War was brought to a close at the Peace of Paris in 1763, Britons on both sides of the Atlantic contemplated a new era of greatness. Just twelve years later, they were locked in a bitter and bloody civil war. Ironically, the seeds of that conflict sprouted from the sheer scale and decisiveness of Britain’s victory. Unlike previous Anglo-French struggles, which had typically ended with a restoration of the prewar situation, the Seven Years’ War caused seismic shifts in the balance of power. Ministers in distant London now faced the challenge of administering vast new American territories: on the mainland alone they had acquired Canada and all other French claims east of the Mississippi. Before the definitive treaty was signed, France had already transferred Louisiana west of the Mississippi to Spain, thereby relinquishing its remaining American territory. Meanwhile, in partial exchange for Havana, Spain ceded Florida to Britain.
The maintenance and administration of this greatly expanded North American empire would require money and manpower. Before these new costs were even considered, there was the question of paying the reckoning for the war that had just been won. At its beginning, Britain’s national debt stood at nearly £75 million; by 1763, it had rocketed to almost £123 million, with interest at £4.5 million a year—and this at a time when the annual national budget was just £8 million. With taxation far higher in Britain than in America, it seemed only fair to British policy makers that the colonists in whose interests the war had been fought should help to shoulder the burden. This assumption misread the mood and mindset of Americans who had long since grown accustomed to ruling themselves through their own elected assemblies, bodies like Virginia’s House of Burgesses. Americans were not represented in Parliament, so why should they pay the taxes it sought to impose upon them? Indeed, to do so would deprive them of their prized English liberties; over the coming decade, sporadic British efforts to tax the colonies would be interpreted by many Americans as a sinister ministerial plot aimed at achieving nothing less.26
There were other baleful legacies to Britain’s overwhelming victory in 1763. The humiliations heaped upon a humbled France ensured that revenge against her old enemy would henceforth become the primary objective of her foreign policy. More immediately, the eradication of French power on the North American continent played a part in fomenting another dangerous Indian war, far more widespread than the conflict with the Cherokees.
As the tribes of the interior were no longer needed as allies against the old enemy, Major General Amherst sought to cut costs by ending the customary policy of providing them with ammunition and other gifts. Deeply offended by what they regarded as a gross show of contempt and convinced by a flow of white settlers across the Appalachians that the promises made at the Treaty of Easton back in 1758 were meaningless, a formidable Indian confederacy, embracing the Ohio and western tribes, struck back with a devastating coordinated assault. Small posts recently taken from the French, like Venango and Presque Isle, were engulfed, leaving larger strongpoints—Forts Niagara and Pitt and the stockaded settlement at Detroit—marooned under Indian blockade. Raids lapped against the frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania, prompting an exodus of settlers that recalled the grim years 1755 to 1758.27
This Indian war of independence, traditionally named after the Ottawa leader Pontiac, erupted when Amherst was least able to quell it. Most of the veteran regulars responsible for conquering New France had been sent to the Caribbean, where they died in the thousands from tropical disease. Those survivors of the siege of Havana who trickled back to New York were but a pitiful remnant of the once-formidable “American Army.” The desperate Amherst managed to gather some 400 Highlanders—all that now remained of Montgomery’s regiment and two battalions of the 42nd, or Royal Highland Regiment—and to place them under the command of Washington’s old commander, Colonel Henri Bouquet, with orders to relieve Fort Pitt.
Obliged to retrace the road he’d followed during Forbes’s campaign, by early afternoon on August 5, Bouquet had marched his convoy of packhorses as far as Bushy Run, about twenty-five miles from his objective. Here, he was attacked by a strong force of Indians: local Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingos joined by Wyandots, Miamis, and Ottawas from the west.
Alerted by the Indians’ tracks and fires, Bouquet had arrayed his command in a hollow square. This defensive formation kept the enemy at bay, but with casualties mounting and little water to be had, by evening his situation looked bleak. The next day, the Indians renewed their assault, fighting with a determination that impressed their enemies. Bouquet proved equal to the crisis. By deliberately weakening part of his perimeter, he lured the Indians forward into a devastating trap, meeting them with close-range volleys followed by a counterattack that allowed his regulars to ply their bayonets. According to Private Robert Kirkwood of Montgomery’s Highlanders, at this the Indians “set to their heels and were never after able to rally again.”28
Bouquet’s close-run victory enabled him to push on to Fort Pitt and was widely celebrated as proof that the Indians, who had beaten Braddock and Grant nearby, “and expected to have served Colonel Bouquet in the same manner,” were no longer invincible. The outcome owed much to the resilience of Bouquet’s veterans and to his own presence of mind: since 1758, he had clearly continued to devote thought to the tactical demands of the wilderness. Writing to congratulate him on his success, one of his officers, Captain Harry Gordon, observed, “You have many times talked of the disposition you put in practice, as preferring it, and I made no doubt the consequence would show the justice of your thoughts.”29
Bushy Run did not end the Indian war. The conflict dragged for another year before the momentum of the tribes’ offensive slackened in the face of growing disunity and a systematic advance against the villages along the Muskingum River, west of Fort Pitt, commanded by the indefatigable Bouquet. Yet “Pontiac’s War” wrecked Amherst’s reputation as the conqueror of Canada; he was replaced as commander in chief in North America by Washington’s friend and yet another veteran of Braddock’s defeat, Major General Thomas Gage.
The unexpected Indian war had prompted much comment and alarm in London. In October 1763, in a belated attempt to defuse tensions between whites and Indians, a proclamation was issued. Renewing the pledge made at the Treaty of Easton five years earlier, this banned white settlement west of the Appalachians, reserving that territory for the Indians “for the present.” Intended to appease and reassure the tribes, the proclamation had the opposite effect on the colonists, not least George Washington.
From his first teenaged forays beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, Washington had been drawn by the trans-Appalachian west and its rich potential for exploitation. By 1763, for all his own extensive acreage at Mount Vernon and the Custis plantations, Washington’s hunger for western land was stronger than ever, and he remained receptive to any initiative that might add more. This interest was stimulated by economic problems: at the very time Washington was working to maximize the productivity of his farms, he was facing an increasingly frustrating relationship with the English merchants who acted as agents in selling his tobacco and who bought and imported the luxury items that were virtually unobtainable in the American colonies.
Both George and Martha Washington were reluctant to scrimp on the fashionable English clothes and furniture fitting for their station or on regular entertaining. The Virginian custom of unstinting hospitality ensured that there were often guests for dinner at Mount Vernon. There were parties, card games, dancing, and such balls and theater performances as Williamsburg or Alexandria could offer, but, above all, fox hunting. An accomplished horseman, Washington was as devoted to following the hounds as any English country squire. His diaries are full of descriptions of hunting, cornering, and killing foxes across the Northern Neck. For example, in January 1769, he was out hunting with his Fairfax County neighbors on five successive days. Washington was equally fanatical about preserving the purity of his pack of hounds, noting with despair the “promiscuity” of bitches such as “Countess,” who broke free from her kennel and mated once with Washington’s own spaniel and twice with “a small foist looking yellow cur” before her escape was discovered.30
The Washingtons’ lavish lifestyle and George’s policy of upgrading and expanding his estates and then buying more slaves to work the extra acres, came at a price. In early 1764, he received a jolt when Robert Cary and Company informed him that he was no less than £1,811.1.1 in their debt. Washington was ruefully obliged to admit that the merchant’s figures were right: the harsh reality was that Mount Vernon tobacco fetched lower prices than that grown by his neighbors. Time and again, Washington complained that he was underpaid for his tobacco and overcharged for the imported goods, which were often of inferior quality or damaged during their passage across the Atlantic. Just as Washington was convinced that provincial officers had failed to receive their just rewards, so it now seemed that the colonists were being treated as second-class citizens of the British Empire, palmed off with outmoded and shoddy merchandise. Every chipped piece of china, every ill-fitting pair of breeches, every barrel of beer that had already been drunk down to the dregs by thirsty sailors on the voyage from England contributed to a growing sense of resentment.
Washington’s readiness to experiment with alternatives to tobacco offered one possible solution to the financial dilemma; but, given his long-standing interests, land speculation was far more alluring. Washington was willing to seek land wherever it could be found, and not just in the west. In the wake of the 1763 peace, he made two trips to the Dismal Swamp, which straddled Virginia’s border with North Carolina, an area that appeared to offer potential for drainage and development. Washington’s account of his trip to the region that October provides a detailed record of a swamp that was a geological oddity, lying above the surrounding land.31 Along with several partners Washington formed a company to drain and develop the area. The next year, 1764, slaves were sent to start work, but returns were modest.
In June 1763, Washington joined eighteen other speculators from Virginia and Maryland in a far more ambitious venture called the Mississippi Company: this aimed to take out an option on a vast swathe of land—2.5 million acres—recently conquered from the French. Yet before the company members could even file their petition, their hopes were dashed by that October’s royal proclamation. That same legislation blocked another ploy by which Washington hoped to acquire western lands. Ever since 1759, the recently retired Washington and other officers of the Virginia Regiment had petitioned for their share in the 200,000 acres of bounty land promised by Governor Dinwiddie to stimulate recruitment back in 1754; like the Mississippi Company, this initiative was sunk by the new ban upon trans-Appalachian settlement. While it failed to halt the flow of white settlers across the mountains, the proclamation was more effective in blocking the efforts of major speculators like Washington, who required clear title to land before they could sell it.32
But Washington remained undeterred, viewing the 1763 proclamation as a “temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians.” To be ready to act when that barrier fell and to preempt other speculators, in 1767 he proposed a partnership to another Virginian veteran, Captain William Crawford; according to local tradition, Washington had known Crawford since they were schoolboys in Fredericksburg. Together they would survey and patent prime tracts around Pittsburgh and farther down the Ohio. Washington told Crawford that anyone who “neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for their own . . . will never regain it.” Crawford, who was on the spot, would identify the best locations, while it was Washington’s role to secure them as soon as possible, covering the costs of surveying and patenting. Tracts would be divided up between them. Washington urged Crawford to proceed in all secrecy, both to avoid broadcasting his dismissive attitude toward the proclamation and to keep competitors in the dark.33
The opportunity that men like Washington had been waiting for came in November 1768, when the Iroquois formally relinquished their claim to an extensive territory, including what would become Kentucky. Seeking to guarantee the integrity of their tribal heartlands, the Iroquois had surrendered land that was not theirs to give. While the so-called Treaty of Fort Stanwix was never ratified by Britain and was angrily repudiated by the Shawnees and other tribes of the Ohio Valley for whom Kentucky was a prized hunting ground, it stimulated a land grab that effectively pushed the dividing line between whites and Indians far westward to the Ohio River; over the next quarter century the Shawnees and a growing band of tribal allies would fight tenaciously to defend that new frontier.34
Encouraged by the bulging of the hated Proclamation Line, in the following year Washington formally renewed his claim to a colonel’s share of the long-promised bounty lands—the just due of those who had “toiled, and bled” for Virginia. Washington hoped for a single large reserve within which each qualified veteran could pick the best lands he could find. Instead, Fauquier’s successor as Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Norborne Berkeley, Lord Botetourt, and his council required claimants to make their selection from twenty distinct parcels of land. In response to this, Washington called meetings of the veterans and persuaded them to appoint his partner Captain Crawford to act as surveyor for all.35
In autumn 1770, in company with another veteran of the Virginia Regiment’s campaigns, his friend Dr. James Craik, Washington set out to supervise the surveys, traveling to the Great Kanawha River, a tributary of the Ohio below Pittsburgh. The trek took him past places evocative of memories: the Great Meadows, where he had been obliged to capitulate in 1754 and the site of Braddock’s massacre a year later. He also met Thomas Gist, the son of his faithful guide Christopher, who as an ensign in the Virginia Regiment had been captured by the Hurons at Grant’s Defeat. Yet Washington’s detailed journal remained focused on the future potential of these lands, not their past significance; he was more concerned with soil and timber than recollections of near-death encounters. For example, in his diary for October 13, 1770, Washington wrote: “When we came down the hill to the plantation of Mr. Thomas Gist, the land appeared charming; that which lay level being as rich and black as anything could possibly be.”36
Only occasionally did Washington note the intrusion of the past upon the present. On October 28, he encountered “an old acquaintance,” one of the Indians who had accompanied him on his diplomatic mission to the French forts in 1753. Seneca chief “Kiashuta,” or “Guyasuta,” was apparently delighted to see Washington once again, even though he had fought against the British during the French and Indian War and the ensuing Indian rebellion associated with Pontiac; indeed, before that outbreak, Guyasuta had moved among the discontented tribes seeking to forge a truly pan-Indian confederacy; had he succeeded, the outcome of “Pontiac’s War”—and the course of North American history—might have been very different. To Washington, however, Guyasuta the visionary Indian diplomat remained the “Hunter”: he now lived up to his name by supplying his guests with a “quarter of very fine buffalo.”37
It was Washington who allotted the bounty lands among the veterans, officers, and soldiers alike. When his own field officer’s share was added to that bought from men too poor to help finance the surveys or too skeptical to risk a commitment, Washington had amassed some 24,000 acres; with land eventually acquired under other bounty provisions included within the 1763 proclamation, which invited war veterans to settle in Florida, Canada, and other territories wrested from the Bourbons, this total rose to more than 35,000 acres. His policy of selecting the very best land—“the cream of the country,” as he later called it—for himself and his crony Craik attracted criticism from fellow veterans.38
Washington responded by emphasizing that it was only through his determination that they had been given the chance to claim their bounty lands at all. One veteran who felt that he had been denied his rightful quota was Major George Muse, the same man who as Washington’s lieutenant colonel at Fort Necessity had been stigmatized as a coward. Muse’s “impertinent letter” has regrettably been lost, but Washington’s angry response reveals his lasting contempt for an officer who had failed to match his own standards of gentlemanly conduct. He wrote:
I am not accustomed to receive such from any man, nor would have taken the same language from you personally, without letting you feel some marks of my resentment. . . . For though I understand you were drunk when you did it, yet give me leave to tell you, that drunkenness is no excuse for rudeness; and that, but for your stupidity and sottishness you might have known, by attending to the public gazettes . . . that you had your full quantity of ten thousand acres of land allowed you . . . do you think your superlative merit entitles you to greater indulgences than others? . . . All my concern is that I ever engaged in behalf of so ungrateful and dirty a fellow as you are.39
Washington’s uncharacteristically withering dismissal of the wretched Muse suggests that his own military service and the high reputation that he had established continued to matter to him. This may help to explain why, in May 1772, he chose to pose for his first and what would presumably be his last formal portrait dressed not as the gentleman farmer he was, but as the officer of the Virginia Regiment that he had once been.
The resulting portrait of Washington, the first of seven to be painted by Charles Willson Peale, reveals an amiable-looking forty-year-old, confident of his status and apparently unconcerned about concealing the paunch now straining the buttons of the waistcoat he had worn in his twenties. In fact, as Peale could testify, the approach of middle age had done nothing to diminish Washington’s phenomenal strength. During his stay at Mount Vernon, the artist recalled how he and some other young men were stripped to their shirtsleeves and engaged in the sport of tossing a heavy iron bar. Without deigning to even remove his coat, Washington sauntered over, hefted the bar, and flipped it way beyond the farthest mark.40
Peale’s portrait includes telling details; they offer evidence that Washington’s selection of his old uniform was deliberate rather than whimsical and intended to recall specific aspects of his military career. For example, the faded crimson sash across his chest had once belonged to Braddock and was given to him as a keepsake by the dying general after the disastrous engagement from which Washington had miraculously emerged unscathed and with such credit. From the pocket of his waistcoat juts a folded paper marked “Order of March,” a carefully observed detail commemorating Washington’s responsibilities as brigadier under Forbes in 1758. Washington’s gorget—the small crescent-shaped badge of rank worn at the throat by eighteenth-century officers—bears the rampant lion and unicorn of the royal arms. This hint of lingering allegiance to Britain’s monarchy is intriguing. In 1772, the very act of donning his old regimentals must have evoked mixed memories of Washington’s days as guardian of the Virginian frontier, stirring both pride in his achievements and a residual anger at the slights he had endured. He could not have known that in just three years he would be in uniform once again, this time fighting to protect Virginian and American liberties from British tyranny.41
In fact, when he posed for Peale’s portrait, Washington had already acknowledged that armed resistance to imperial policies was not unthinkable. As noted, during the 1760s, Washington’s existing sense that the British establishment had failed to recognize his abilities was compounded by fresh grievances relating to his treatment at the hands of voracious London merchants and by the legislation that consistently hamstrung his ventures into land speculation. While Washington was clearly irked by what he regarded as British discrimination against colonials, during that same decade, as British taxation policies provoked vociferous colonial reaction, he scarcely gained the reputation of a radical revolutionary. In the House of Burgesses, where he represented his own Fairfax County from 1765, he typically took a backseat in the debate over what was increasingly seen as a ministerial conspiracy to strip Americans of their hard-won English liberties. Through Washington’s personal correspondence, however, it is possible to trace his growing disillusionment with imperial policies, a hardening in his attitude and, ultimately, an acceptance that war with Britain was inevitable.
In September 1765, Washington gave a dispassionate assessment of the effect of that year’s Stamp Act upon trade between Britain and her colonies. Rising to oppose Prime Minister George Grenville’s measure in a forceful speech in Parliament, the Quebec veteran Isaac Barré had used the opportunity to defend the much-maligned British Americans, describing them as “Sons of Liberty.” Barré, like the former war leader William Pitt, was hailed as a “friend” of the colonists; when his words were reported in American newspapers, they were swiftly embraced as a proud title by the most determined opponents of British taxation.42 Washington was not yet among them. While certainly believing the act, which aimed to impose a tax upon paper, to be “ill judged,” Washington distanced himself from “the speculative part of the colonists, who look upon this unconstitutional method of taxation as a direful attack upon their liberties, and loudly exclaim against the violation.” However, as he assured his wife’s uncle, Francis Dandridge, people were already beginning to realize that they could live without those “many luxuries which we lavish our substance to Great Britain for.” Turning to the “necessaries of life,” for the most part they could be found within the colonies themselves. This was scarcely firebrand rhetoric, but it nonetheless demonstrated a willingness to begin cutting the apron strings that still tethered colonial “children” psychologically to the “Mother Country.”43
As the controversy dragged on and ministers in London came and went, imposing legislation in fits and starts, British attempts to generate American revenue encountered peaks of colonial resistance, matched by deceptively tranquil troughs when economic conditions in America improved and discontent subsided. This suggests that, for many colonials, opposition to British policies was fueled by economic as much as by ideological factors. Yet the underlying issue, the perceived threat to liberty, endured; during the second half of the 1760s, the political stance of Washington, who was as interested as anyone in financial realities, slowly shifted.
By 1769, when the next concerted wave of British taxation policy, the Townshend Duties of 1767, prompted colonial resistance through nonimportation pacts, Washington’s position had altered significantly from four years earlier. By now he was contemplating armed resistance against “our lordly masters in Great Britain,” who seemed bent upon depriving Americans of their freedoms. But while Washington believed that “no man should scruple, or hesitate a moment to use a-ms [arms] in defense of so valuable a blessing” as liberty, he was still emphasizing that this “should be the last resource; the dernier resort.” Addresses to the king and Parliament had been tried and failed, yet it remained to be seen whether economic warfare targeting British trade and manufactures would bring ministers to a proper awareness of Americans’ rights and privileges.44
In May 1769, Washington was present when the House of Burgesses resolved that it alone had the right to tax Virginians. After Lieutenant Governor Botetourt responded by dissolving the defiant Assembly, Washington was among those burgesses who promptly adjourned to a local tavern and signed an agreement pledging to embargo all taxed items from Britain. Like many men of his class, however, Washington took a dim view of unrestrained mob action against British policies. He was unmoved by the “Boston Massacre” of March 1770, in which several members of a crowd were shot dead by the British soldiers they were baiting, and appalled by the destruction of property resulting from the “Boston Tea Party” in late 1773, when Bostonians disguised as Mohawks dumped a consignment of cut-rate East India Company tea into their harbor. Yet he was even more vehemently opposed to the punitive measures, which smacked of despotism, that the exasperated British promptly imposed in retaliation. These so-called Coercive Acts, which closed the port of Boston to all commerce, stripped the Massachusetts assembly of its powers to appoint the governor’s council, and saw the return of redcoats who had been removed amid the tension following the “Boston Massacre,” were widely interpreted as an all-out attack upon colonial rights and proved the real turning point for men like George Washington.45
By the summer of 1774, Washington was reconciled to the inevitability of war with Britain. Writing to Bryan Fairfax, the brother of his friend George William Fairfax, Washington believed that the time for petitions was now over: “Does it not appear, as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness, that there is a regular, systematic plan formed to fix the right and practice of taxation upon us?” he asked. Surely, the attack upon the liberty and property of the Bostonians mounted by the Coercive, or “Intolerable,” Acts was proof of that. Such tyrannical measures left no doubt that the ministry in London would stick at nothing to carry its point. For Washington, the only response was now clear: “Ought we not, then, to put our virtue and fortitude to the severest test?” It was another rhetorical question.46
Washington’s words reveal his alignment with other Americans, mostly from his own privileged background, who had imbibed the ideology evolved by a diverse but distinct body of English political writers during the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Collectively called the “Country Party,” these reform-minded thinkers among the landed gentry argued that the hallowed English constitution was endangered by the “corrupt” politics of the age, personified by the long-serving “prime minister,” Sir Robert Walpole; their writings provided a lens through which English and American radicals scrutinized the policies of subsequent British ministries, seeing the same dire tendencies that had ruined the virtuous Roman Republic, despite the best efforts of public-minded patriots like Cato, the hero of Joseph Addison’s much-admired play. Key “Country Party” texts warning against impending tyranny included John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters and The Independent Whig and Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke’s periodical The Craftsman. These works, and many more of a similar bent, could be found in the extensive library of Daniel Parke Custis, which Washington inherited upon marrying his widow, Martha Custis, in 1759; he had already begun reading about English history and politics while still a teenager.47
Ironically, the rarefied worldview of Englishmen who believed that their hard-won liberties were in peril resonated most strongly across the Atlantic among disgruntled Americans like Washington, bolstering suspicions of a calculated bid to strip them of their property and so reduce them to “slavery.” Just as Washington’s English-born mentors at Belvoir had provided patterns for his future conduct, so the writings of English political thinkers shaped the way in which he perceived the worsening crisis between colonies and Mother Country.
What Washington and many other Americans were now contemplating was a fight in defense of their cherished freedoms. Viewed from London’s perspective, such resistance would brand them as rebels. The last rebellion against the ruling Hanoverian regime, in 1745–46, had been crushed with signal savagery: on the battlefield of Culloden, in brutal punitive expeditions into the Scottish Highlands, and through a spate of executions. Twenty years later, the heads of men who had served in the Jacobite armies of Bonnie Prince Charlie and been hung, drawn, and quartered for treason were still spiked on Temple Bar overlooking Fleet Street, one of London’s busiest thoroughfares. In the early hours of December 9, 1766, that year’s Annual Register reported, a furtive sportsman “was observed to watch his opportunity of discharging musket-balls from a steel cross-bow, at the two remaining heads upon Temple Bar.” His targets belonged to Francis Townley and George Fletcher, who were among officers of the Manchester Regiment executed on Kennington Common on August 2, 1746.48 In 1775, there was nothing to suggest that a new crop of American rebels would not share their fate.
One man who knew about rebellion from hard personal experience, the former Jacobite Hugh Mercer, had relocated from Pennsylvania to Virginia in 1771. Mercer’s move south came at Washington’s suggestion, and he settled near Mount Vernon at Fredericksburg. The two veterans forged a strong friendship, and both were members of the town’s Freemasons’ lodge. Mercer’s daughter Anne married Robert Patton; their great-great-grandson would become that quintessential American warrior, General George Patton.49
Another British-born veteran of the French and Indian War, Horatio Gates, came to Virginia soon after Mercer, in 1772. Gates was a former regular army officer who had captained a New York independent company at Braddock’s defeat and had been wounded there. He subsequently served as brigade-major to Brigadier General Stanwix at Fort Pitt in 1759. Two years later, when Stanwix’s replacement, Robert Monckton, was appointed major general to command the expedition against Martinique, he took Gates along as his aide-de-camp. Following the capitulation of the island’s key citadel of Fort Royal in February 1762, Gates was awarded the honor of carrying the victory dispatches to London. Despite this mark of distinction, which brought promotion to major, after the peace, Gates’s military career stagnated. Like Washington, Gates felt aggrieved at being denied the recognition that he believed his services merited, eventually choosing to make a new life in the Shenandoah Valley. There he soon established friendships with neighbors, including that seasoned veteran of the Virginia Regiment, Adam Stephen.50
From his Berkeley County plantation, “Traveler’s Rest,” Gates extended an offer of hospitality to another old comrade of the Braddock expedition, Charles Lee, who had come to Virginia in February 1774. Lee too was convinced that he had never received due recognition of his efforts and abilities from the British establishment. After the peace of 1763, Lee followed a rambling and varied military career that had taken him to a Poland torn apart by insurrection, and as far afield as Moldavia, where he had fought with the Russians against the Ottoman Turks in a campaign that helped to convince him of the superiority of guerrilla warfare over more conventional strategies.51
An outspoken advocate of American liberty, in Virginia, Lee soon made his mark on the local political scene: he was in Williamsburg when the news arrived of London’s draconian response to the Boston Tea Party, and in conjunction with another radical, the brilliant young Virginian lawyer Thomas Jefferson, he helped to orchestrate an official day of fasting to express solidarity with the Bostonians. From the Old Dominion, Lee headed north to Philadelphia and New York. Drawing upon his extensive military experience, he published a pamphlet calculated to stiffen the resolve of Americans now bracing themselves for war with Britain. Lee assured them that they had nothing to fear from the redcoats—“debauched weavers ’prentices, the scum of the Irish Roman Catholics, who desert upon every occasion, and a few Scots, who are not strong enough to carry packs”; though “expert in all the tricks of the parade,” such troops were “totally unfit for real service.” In his estimation, the “yeomanry of America” would prove more than a match for the regulars: in just a few months, by concentrating on the basics, such militia could be transformed into a “most formidable infantry.” Lee believed that the Americans had another crucial advantage on their side: unlike “the peasantry of other countries,” they were familiar with firearms from infancy and consequently “expert in the use of them.” Gates warned Lee to moderate his “zeal in the noble cause” while adding that he was himself willing to risk his life “to preserve the liberty of the western world.” Like Gates and Mercer before him, Lee settled in Virginia and was likewise destined to play a leading role as the political crisis intensified into a military conflict.52
During 1774, even as war looked ever more likely, Washington had other concerns. Besides overseeing the steady expansion of Mount Vernon, which acquired a new wing, he was entrusted with the melancholy responsibility of selling off the familiar furniture and furnishings of the far grander mansion at Belvoir. The Fairfaxes—George William and his wife, Sally—had decided to make a new home in England; they never came back. For Washington, their departure marked a break with the past: it was at Belvoir, as a gangling teenager, that he had begun to acquire the polish of the finished gentleman; it was there he had listened to Colonel Fairfax’s inspirational tales of European warfare—and fallen in love with Sally: in different ways, both had exerted a profound influence upon his first career as a soldier.
There was also the still-unresolved matter of the war bounties, both those resulting from Dinwiddie’s 1754 announcement regarding the Ohio lands and those promised by the British government under the 1763 proclamation. When he finally learned, in early 1774, that Lord Hillsborough, the secretary of state for the American colonies, had ruled that only regular soldiers were eligible to apply for the 1763 bounties, it seemed yet another example of anti-American prejudice: echoing the words of the angry letter that he had written to Dinwiddie on behalf of his Virginia Regiment in 1757, he observed: “I conceive the services of a provincial officer as worthy of reward as a regular one, and can only be withheld from him with injustice.” As such a ruling rested upon equal measures of “malice, absurdity, and error,” he could see no reason to be bound by it.53
In any case, events were now moving with a momentum that suggested such imperial decrees would soon be redundant. That August, Washington returned to Philadelphia as one of Virginia’s seven delegates to the First Continental Congress, summoned to hammer out a pan-colonial response to the escalating dispute with Britain; attended by representatives from every colony save Georgia, this was a show of cooperation that would have been unthinkable during Washington’s twenties, when Americans were notorious for their intercolonial squabbling.
The fifty-six delegates included men who had achieved prominence during the previous decade of periodic resistance to British legislation by openly challenging Parliament’s right to levy taxation: in 1765, besides galvanizing Virginia’s strident response to the Stamp Act, the backwoods lawyer Patrick Henry gained fame—and notoriety—with his warning that, just as Charles I had met his master in Oliver Cromwell, so he didn’t doubt that “some good American would stand up, in favor of his country.” Two years later, equally emotive language had been used by another of the delegates sent to Philadelphia in 1774. In a series of articles known as the “Letters of a Pennsylvania Farmer,” John Dickinson had argued that craven submission to London’s policies would complete “the tragedy of American liberty,” leaving his countrymen no better than the downtrodden peasantry of France and Poland, “in wooden shoes and with uncombed hair.” Other delegates, sharp legal minds John Adams of Massachusetts and John Jay of New York, were to undertake a still greater role in their country’s affairs in coming years.
Even now, old ties exerted their pull. Resolving to form an “Association” imposing a boycott on British imports from December 1, 1774, delegates continued to describe themselves as “His Majesty’s most loyal subjects.” To enforce this pact, “Committees of Observation and Inspection” were to be formed in “every county, city, and town,” picked by those men qualified to elect representatives in their own legislatures.54 This was a crucial development: while the delegates sent to Philadelphia had been drawn overwhelmingly from the traditional leadership strata of landowners, merchants, and planters epitomized by gentry like Washington and the Congress’s president, his fellow Virginian Peyton Randolph, the new committees reflected a far broader membership, giving humble artisans and farmers a heady taste of power and influence.
Washington said little enough during the six weeks of debates, although there is no doubting the strength of his private views. That September, while the Congress was still in session, he received a letter from Robert Mackenzie, who had served as a captain in the Virginia Regiment and was now a lieutenant in one of the British regiments recently sent to overawe the truculent populace of Massachusetts Bay. Back in 1760, when he first tried to transfer to the regulars, Mackenzie had written to Washington for a testimonial. His request was declined, courteously but firmly, because Washington felt such a reference should better come from Mackenzie’s current colonel, William Byrd. Mackenzie had eventually succeeded in securing an ensign’s commission in the 58th Foot, only to be captured by the French as his regiment was on passage to the siege of Havana in 1762. Since then, he had gained a lieutenancy in the 43rd Foot. It was in that capacity that Mackenzie sought to alert his former colonel to the dangerous extremism of the Boston radicals he now found himself billeted among; they were bent upon nothing less than “total independence,” he warned, and needed to be reined in by “abler heads and better hearts.” Indeed, their rebellious behavior and scandalous “attacks upon the best characters” in the colony had obliged General Gage to put Boston in “a formidable state of defense.”55
Washington’s reply showed that he now shared much in common with the very men that Mackenzie was bidding him to shun. Neither the leaders of Massachusetts Bay nor “any thinking man in all North America” were seeking independence from Britain, he wrote. On the contrary, it was the “ardent wish of the warmest advocates for liberty, that peace and tranquility, upon constitutional grounds, may be restored, and the horrors of civil discord prevented.” That said, the colonies would never “submit to the loss of those valuable rights and privileges, which are essential to the happiness of every free state, and without which, life, liberty, and property are rendered totally insecure.” If the ministry in London was determined “to push matters to extremity,” Washington predicted, “more blood will be spilt . . . than history has ever yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America.”56
That civil war grew more likely by the day. In Philadelphia, Washington made some telling purchases: a new sash and epaulettes for his uniform and a book by a veteran officer of the 48th Foot, Thomas Webb, entitled A Military Treatise on the Appointments of the Army.57 When Washington returned from Philadelphia, he found Virginians busily preparing for impending war. The notoriously inefficient county militia was being reorganized into more rigorously drilled “independent companies”; as the Old Dominion’s most illustrious soldier, “Colonel Washington” was in heavy demand to head them. By March of 1775, Washington had been invited to lead five companies, including that of his own Fairfax County—the first to be raised. That same month, a second Virginia Convention was summoned; this ordered that the colony should “be immediately put into a posture of defense.” As war loomed ever closer, so the value placed upon Washington’s experience rose correspondingly: his standing ensured that he was comfortably elected as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, scheduled to open in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775. Some two weeks before then, news reached Mount Vernon that the anticipated rebellion against Britain had already erupted, with murderous clashes on April 19 between redcoats and militia at Lexington and Concord in the countryside surrounding Boston.
Writing to his close friend and former neighbor, George William Fairfax, who was now in England, Washington was adamant that the heavy losses inflicted upon the regulars as they were chivvied back into Boston should convince even the most hawkish British minister that, far from being cowards, Americans were willing to “fight for their liberties and property.” It was indeed unhappy “to reflect, that a brother’s sword has been sheathed in a brother’s breast, and that, the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with blood, or inhabited by slaves.” These were sad alternatives, he acknowledged: “But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?”58
Washington would answer his own question soon enough.