CHAPTER TWO

On the Borderland

ON A JUNE MORNING IN 1815 a schooner called Lady of the Lake set sail from northern Virginia bearing George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of George and Martha Washington, and a great admirer of the hero. Custis had already transformed his mansion, Arlington, into a virtual museum of Washington’s life and career; and on that June day Custis headed down the Potomac with two companions in a further act of commemoration. They dropped anchor off the shore of Westmoreland County and clambered into a small boat. Once ashore they met up with two local gentlemen and a random party of fishermen, who, when told of the historic event about to unfold, fell in with Custis’s group in its march to a spot not far from the water. Custis and his companions were bearing a slab of stone and an American flag. When they reached their destination they reverently wrapped the flag around the stone, which was then gently placed by four men—all descended from Revolutionary patriots—on a pedestal of rocks. The slab was engraved with the words:

HERE

THE 11TH OF FEBRUARY, 1732 (OLD STYLE,)

GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS BORN.

There were only ruins at the place, but Custis had been guided by a pile of bricks that he surmised “once formed the hearth around which Washington in his infancy had played.” After laying the stone, the party repaired to the schooner, fired a cannon in salute, and departed. Custis later wrote, probably correctly, that his marker was “the first stone to the memory of Washington.”* His memorial itself became a valued relic. Curiosity seekers who tramped to the remote site over the years chipped off pieces of it as souvenirs until the entire stone had been whittled away by 1870.1

A new memorial rose at the behest of the federal government and the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1896. A forty-ton obelisk—a replica of the Washington Monument in the nation’s capital, but one-tenth its size—was delivered via barge to the shores of Popes Creek and set in place upon what was thought to be the exact site of Washington’s birth. In the early 1930s, as the two-hundredth anniversary of Washington’s birth approached, a private group led by a Washington descendant moved the obelisk to construct a “Memorial House,” a re-creation of an eighteenth-century Virginia planter’s dwelling. Fortunately for history, the obelisk and the Memorial House that followed it were erected on the wrong spot. The builders missed the mark by about a hundred feet. Several years later archaeologists unearthed some 16,000 artifacts at the true site. The birth site, a family cemetery, and the surrounding 394 acres were officially designated the George Washington Birthplace National Monument under the administration of the National Park Service in 1932. Now set at the entrance of the park, the obelisk gradually rears up in the windshields of approaching visitors, creating the odd sensation that one has made a wrong turn and ended up on the National Mall.

I arrived at the Birthplace to the sound of clanging. The site was in full “plantation life” mode, with a blacksmith hammering away, costumed women cooking hoecakes in a fire, others washing laundry, and a woman pressing apples for cider. This spectacle of the plantation’s daily round of chores presented an ironic tableau, for many of the on-lookers that day were descendants of the women who had actually done that work on this very spot two and a half centuries earlier.

The Birthplace was hosting a gathering of Bowden descendants: three generations of Bowdens had been bound as indentured servants to two generations of the Washington family. This reunion had come about as the result of nearly twenty years of research by a California woman, Anita Wills, who had begun tracing her ancestors in 1980. She tracked the family line back to Virginia, where she discovered she was descended from Revolutionary War veterans. She sent her findings to the Daughters of the American Revolution and was duly inducted. Continuing her search, she discovered the Washington family connection from nineteenth-century documents in Fredericksburg that mentioned the family’s service to the Washingtons at Popes Creek. The Park Service historian at Popes Creek was startled to get a phone call from a woman claiming to be descended from the plantation’s servants. No one had ever been able to trace such a connection before; but he was convinced when he saw the documentation Anita Wills had gathered from county legal records and the Washington family’s own papers.

George Washington had known the Bowdens well. In his teen years, when he spent long visits at Popes Creek with his brother Austin, he was waited on by Mary Bowden, who was three years older than Washington. Her daughter Patty was later willed by Austin to George’s niece Elizabeth Washington Spotswood. An indentured servant could be sold, given away, or bequeathed in a will during the term of her contract, like a slave, though eventually she would be free.

Indentured servitude was a colonial version of the American Dream: if you hated the squalor and stink of London or the tedium of your father’s pig farm in Yorkshire, America beckoned. If you were too poor to buy passage to the New World you could get there by signing a contract selling your labor to a planter for seven years. The labor and the conditions might be harsh, but at the end of your term you would get your freedom back and some cash, and you would be in the New World with the sky as your limit. I had never heard that blacks could be indentured servants, but somehow the Bowdens fit into this system.

The day’s slate of events included music, a wreath-laying by the descendants, and tours of the plantation. (Park Service archaeologists have been looking for the site of the slave quarters there for some time, without much success. They have discovered artifacts and traces of buildings but nothing they can definitively identify as a slave dwelling.) Between stops on the walking tour the Bowden descendants traded family stories. A branch of the family had migrated to Pennsylvania, where they had been active in the Underground Railroad. Some Bowden descendants had served in the Revolutionary War on the American side; others had fought for the North in the Civil War. They had a rich oral history and an equally rich documented history. One man had brought with him a thick volume of photographs and historical records he had assembled in years of researching the family history.

I had a long talk with an elderly woman who told a family story not related to Washington, but so powerful and so poignantly evocative of the struggles of the enslaved people that I wrote it down anyway. The story was told to the woman by her grandfather, who had lived it. Her grandfather’s mother, she said, was a slave on a plantation near Hilton Head in South Carolina before the Civil War. The overseer on the place was a cruel man. Even when she had recently given birth, the overseer “would make her jump over a fence on her way to work and then—maybe I shouldn’t say this—curse her on her way to work. And then she overheard a conversation between the master and one of his overseers that if a woman beat a man they wouldn’t do anything to her because it was a shame on the man.” One day she was late getting to the fields because she was nursing her baby. “When she came she explained to the overseer and he picked up a stick and hit her on the head. My grandfather saw this when he was age seven. When she got herself together she saw this man standing over her, and she grabbed sand and threw it in his eyes, and gave him a beating.” She had gotten her revenge on the overseer, but as a punishment the master sold her away, and kept her children. “All her children stayed there. My grandfather, being fair, was in the house training to be a butler. The mulatto children were very much in need for house servants.”

Then came the Civil War. When Union troops swept through the area her grandfather escaped with them, joining up with the all-black Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment. But after the war, he went back to look for his lost mother. He found his two half sisters, who told him he could find their mother on Hilton Head. He tracked her down, but after thirty years she did not recognize the man who had been just a boy when she last saw him. She had thought her child was dead. When she finally realized who he was, she cried out, “My son is alive!”—a cry of joy remembered for generations afterward.

The officials at the Birthplace had set up a large tent where Anita Wills would deliver her findings to a gathering of historians and officials. The chief historian of the National Park Service attended, as did a professor from Norfolk, an expert on slavery from Monticello, and local historians and genealogists from Fredericksburg and Charlottesville. The presence of the experts at this family gathering reflected a sea change that had occurred in American historiography, with African-American family historians, for the most part “amateurs,” conducting research of prime importance. Keepers of mainstream American history had come that day to learn from someone who would have been dismissed as an interloper by a previous generation of scholars.

The Park Service’s historian introduced Wills by invoking Alex Haley, whose book Roots had revolutionized the study of American history. Haley, he said, “showed us the way by digging deeper, by going into documents that nobody thought would reveal anything. It is significant that Alex Haley was not a historian; historians knew that you could not do what he wanted to do—and he was told that. But not being a historian, he wasn’t aware of the cultural baggage that we brought to the discipline and he went about his work anyway, and the result, as we might say, is history.”

A tall, dark-skinned, plainly dressed woman took the podium. Anita Wills spoke softly but with emotion as she methodically described her research, which she called “a spiritual quest that has opened my eyes to the lives and times of my ancestors.” Her quest began in California, she said, when she simply asked her mother where the family had come from, and her mother said, Virginia. Her work proceeded very slowly until the Internet made distant records available online and put her in contact with other researchers. She found that her ancestors were mixed-race people, partly white, partly African, and partly Native American, a mixture not at all unusual in colonial Virginia. But her research offered a startling new view of George Washington. He came of age, and learned to be a master, on a racial borderland where the definitions and boundaries of race were dangerously fluid. Because they were mixed-race, Wills’s ancestors lived on the margins of the borderland, enslaved but not quite slaves.

Female servants were especially vulnerable in colonial Virginia. Indenture contracts generally forbade servants to marry during the term of their indenture. The required celibacy was certainly burdensome, to say the least, because servant women were generally in their teens and twenties. If a female servant had a child during her indenture she was liable to be fined on two counts—the moral offense of having an illegitimate child and for introducing a financial burden to her master’s household. The first penalty was officially imposed by the county court, acting on behalf of the vestry of the local parish, whose wardens were often the men who brought the women to the court. The church extracted a fine because it bore the responsibility and expense of caring for abandoned infants and orphans. The courts usually dealt with the second matter—the added expense to the master—by extending the term of the mother’s indenture so that her extra unpaid labor would compensate the master for his expense.

George Washington’s father sat as a justice of the Westmoreland County court. In the year of George’s birth, 1732, and the year after, the court indicted twenty-eight women for “bearing a base born child.” Twelve of them fled the county before the sheriff could get his hands on them and their children. All of them would have been young and probably destitute when they fled from Westmoreland to parts unknown with their infants to escape the authorities. Two women paid fines and had their cases dismissed, but two unfortunate mothers without money to pay their fines were hauled into court to hear the sentence: the sheriff was to administer “25 lashes well laid on at the publick whipping post.”2

In 1751 Austin Washington appeared before the Westmoreland County court to inform the gentlemen justices that his indentured servant Mary had a mixed-race child, Martha, nicknamed Patty. He did not identify the father. By reporting Patty to the authorities, Austin gained a free servant for himself. A brief entry in the Westmoreland County Orders records the court’s instructions to the churchwardens of Washington Parish “to bind out Martha Bowden a Mulatto Child Daughter of Mary Bowden to Augustine Washington, Gent. according to Law.” Her term of indenture to the Washington family, as specified by law, would be thirty years from her date of birth; she would be freed on her thirty-first birthday. Patty was four years old.3

On two counts—because she was a mulatto and because her mother was an indentured servant—Patty Bowden fell afoul of the colony’s race laws. In 1691 the Assembly had prescribed thirty-year servitude for the children of white women and black or Native American men. But this law was not enough to halt interracial births; so in 1723 the Assembly expanded the law to state, “Where any female mullatto, or indian, by law obliged to serve till the age of thirty or thirty-one years, shall during the time of her servitude, have any child born of her body, every such child shall serve the master … of such mullatto or indian, until it shall attain the same age the mother of such child was obliged by law to serve unto.” By these laws, as one legal commentator has written, “the sins were visited on the next generation.” Patty was indentured to Austin Washington because her mother was a mulatto. In an era when life spans ran only into the forties and fifties, a thirty-year indenture was servitude for much of one’s life.4

Mary apparently tried to save her child from the indenture by running away, but Austin managed to find her and bring her back to Popes Creek. In addition to seeing her child bound for thirty years, the mother was punished by having her indenture extended to compensate Austin for his expenses in searching for her. Undeterred, she ran away a second time, only to be found and returned again. Mary’s servitude was increased again by four years.5

As the law allowed, the indenture fell upon the next generation as well. In 1778 Patty had a daughter named Delphia, and she too was bound for thirty years. These transactions were so obscure, and so easy to overlook in the records, that no one had found them until the late twentieth century, when Anita Wills and a cousin came along, researching their family history.6

What Wills described was not the American Dream but the inversion of it, the imposition of thirty years of involuntary servitude on mixed-race children who were legally free. The Bowdens and people like them represented the thin edge of freedom inserting itself into the bricks and mortar of the slave system. As the daughters, one after the other, of nonslave women, they should have been free at birth. We can imagine what this would have created, very quickly: extended families of mixed race, some indentured, some enslaved, some free. Children such as Patty Bowden represented a threat to the slave system because their very existence was erasing the color line. If freed from indenture, they could have worked to purchase the contracts of their indentured relatives and thereupon set them free, and they could have done the same for their enslaved kin. Within two or three generations, in an evolutionary growth toward freedom, Virginia would have been home to a community of free mixed-race people with kinship ties to both the white and black communities.7

This may sound like an abolitionist fantasy, but it actually happened later on in Norfolk, Virginia. A researcher who looked at the manumission records for that city found that between 1791 and 1820, nearly 40 percent of the emancipations came about when blacks purchased freedom for themselves or family members. The names of three free African-Americans, a shoemaker, a baker, and a harbor pilot, turned up repeatedly in the records, buying other blacks to set them free.8 They managed for a brief time to find a chink in the wall of slavery and exploit it. Such manumissions could have become a reality in Washington’s youth if powerful local leaders such as his half brother had decided to look the other way, out of respect for privacy and the right of any person to chose a mate freely.

Austin Washington could have let the girl Patty remain free and allow her and her mother to leave as free people when the mother’s indenture was finished, but he did not. He knew that such “new people,” neither black nor white, neither fully slave nor fully free, threatened the foundation of his power. The third generation of indentured Bowdens, Delphia, was born in the possession of Washington’s niece Elizabeth Washington Spotswood and her husband, Alexander. He set Patty and Delphia free because he recognized the danger of mixing freedom and slavery in the same community. Spotswood was explicit about his reason for the manumissions: he set the infant free to reward the mother “for faithful services,” he said, but the mother went free because “I discharged her not wishing to have female Negroes entitled to freedom among my slaves.”9

The laws and the writings of the planters suggest that racial mixing was extremely distasteful to all Virginians, but the rhetoric of the era is misleading. The rulers legislated for all, but they did not speak for all; they spoke for themselves. The very need for laws to prohibit interracial unions is powerful evidence that racial mixing was increasing; one does not forbid what does not exist. Perhaps it was distasteful to those who wrote the laws forbidding it, but certainly it was not an evil to the men and women of different races who had children together. The government of colonial Virginia represented the voices and opinions of a smaller number of men who were alike in their background and who had the same interests. They were all planters, they were all slaveholders; they spoke for their class, which consisted of themselves and people like them. The same men served in the General Assembly, in the county courts, and on the church vestries. The Washingtons offer an excellent example of this pattern. There was no Eugene Debs mounting an insurgent campaign for office on behalf of the slaves and the indentured.

Had the masters not been so vigilant in ferreting out mixed-race offspring and so dogged in their punishment of the mothers, the wall of slavery would have been breached. That was the implication of Anita Wills’s research into her family; and that is what Washington grew up with. That was the borderland his father and brother stood watch over. Later, when the time came for Washington to assume his position in Virginia society, he too would find himself called upon to police the racial borderland. As the story of the Bowdens makes clear, Washington’s society was still, at that late date, grappling with the question of what slavery was and who was a slave. The Bowdens tested the edges of that world.

*   *   *

When Washington’s father died in 1743, young George’s prospects changed utterly. Psychologically, the loss of his father affected him in ways we can only guess at. Financially, Gus Washington’s death eliminated any chance that George could receive the English education that the father had bestowed on Lawrence and Austin, his half brothers. As the third son, George would not inherit enough land and slaves to establish himself properly, and there was evident confusion in the family over what to do with the boy as he entered his teen years. Lawrence came up with a solution: send him to sea.

Lawrence, who was fourteen years older than George, had tasted the naval and military life himself. In 1740 he had sailed from Virginia to Cartagena in the Caribbean as part of a British campaign against Spain. Though the campaign ended badly, Lawrence returned to Virginia full of admiration for his commander, Admiral Edward Vernon, after whom he named Mount Vernon. Like his forebears, Lawrence had advanced his financial and social prospects through a highly advantageous marriage. He courted and won Ann Fairfax, daughter of William Fairfax, who resided in the splendid Belvoir mansion not far from Mount Vernon. In Virginian terms, this was a celestial match—better even than an alliance with the Lees or Carters—for the Fairfax family controlled an enormous royal land grant whose extent today we can only gasp at. William acted as the agent for his cousin Lord Fairfax, who had inherited some five million acres, extending from the tip of the Northern Neck into the back country of the Shenandoah Valley, pursuant to a royal grant of 1649. King Carter, in his time, owed his wealth to his post as land agent of the Fairfaxes. By his marriage to Ann, Lawrence Washington leaped directly into the innermost circle of the most powerful family in the colony.

Mary Washington considered the question of George’s future carefully and fretfully. She was loath to part with her oldest son when she most needed him, as Gus’s death had left the Washingtons in pinched circumstances. Living with his mother at Ferry Farm, George was so poor he could not afford the corn for his horse to get to the dancing assemblies.10 Mary sought advice on the navy question from friends in Fredericksburg and wrote about it to her half brother Joseph Ball in England. Meanwhile, George took up the eminently useful study of the science of surveying. In a chest at Ferry Farm he found his father’s surveying instruments, and he set to work filling a copybook with mathematical exercises notable for their accuracy, clarity, and neatness.

At length a letter arrived for Mary Washington from England. Joseph Ball quashed any notion that George should go to sea. As for the Royal Navy, no one could gain any advancement there without patronage—“there are always too many grasping for it here, who have interest and he has none.”11 As for taking a berth in a Virginia merchant ship, that would be far worse. Ball wrote that on a merchant ship George would run the risk of being impressed into the Royal Navy as a common seaman, a fate worse than death. The navy, Ball wrote, would “cut him and staple him and use him like a Negro, or rather, like a dog.” That comparison was enough to end all thought of the youth going to sea.

Many years later John Adams aimed a famous blast at Washington, proclaiming that the first president was “too illiterate, unread, unlearned for his station.” Washington himself admitted to his “consciousness of a defective education.” Whatever formal schooling Washington received ended by the age of fourteen or fifteen; thereafter he was self-taught.12 But the autodidact did quite well for himself with an education that was part rough-hewing and part polish.

His skills as a surveyor did not go unnoticed by William Fairfax, who dispatched the teenager to the frontier to chart the lands Fairfax was selling to settlers. George’s encounter with the frontier shaped him profoundly. In the first place his treks through the wilderness toughened him physically, until he could endure almost any trial brought by terrain or weather. Making his way on foot through the Pennsylvania woods in winter, he journeyed through snow for a week, then tumbled from a raft into an icy river. From all this he emerged intact, whereas his companion came down with frostbite.13 He wrote wonderful letters from the frontier, full of joy at the adventure of it all:

I have not slept above three nights or four in a bed but, after walking a good deal all the day, lay down before the fire upon a little hay, straw, fodder, or bearskin—whichever is to hand—with man, wife, and children like a parcel of dogs or cats, and happy’s he that gets the berth nearest the fire.14

George found the people of the backwoods to be as crude as their surroundings. He was not favorably impressed by his first meeting with German settlers: “a great Company of People Men Women & Children that attended us through the Woods as we went shewing there Antick tricks. I really think they seem to be as Ignorant a Set of People as the Indians. They would never speak English but when spoken to they speak all Dutch.”15 Indians seem not to have cowed him at all, even when his surveying group was approached by some thirty warriors bearing a fresh scalp. Given liquor, the Indians commenced a dance, which he described in detail:

They clear a large circle and make a great fire in the middle. Then seat themselves around it.… the best dancer jumps up as one awakened out of a sleep and runs and jumps about the ring in a most comical manner. He is followed by the rest. Then begin their musicians to play. The music is a pot half of water with a deerskin stretched over it as tight as it can, and a gourd with some shot in it to rattle, and a piece of a horse’s tail tied to it to make it look fine. The one keeps rattling and the other drumming all the while the others are dancing.16

After this initial encounter he felt quite at ease. “Nothing remarkable … being with the Indians all day.” His surveying work in the forest gave him the sense that even the wildest places could be made to yield to the rationality of the surveyor’s chain and the deed book.

Back at Belvoir and Mount Vernon, George schooled himself in “the graceful arts” of dancing, fencing, and riding. William Fairfax handed him books to polish his manners and shape his intellect.

When Washington was nineteen his beloved half brother Lawrence came down with a persistent cough and fatigue that signaled the onset of tuberculosis. Lawrence sought relief at hot springs in western Virginia, taking George along with him. George also accompanied Lawrence on a voyage to Barbados in another fruitless attempt to restore his health. There, fortunately for history, George contracted a mild case of smallpox, just serious enough to leave a few slight pockmarks on his nose and to give him lifelong immunity to the disease. But the trip did Lawrence no good; he returned to Mount Vernon and died there in 1752 at the age of thirty-four, putting George in mind of the short life spans parceled out to his family.17

Lawrence’s widow soon remarried, giving George the opportunity to rent Mount Vernon from her along with a portion of his late brother’s slaves. He had already turned his surveying work into a profitable enterprise, and now he was a plantation master. Many men, having found a remunerative path, would have been content to remain on it for good; but not Washington. Lawrence’s death had not broken George’s ties to the Fairfax family. William Fairfax looked upon George as a son and pulled his formidable strings to advance the young man: the governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, chose Washington, at age twenty, to be adjutant of the Virginia militia.

In the fall of 1753 Dinwiddie dispatched Washington on a delicate mission out west. France and Great Britain were in dispute over ownership of the territory along the Ohio River system in western Pennsylvania and Virginia, known as the Ohio country. Washington went out to demand that the French abandon the region, which, coincidentally, prominent Virginians including Dinwiddie and the Washington family wished to develop.18

For more than fifty years Europe had been convulsed in a series of world wars, and North America became yet another theater in those wars. By the 1750s both the French and the British colonists came to view the Ohio Valley as the key to control of the continent. For the French, the Ohio River system was crucial in linking their Canadian holdings with those on the lower Mississippi Valley. For the British colonists, pushing farther westward in a quest for new land, the lush Ohio country seemed to be their natural birthright. When the French began building a series of forts along the Ohio River to gain control of that essential waterway, the Virginia land speculators demanded action. Believing they had legal control over some half a million acres in the region, they were not going to sit by and watch their investment vanish.19

Washington traveled west and met with the French. After a night of drinking with a group of French traders, the young envoy concluded that it was

their absolute Design to take Possession of the Ohio, & by G[od] they wou’d do it, for though’ they were sensible that the English cou’d raise two Men for their one; yet they knew their Motions were too slow & dilatory to prevent any Undertaking of theirs. They pretended to have an undoubted right to the river from a Discovery made by one La Sol [La Salle] 60 Years ago, &… [they intend] to prevent our Settling on the River or Waters of it, as they have heard of some Families moving out in order thereto.20

Though the French commander rejected Washington’s demands, the expedition was not a complete failure. Having scouted the region, Washington returned to Williamsburg with invaluable information on the French presence in the Ohio country, a detailed map of the fort they had built near the Ohio River on French Creek, as well as intelligence on the size of the military force there and the number of canoes available to transport troops. Drawing upon his surveying skills he mapped the Ohio River system and pointed out the strategic importance of the Forks of the Ohio—the site of present-day Pittsburgh, where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers join to form the Ohio—writing in his journal, “I spent some time viewing the rivers, and the land in the fork, which I think extremely well suited for a fort, as it has the absolute command of both rivers.” The expedition brought Washington a wholly unexpected dividend—a continental reputation. On his return to Williamsburg he presented his journal to Dinwiddie, who ordered it published, instantly making the young officer “one of the most famous men in the colonies,” as the scholar Frank Grizzard has put it.21

Within months Washington was back in the Ohio wilderness. Appointed lieutenant colonel of the Virginia Regiment in 1754, Washington set out with some 140 men to protect Virginia workers building a fort at the Forks of the Ohio. Before the militiamen could get there, however, the French had taken over the site. While awaiting the arrival of the rest of the Virginia Regiment, Washington would stride unexpectedly upon the world stage. He and his men rashly ambushed a detachment of French soldiers they came upon in the forest that spring. The commander, Jumonville, and nine others fell dead in an incident that would be labeled an “assassination” by the French, an interpretation bitterly disputed by the British. The bloody, fatal firefight in the woods elated Washington; indeed he could barely hide his exhilaration, writing to his brother two days later, “I can with truth assure you, I heard Bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.” (When the letter was later published in London Magazine, Washington’s jaunty remark caught the eye of King George II, who commented acidly that the young officer would not have found the sound of bullets so charming “if he had been used to hear[ing] many.”) Those whistling bullets—charming or not—turned out to be the opening shots in what American historians call the French and Indian War, a savage struggle that would soon turn into a global conflict.22

Despite his role in igniting a war, the twenty-two-year-old Washington found himself rewarded. Not long after the Jumonville incident, the colonel in charge of the Virginia Regiment broke his neck in a fall from his horse; Washington assumed command. The glory was short-lived, however; less than a month later, he and his regiment were attacked at their encampment, Fort Necessity, and forced to surrender. Despite the defeat he and his men received official praise from the House of Burgesses “for their late gallant and brave Behaviour in the Defense of their Country.” When Dinwiddie reorganized the regiment in October 1754 Washington decided to resign his commission, but his energy and ambition remained undimmed.23

The following spring, General Edward Braddock arrived in Virginia with two regiments of British regulars to dislodge the French from the Ohio country. Seeing this as an opportunity to launch a career in the British army, Washington volunteered to serve as an aide to the general. The expedition resulted in disaster. Marching toward Fort Duquesne, which the French had built at the Forks of the Ohio, Braddock’s 1,700-man column of British regulars and colonial militiamen was ambushed and routed by a smaller contingent of French soldiers and Native American allies. “We have been most scandalously beaten by a trifling body of men,” Washington wrote. In the midst of the fray he took “4 bullets through my coat” and had “Two Horses shot under me.” General Braddock was killed.24

News of the debacle spread panic among Virginia settlers, who anticipated raids by the French and their Native American allies. In response, Dinwiddie turned once again to Washington, naming him commander in chief of all of the military forces in Virginia. The twenty-three-year-old colonel faced a formidable challenge: he had to establish his authority over some fifty officers, many of whom were older than he and had more military experience; he had to raise a regiment of more than a thousand men; and he had to establish supply lines to support them in the wilderness. For the next three years, Washington was the supreme commander in this theater of the war, defending a 350-mile frontier against, in his words, “the cruel Incursions of a Crafty Savage Enemy.”25

Out on the frontier Washington took on the daily exigencies of commanding in the field and, by letter, in the distant chambers of power, honing the political skills needed to placate both the governor, from whom he received his authority, and the legislature supplying his troops with funds. At a time when other Virginians his age and class were rioting about the countryside, gambling, drinking, and racing horses, Washington was set apart. “I am become in a manner an exile,” he wrote plaintively. Yet that very distance from Virginia society during these formative years was crucial to his education. In part, it freed him from a Virginia provincialism that might have prevented his later transformation into a true nationalist during the Revolution. His imagination was fired by the frontier and the possibilities of the western lands. And he was forced to think on a grander scale than his peers back home. He had to, or he and his troops would not survive. On the frontier he forged the iron discipline that he imposed for the rest of his life on himself and on others. He hanged two soldiers for desertion and ordered other executions, but then second thoughts restrained him.26

Washington’s authority began with his physical presence. To begin with, he towered over most of his men by about a foot. A comrade in arms set down a description of Washington that captures him better than any painted portrait:

Straight as an Indian, measuring six feet two inches in his stockings and weighing 175 pounds.… His frame is padded with well-developed muscles, indicating great strength. His bones and joints are large, as are his hands and feet. He is wide shouldered but has not a deep or round chest; is neat waisted, but is broad across the hips and has rather long legs and arms. His head is well-shaped, though not large, but is gracefully poised on a superb neck. A large and straight rather than a prominent nose; blue gray penetrating eyes which are widely separated and overhung by a heavy brow. His face is long rather than broad, with high round cheek bones, and terminates in a good firm chin. He has clear though rather colorless pale skin which burns with the sun. A pleasing and benevolent though a commanding countenance, dark brown hair which he wears in a cue. His mouth is large and generally firmly closed, but which from time to time discloses some defective teeth. His features are regular and placid with all the muscles of his face under perfect control, though flexible and expressive of deep feeling when moved by emotions. In conversation he looks you full in the face, is deliberate, deferential, and engaging. His demeanor at all times composed and dignified. His movements and gestures are graceful, his walk majestic, and he is a splendid horseman.27

In the winter of 1757–58 this “splendid” physical specimen was felled not by bullets but by an attack of dysentery so serious that he feared for his life. He recuperated at Mount Vernon and sought medical advice in Williamsburg, where a doctor told him that, as bad as things seemed, he would recover. In the spring of 1758 he returned to his regiment and took part in the final assault on Fort Duquesne. The French burned the fort and fled, leaving that prized location, the Forks of the Ohio, to the British. The war was effectively over and Washington could now turn his attention to his future. He was in possession of Mount Vernon, a relatively small establishment that could be expanded by a man of his energy and acumen. But there was a more rapid means of acquiring the cash and slaves he needed to build his realm. He could follow the path of his forefathers and seek an advantageous marriage. Word had reached him that there was a young widow, just recently bereaved, at a plantation on the Pamunkey River. She was the heiress to one of the largest fortunes in Virginia.