It was another three days before Washington staggered into Fort Cumberland, now a crowded hospital with barracks full of the wounded. Washington learned that he had been reported dead. It was the first time in weeks that he was able to laugh. He dashed off a message to his brother Jack that he was "in the land of the living by the miraculous care of Providence that protected me beyond all human expectation." Then he rode on to the British camp at Frederick, Maryland, where he bought a mattress and slept. When he awoke, he wrote a long letter to his mother. She must have heard, too, that he was dead. "I doubt not, but you have heard of our defeat and perhaps have had it represented in a worse light if possible than it deserves," he began. Washington still believed that the British had been routed by a mere 300 French-led Indians and that only the panic and cowardice of British enlisted men had caused their slaughter. There were "many" brave English officers, but he was especially proud of the courageous stand of the Virginia troops. Of 300 Virginians in the advance guard, only 30 survived; every Virginia officer but Washington had been killed or wounded. In all, 63 of 86 British officers had died or were wounded; 914 of 1,373 enlisted men were killed or wounded. With two-thirds casualties, it was the worst disaster in British military history. "I luckily escaped without a wound," he reassured his mother, "though I had four bullets through my coat and two horses shot under me." The early deaths and wounds of Braddock's other aides had left him the only person then left to distribute the General's orders, which I was scarcely able to do. I was not half recovered from a violent illness that had confined me to my bed and a wagon for above ten days. I am still in a weak and a feeble condition which induces me to halt here two or three days in hopes of [gaining] a little strength to enable me to proceed homewards.

He would not have time to stop off at Ferry Farm, he wrote. He must get home to Mount Vernon and bring in the harvest. Once again as in the aftermath of Fort Necessity, he was anxious about money. So much of what he had owned — his horses, papers, clothing, weapons — had, along with his prospects of a military career, been left behind in ruins at the Monongahela.

George Washington was surprised by his own popularity. He had every reason to be disenchanted when he rode home to Mount Vernon in the late summer of 1755. He believed he was a failure. His two years of hardship and defeat on the frontier seemed to have yielded nothing. With Braddock dead and the remnants of the British army retreating toward Philadelphia, his service as a volunteer had come to an abrupt end. Braddock's promise to secure a royal commission as a regular had died with him. His health was damaged. He had neglected his farms. As he wrote to his half-brother Augustine, he had "suffered much in my private fortune besides impairing one of the best of constitutions." After five weeks, he still had not recovered. But there was little time for bitterness. No sooner did he arrive at Mount Vernon than he discovered, to his immense surprise, that his valor as Braddock's aide had made him the only hero of the Fort Duquesne debacle. People must have their heroes as well as their scapegoats. Braddock was being blamed for everything; Dinwiddie and the other lying royal Governors and corrupt contractors for nothing. Washington was the talk of Williamsburg. He was credited with stout resistance and bravery under fire. His bad advice on battle strategy was a secret that had died with Braddock. Even the British officers were commending him publicly.

A harbinger of this reversal of fortune awaited him at Mount Vernon. He instantly recognized the handwriting of Sally Fairfax on an envelope and tore it open. Sally was overjoyed at his return. If he was up to it, could he come over to Belvoir the next day? Was he up to it! The next afternoon, ignoring his debilitated condition and enlisting the help of his faithful manservant Thomas Bishop, Washington bought some watermelons and rode as fast as he could over to Belvoir.

One week later, after daily exchanges of visits by Sally and her friends, Washington began to write letters about the disaster in the Ohio Valley. He was prodded into action by messages from visitors to Williamsburg who reported that Virginia's legislative leaders wanted him to serve once more to defend the colony's exposed 350-mile frontier. Only privately in a letter to Augustine from Mount Vernon on August 2 did he express in writing his personal anger and frustration at what he considered his ill-usage by the Governor:

I was employed to go a journey in the winter (when I believe few or none would have undertaken it) and what did I get by it? My expenses borne! I then was appointed with trifling pay to conduct a handful of men to the Ohio. What did I get by this? Why, after putting myself to considerable expense in equipment and providing necessaries for the campaign — I went out, was soundly beaten, lost them all — came in, had my commission taken from me or, in other words, my commission reduced under pretense of an order from home [England]. I then went out a volunteer with General Braddock and lost all my horses and many other things. I have been upon the losing order ever since I entered the service.

Augustine had wanted to come see him. Washington rebuked him for considering leaving his seat in the House of Burgesses to make the journey. And "I am not able, were I ever so willing, to meet you in town." He bluntly reported the "shameful defeat" on the Monongahela. "It is easily told. We lost all that we carried out." All twenty-one pieces of artillery had either been captured, or destroyed "to expedite flight." Obviously Augustine's politically well-connected friends had asked him to sound out George's willingness to accept a new command and lead a fresh expedition into the Ohio country. Without artillery and supply bases, "I think it is impossible," George answered bluntly. Nothing could dislodge the French short of starvation.

The flight of the remnants of the British army from Fort Cumberland, in western Maryland, all the way across Pennsylvania to Philadelphia left the Allegheny Mountains frontier, including all the back settlements of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, exposed to ever more frequent Indian raids. By autumn 1755 the attacks by unusually large bands of up to 150 Shawnees left seventy settlers dead in Virginia alone. In Pennsylvania, Shawnee and Delaware Indians struck within one hundred miles of Philadelphia by October, within fifty miles by November. As soon as the last of Braddock's forces withdrew from Fort Cumberland, the 256 Virginia troops left behind began to desert, sometimes as many as a dozen a day, to protect their families. Virginia lay defenseless. There was no coherent militia system to fall back on after Governor Dinwiddie had set up and then dissolved the Virginia Regiment in favor of his latest unrealized scheme of independent companies. Even if there were willing and able militiamen, there were no guns left in the magazine at Williamsburg. He'd sent them all off to the north to aid other British offensives.

An outcry of public opinion made it clear to Governor Dinwiddie that as much as he disliked the idea, he had to recall Washington to reorganize the original Virginia Regiment. Dinwiddie considered Washington both an opportunist and an ingrate. He believed he had been a generous patron, yet the young man was always caviling and whining and making absurd demands. But Dinwiddie was an astute politician. Once he accepted the fact that Braddock's army was defeated and found another assault on Fort Duquesne, he wasted little time in trying to mend fences with Washington, but only after making another alarming discovery Calling up militia companies in the Shenandoah Valley, he learned that most would-be recruits had already abandoned their homes and fled eastward with their families.

When the General Assembly convened in emergency session on August 5, it was obvious to the burgesses that the Virginia Regiment not only must be resuscitated but must be given plenty of money and weapons and a respected leader, one who would accept sole responsibility for stopping the headlong flight of settlers. Only one name cropped up. Washington's brother Augustine urged him to ride to Williamsburg to advance his candidacy, but George believed he was still too ill. While he recuperated at Mount Vernon, his cousin, Burgess Warner Lewis, kept him posted. At first, he seemed not at all interested. He had lost too much in the past two years. And he was sure he would not be offered the new command on terms he would accept. As the Indian attacks worsened, the Shenandoah Valley emptied out. The Blue Ridge effectively became the western border of Virginia. Washington felt compelled to reconsider. If for no more patriotic reason, he had land and farms in the west that could fall into French, hands.

At this moment Warner Lewis wrote him that the assembly had voted a generous £40,000 for defense - and wanted to raise the largest army in Virginia's 150-year history. Some 4,000 Virginia troops were to mount a fresh expedition to oust the French. Everyone in Williamsburg wanted Washington to take "command of the men now to be raised." Yet Washington felt he was still too weak to make a 150-mile-long ride. He kept Lewis's servant waiting overnight while he wrote Lewis a crucial letter.

He'd had plenty of time to ponder what "ignorance and inexperience made me overlook before." From this trusted kinsman he did not conceal his pride. If he turned down a new command, "I should lose what at present constitutes the chief part of my happiness, i.e., the esteem and notice the country has been pleased to honor me with." He hesitated to volunteer for fear of appearing presumptuous. "If the command should be offered," he would feel free to suggest what "my reason and my small experience have pointed out." He left no doubt that he was willing to accept a new command if the terms suited him.

After the courier left, Washington summoned his courage to write to his mother. He resented her latest intrusion but was less than candid with her. His letter to his cousin made it clear that he would lead a new expedition to the west in a minute. Yet to his mother he wrote: "Honored Madam, If it is in my power to avoid going to the Ohio again, I shall." But if the command is pressed upon me by the general voice of the country and offered on such terms as cannot be objected against, it would reflect eternal dishonor on me to refuse it and that, I am sure, must, or ought, to give you greater cause of uneasiness than my going in an honorable command.

She would not like it if he accepted; she would not like it if he didn't. Washington had heard his mother object to his military aspirations since he was fourteen and he did not now begin to consider her point of view. Could she not simply want to save her son from being killed like so many other mothers' sons on the frontier in recent years? Equally sadly, Mary Ball Washington seemed utterly unable to take pride in his honors, so hard-won and so important to him. Protesting every step of his attempt to create a military career for himself, she probably only succeeded in pushing him toward one.

Ironically, it was at this moment that Washington heard from his mother's brother Joseph, the uncle who had advised her to prevent George from pursuing a military career. In its August number, the Gentleman's Magazine of London had reported that, while Braddock's regulars "fled with the utmost terror and precipitation," the Virginians who formed the rear guard "still stood unbroken and continued the engagement on very unequal terms near three hours." After a silence of thirteen years, his uncle saluted George as "Good cousin" and asked his nephew "to give me a short account how you proceed. As I am your mother's brother, I hope you can't deny my request." George could not help feeling a touch of pride when he read that "it is a sensible pleasure to me to hear that you have behaved yourself with such a martial spirit in all your engagements with the French nigh Ohio. Go on as you have begun, and God prosper you." People can change their minds and admit they have been wrong. Washington saved the letter. These were probably the first words of praise he had ever read from a family member.

Washington arrived in Williamsburg on August 27, 1755, to find that the General Assembly had voted him £300 compensation — a handsome sum roughly equivalent to $12,000 today — for personal property he had lost on the march with Braddock. He also learned that the Assembly had whittled down its 4,000-man army to a total authorization of only 1,200 troops, including the three already funded 50-man companies of rangers supposedly protecting the entire Shenandoah Valley and the 50-man Virginia company at Fort Cumberland. That left only a reconstituted 1,000-man Virginia Regiment, which was to be made up of volunteers or, if recruiting fell short, by drafting unmarried militiamen. The new militia law left intact a provision that a draftee could avoid conscription by paying a £10 fee, something many Virginians could afford. Dinwiddie had already appointed most of the sixteen new captains by the time Washington arrived. In Washington's private letter spelling out his demands to Warner Lewis, his number-one stipulation had been that the Governor consult him on appointments: "having the officers in some measure appointed with my advice and with my concurrence." Washington had given the Governor too much time to organize the new military units before he arrived. As Washington feared, some of Dinwiddie's choices were dreadful. He later called Peter Hog, commissioned captain at half-finished Fort Dinwiddie, "the most unfit person in the world to raise and command a company of rangers." Eventually, Washington dismissed him. Dinwiddie's latest brainstorm was to appoint rangers to patrol the frontier. He had wasted fully half the commissions on amateurs who claimed they knew all about rangers. By the time the Governor formally offered the command, Washington felt his hands were already tied. Unless Dinwiddie met his other demands, he would reject the appointment. It was the first time Washington publicly displayed his ability to put everything in which he believed unflinchingly on the line.

For five tense days Washington and Dinwiddie negotiated so acrimoniously that the bargaining had to be carried on through go-betweens. Dinwiddie, was not to be refused. He enlisted a large part of the Assembly to bring influence to bear individually on young Washington. Burgesses took Washington off to this tavern or that. He had never been so flattered, but he would not budge. In the end, rather than lose Washington Dinwiddie gave in on nearly everything he wanted, and Washington, rather than lose the command, compromised, something new for him. He accepted all he could get, which happened to be just about all of his demands. He not only would have the rank of colonel and full command of the Virginia Regiment or any other troops raised in Virginia but he could appoint his lieutenant colonel and major, a telling point for Washington. He wanted to avoid any more challenges over his rank. He commissioned two veterans he trusted as his key subordinates: Adam Stephen, his second in command at Fort Necessity, and Andrew Lewis, Washington's cousin. He could appoint his own aide-de-camp, secretary, adjutant, commissary, quartermaster, "and such other inferior officers as you shall find necessary." He also would receive a military war chest to "use as you see the nature and good of the service requires." He could design a regimental uniform. He came up with a blue coat trimmed in scarlet and silver with a red waistband and silver-edged tricornered hat. His financial worries seemed to be over. He was to receive 30 shillings a day pay (about £500 a year or some $50,000 a year today) plus generous expenses that included £100 (about $10,000) for his table and an allowance for batmen. He was to act as regimental commissary officer and paymaster and receive a 2 percent commission on all the money he handled. Washington had studied an officer's prerogatives in Braddock's camp and now he drove a hard bargain with the Scottish Governor. He realized how important an expense account and perquisites were to his prestige as well as to his financial well-being. In September 1755, at age twenty-three, Washington became commander in chief of the tiny Virginia army he had designed himself. It is hard to imagine how he could have struck a more successful deal in his first bargaining session with politicians.

Washington's shrewd decision to serve Braddock without pay had paid handsome dividends. In the public view, he had metamorphosed from soldier of fortune, a man on the make, to public-spirited defender of his home country. His transition to professional soldier complete, Washington plunged eagerly into his new duties. He applied the principles of total personal control he had learned as a young planter and owner of a surveying business to micromanaging his little army — which happened to be the largest permanent military establishment in the British-American colonies. He set up supply and recruitment bases at Winchester, Fredericksburg, and Alexandria; he issued orders to recruiting officers to come meet him in Williamsburg. Instinctively, he tackled his worst problem first. Only 256 men volunteered during that autumn of conflagration on the frontier. Of these, many were vagrants and ex-convicts deported from. England and northern Ireland. In Fredericksburg, they mutinied and had to be locked in the county jail to prevent their desertion en masse. This produced a riot. The prisoners' friends broke into the jail and freed the reluctant warriors. Washington reacted swiftly. He transferred his cousin, Captain Lewis, to Fredericksburg and ordered him to impose strict military discipline. Washington had no notion of nepotism. He often chose family members to serve under him because he trusted them more than strangers. Soon, Lewis had the recalcitrants broken up into platoons and shooting at targets.

Washington had studied discipline closely under Braddock. He had borrowed a copy of Humphrey Bland's Treatise of Military Discipline from one of Braddock's officers. He now required his officers to follow "the book." Beginning a tour of inspection at Alexandria in mid-September, he rode to Winchester, his intended headquarters. He stopped only long enough to order an accounting of supplies left behind by the British and to issue strict orders to his officers about how to deal with drunkenness and desertions. By October 17, riding fast, he reached Fort Cumberland at Wills Creek, Maryland. This sprawling, poorly placed wooden fort was still incomplete. It lay exposed to easy enemy fire and was garrisoned by fewer than fifty survivors of his old Virginia Regiment plus a Maryland contingent of about 130 men. There were almost daily desertions. He found discipline so lax that one private was openly peddling liquor to the hard-drinking soldiers around him.

Ordering his commanding officer's commission read aloud to the assembled troops at Fort Cumberland, he summoned all the officers to a five o'clock briefing. Denouncing the fort's "disorderly and riotous assembly," he announced a new command structure and put Adam Stephen in command. He read aloud the orders he had just written. The officers were to complete the stockade, construct a below-ground powder magazine, and "have the barracks well cleaned and sweetened as soon as the hospital is removed." Officers and soldiers "are to be regularly and constantly exercised twice a day." Officers were to order, pay for, and wear the new blue Virginia uniform. They were to treat any Indians who joined them "in the most familiar manner." He overlooked nothing. When coopers arrived to make barrels for the gunpowder he was going to distribute to the other frontier forts, they were told to "make their casks so small that a horse may carry two of them." There would be none of Braddock's slow-moving wagon trains. Gunsmiths were to be put to work "repairing the arms"; the fort's carpenters were "to make ram-rods for them." The officers were to assemble the troops and read out the roll three times a day to discourage desertion, and they were to hunt down any would-be deserters for trial. They were to deal sternly with drunkenness, swearing, and obscene language. They must shut down liquor trafficking. In short, they were to crack down on infractions of all kinds. Washington revealed himself to be a stickler for discipline who had seen what the lack of it could do at the Monongahela. He also devised a daily camp routine:

The Guard is to be regularly relieved every morning at ten o'clock. The drummer must observe the beat. At the appointed times, the following beats [will be]: revele [sic] at daybreak; troop, at ten o'clock, retreat, at sunset; and tattoo at nine o'clock at night. An officer is to see that the above orders are duly executed. The tour of duty [is] to begin with the eldest captain and to continue through the rest of the officers according to seniority. The Officer of the Day is to make a report of the Guard as soon as he is relieved.

Washington was determined to eliminate corrupt military practices. He was aware that some officers were lining their purses at the expense of their men. Officers were no longer allowed to require their men to buy supplies or clothing from them and then to debit their pay: "They are for the future to receive their pay without deduction." Washington, surprised at the greed of officers and civilians who tried to profit from the common danger, understood the reluctance of civilians to enlist. He instructed his officers to supervise the work of the gunsmiths and keep them on the job. After the meeting he fired off written orders to distant outposts. He warned Captain Hog at Fort Dinwiddie to be "very circumspect" about the physician at Fort Dinwiddie. "See that he has no more opportunities than what are absolutely necessary to enhance a bill."

After shaping up Fort Cumberland, Washington dashed off to the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley, where there were rich new farms and badly needed cattle. Riding west over the Allegheny Mountains, he found nearly all the farms deserted. After five days in the saddle he reached Fort Dinwiddie, a wretched stockade still unfinished because its garrison was constantly responding to Indian attacks. He read aloud written orders to Captain Hog "to add bastions to and build barracks in the fort and to fell all the woods within musket shot." Washington feared another disaster, like the recent attack on a stockade twenty miles farther west where sixty settlers had taken refuge. Indians had killed twenty-five of them before they were frightened off by reinforcements. The Shawnees had burned eleven houses and led off some five hundred horses and cattle and two young girls. Washington urged vigilance. Patrols were to range woods at least twice every day. Before riding off he issued contracts to ship 620 beef cattle up the Shenandoah to Fort Cumberland by November first, for salt to pickle the beef, and for hired coopers to make the barrels to ship it.

Washington fired off orders for supplies in all directions, advancing the money the Governor had given him. Virginians could supply suits, stockings, shirts, and hats but a contractor had to go to Philadelphia to buy shoes, white yarn stockings, kettles, tomahawks, cartridge paper, blankets, and tents. Washington ordered rum from the West Indies. He expected no man to fight without his daily rum. He ordered strict accountings, then parceled out the supplies left behind by the British. When enlistment lagged, he sent recruiters to Maryland and Pennsylvania. One of the ranger captains he commissioned was his old friend Christopher Gist, who promptly reported that "your name is more talked of in Pennsylvania than any other person of the army. Everybody seems willing to venture under your command. If you could send some discreet person [I] doubt not but they will enlist... especially to be irregulars.... All their talk is of fighting in the Indian way." Gist passed along a message from Benjamin Franklin, chairman of the Pennsylvania Assembly's defense committee: "If you was to write [a] pressing letter to them informing them of the damage and murders and desire their assistance you would now get it sooner than anyone in America."

So much of what Colonel Washington did during these harried months he had learned from recent bitter experiences. Not yet twenty-four years old, he had devoted his mind and talents for more than three years to the military, much of it on a frontier largely at war. Probably no Virginian had more military knowledge or experience. He had seen combat three times and had actively studied tactics, artillery, fortifications, logistics, discipline —all the military skills of his time. His mastery showed up in each day's orders. In September, he instructed his captains to cut firewood so it would be cured by winter. Buy horses, wagons, flour, and feed for the horses from farmers if you can; if not, commandeer them. Sometimes he joined in the unpleasant near-raids on settlements. Many farmers had not yet been reimbursed for requisitions of their draught animals by Braddock's quartermasters. One uncooperative farmer threatened to "blow out my brains," Washington reported, adding that he drew his sword to persuade the crowd of his seriousness. As if heedless of the danger, he rode off with an aged horse in tow.

Working hard at the virtually impossible, Washington was trying to defend Virginia's vast borderlands with only a few hundred men, a feat that meant answering constant alarms. He was heading home for a brief visit on October 7 when an express rider brought an urgent message from Adam Stephen at Winchester. Communications with Fort Cumberland had been cut off. Indians were raiding deep into the Shenandoah Valley:

They go about and commit their outrages at all hours of the day. Nothing is to be seen and heard but desolation and murder and unheard of instances of cruelty. The smoke of the burning plan darken the day and hide the neighboring mountains from our sight.

Washington rode pell-mell across northern Virginia to Winchester with thirty recruits. He found the town packed with refugees, many with their livestock and wagons bulging with all they could drag away That night, an express rider alarmed the town: the Indians were only twelve miles away! Another rider arrived the next morning: the Indians were only four miles away! He had heard their yells and heard gunfire himself. Washington rounded up forty horsemen and rode out to scour the woods. He soon heard yelling and shooting. He ordered his men to spread out and move in. He found three drunken Virginia troopers hallooing and firing off their guns. The "Indians" from the day before turned out to be two slaves trying to round up stray cattle.

The Indian raiders had gone home, dissuaded by Washington's quick action. To Dinwiddie, he reported that reinforcements had difficulty crossing the Blue Ridge "for the crowds of people who were flying as if every minute was death." Washington sent express riders to tell the settlers to return to their homes, keep the roads free for his reinforcements. He ordered a formal warning read in every town throughout the region:

Whereas diverse timorous persons run through the country and alarm its inhabitants by false reports of the Indians having attacked and destroyed the country, even Winchester itself. This is to give notice to all people that I have great reason to believe that the Indians who committed the late cruelties are returned home. I do advise all my countrymen not to be alarmed on every false report they hear, keep to their homes and take care of their crops. In a short time the frontiers will be so well guarded that no mischief can be done.

Washington managed to stem the panic. He then siphoned off the thirty recruits to march northward to reinforce Fort Cumberland.

On their three-day march, Washington and his men passed deserted houses, barns filled with oats and grain abandoned, horses and cattle wandering around. Yet the settlers had not imagined the Indian attack. A Shawnee war party of 150 repeatedly raided the region from its base at Fort Duquesne. Near Patterson's Creek, Washington passed a homestead where the farmer had been killed, the farmhouse burned, the cornfield destroyed. Within gunshot of Fort Cumberland, Washington saw the unburied bodies of a scalped woman, a little boy, and a young man. Soldiers he sent to harvest corn found more scalped, half-burned bodies. As soon as he reached the fort, he began to send out patrols to prevail on the farmers to harvest their corn crop. Six weeks after he had become Virginia commander, Washington was still riding from wilderness county to wilderness county in southwestern Virginia. At least once he narrowly escaped an Indian ambush. As he rode toward Fort Dinwiddie on a narrow horse trail in dense woods, he galloped past the spot where several Shawnees had prepared an ambush. The Indians had gone off to relieve themselves just before Washington rode by. They killed the next soldier who came down the path.

Colonel Washington soon realized that his chances of stopping Indian raids altogether were slim. At first, Governor Dinwiddie was sympathetic. "I cannot expect you can do much this fall," Dinwiddie wrote to Washington, "but to keep the (provincial troops) together, to have them taught their exercises, and to teach them as much as possible bush fighting." Without the support of Indians to fight at their sides, Virginians must fight like Indians. The defeat of Braddock made a reevaluation of military tactics imperative. Americans were gradually developing a new style of warfare that blended Indian and colonial tactics with textbook British methods. One British observer had foreseen the failure of Brad-dock's orthodox tactics against Indians: "They [redcoats] are only of use to defend a fort or to support Indian forces against regular troops." Another critic argued that "regular troops, in this wilderness country, are just the same [as] irregular ones would be in Flanders. American irregulars would easily be confounded by regular troops in the open fields of Europe and regular troops would be as easily reduced to the like confusion by American irregulars in the woods here."

Benjamin Franklin supported Washington's advocacy of a revolution in American military tactics. Militia was useless, he argued. As Washington went to the relief of Virginia and Maryland frontier families, Franklin organized militia and lobbied for tax money to build a line of forts, within a day's march of one another along the Pennsylvania frontier, to act as bases for special ranger forces. But Franklin denounced sole reliance on militia: "The manual exercise and evolutions taught Ito] a militia are known by experience to be of little or no use in the woods." The news that flashed through the settlements of Virginia at Braddock's defeat — "The British are beaten! The British are beaten!" —carried with it a note of excitement along with horror. The British army could be beaten unless it drastically changed its habits.

But no one was addressing one problem. Washington ran smack into his old bugbear again that fall: any royal-commissioned officer still outranked any colonial officer. To Washington, no coherent reform of the militia to meet a new kind of threat from the French could be achieved until American colonial officers were given equal footing with British officers. That English subjects lost their equal status as free Englishmen as soon as they settled in America outraged them. When he arrived at Fort Cumberland, he encountered Captain John Dagworthy, who commanded Maryland militia there. Dagworthy had once held a royal commission to lead Maryland troops in Braddock's army and refused to take orders from any colonial. Nor would Colonel Washington take orders from a captain. So angry was Washington that he left his troops at the fort and rode all the way to Williamsburg, some 200 miles. There, he demanded to see Governor Dinwiddie and then John Robinson, Speaker of the House of Burgesses. The Governor agreed to write to Massachusetts Governor William Shirley, who had been acting as commander in chief of British troops in North America since Braddock's death. Dinwiddie agreed with Washington that Captain Dagworthy could outrank Colonel Washington only if the king had specifically ordered Dagworthy to Fort Cumberland. Dinwiddie also asked Governor Shirley to issue Washington a new brevet (temporary) commission in the British army.

Washington agreed to return to his duties while he awaited a ruling. He received no answer for months. Finally, he learned that Governor Shirley had passed the buck to Governor Sharpe of Maryland, who controlled Maryland militia and posts. Washington may have been surprised to know that Governor Sharpe had ruled that Captain Dagworthy could not give orders to Virginia troops and that Dagworthy concealed his new orders and continued to command the garrison at Fort Cumberland. Washington was not alone in his frustration: his officers threatened to resign en masse unless they received royal commissions. As winter approached, Washington got Dinwiddie's permission to leave his troops and ride north to Massachusetts to appeal personally to Governor Shirley.

Wearing his brand-new blue uniform, Colonel Washington left Virginia in February 1756, accompanied by his aide, Captain George Mercer, and two slaves. It was the second time Washington had made a thousand-mile winter trek. This time there was a growing number of critics who insisted the mission was personal and that his place was at the front with his men.

No doubt he had to resolve the rank-of-command problem, but couldn't he write a letter? Wasn't it hard to justify leaving the panicky frontier in such danger for two full months? Instead, he decided to storm the citadel where he believed British power over America resided. He had a pretext to pay a call on Governor Shirley. Shirley's son had befriended him on Braddock's expedition and Washington wanted to tell him in person how valiantly his son had died. Washington had also met Shirley once at the Governor's conference in Alexandria. Washington considered the risk of attack somewhat diminished in winter and he was no longer willing to tolerate such a challenge to his authority And here was a chance to make a personal pitch for a British officer's permanent commission, something he had wanted for so many years.

Riding through deepening snow in eastern Maryland and Pennsylvania, Washington stopped off in Philadelphia to introduce himself to the proprietary Governor, Robert Hunter Morris, whose. son, Braddock's secretary, had been so kind to him. Moths briefed him on the state of Pennsylvania's defenses. For seventy-five years, Pennsylvania had been ruled by pacifist Quakers who did not believe in war. Their dealings with Indians had at first been exemplary, making the colony a haven against Indian attack. In all the Indian wars between the English and the French in the past century there had never been any killing in the Penns' colony. But sharp land dealings in recent years had forced most of the native Shawnees and Delawares off their lands and driven them west to the Ohio Valley, where they now fought beside the French. Vengeful Shawnees had carried out raids as far east as Allentown and Easton, within fifty miles from Philadelphia, and were threatening the defenseless Quaker City itself. When Washington arrived, an extralegal militia led by Benjamin Franklin and his son, Captain William Franklin, was fortifying frontier towns and building a chain of forts in Northampton County Washington was anxious to learn all about Franklin's bold actions. He was coming to believe, like Franklin, that the underlying problem of defending against the French and Indians was the method of settlement. Newly arrived immigrants in search of cheap land scattered as far as they could from existing settlements. They assured their isolation by staking out as much land as they possibly could. This fact alone made them easy prey for Indian raiding parties.

Wherever he went that winter, Washington discovered that he was known as the hero of the Monongahela campaign. Washington's visit in uniform gave Governor Morris the idea of a well-qualified candidate for commander in chief of Pennsylvania militia. Washington seems to have encouraged the idea. If he could not win the support he needed for the defense of Virginia he might be willing to become Pennsylvania's commander in chief. Gossip quickly circulated that Washington had met with Morris to discuss plans for a joint Virginia-Pennsylvania assault on Fort Duquesne that Washington would lead.

Washington did not spend all his time politicking. He went shopping. His service with dapper young British officers had whetted his taste for fine clothes. His visit to the Quaker City stretched out to five days as tailors fitted and finished new suits for him and handed him the bill for a hefty £60. Packing up his purchases against the mud and slush of the road, Washington crossed the Delaware River for the first time and hurried along the Post Road through Burlington and Allentown to Perth Amboy and sailed to New York City. He stayed with native Virginian Beverly Robinson, the brother of John Robinson, Speaker of the House of Burgesses. Robinson had married Susannah Philipse, heiress of a vast Hudson Valley manor. Washington's visit with Robinson revealed his ever-closer ties with Speaker Robinson, the mortal political enemy of Governor Dinwiddie, who grasped its significance as soon as he learned of it.

The pleasure of arriving in New York City for the first time at the peak of its winter social season multiplied when Mrs. Robinson introduced the tall, elegant young Virginian to her younger and still unmarried sister. He felt he had to pay a courtesy call on the ladies of New York society. Mary Eliza Philipse, known as Polly, was rich. A wide mouth and dimples only emphasized her large nose. But Polly Philipse exuded self-confidence; she possessed a stubborn drive to dominate everyone around her that made her resemble Washington's mother. Yet even if she owned 50,000 acres of valuable New York real estate, she was not exactly the woman George. Washington had in mind. After the obligatory bows and curtsies, Washington escorted her to a popular exhibit at the News Exchange, a museum of sorts, called "The Microcosm or World in Miniature." He nodded appreciatively when he saw a mechanical tableau of Orpheus playing his lyre and then nine muses playing their instruments and windup birds that flew around and sang in a simulated grove. More interesting to him were models of a gunpowder mill and ships sailing across waves. George liked the exhibit well enough to take the ladies back a second time.

He left Polly Philipse behind when he visited several taverns and men's clubs. He shopped for shoes, played cards and lost. He hired a horse trader to find him three good horses and gave his friend George Mercer the best horse. This heavy £75 outlay took most of his remaining cash. He so much overspent his budget he had to borrow £100 — his adjutant's salary for a year — from Beverley Robinson to get him home. His purse refilled, he pushed off for New England on February 20, 1756. In New London, Connecticut, he visited Joseph Chew, an old friend of his parents. He sailed on to Newport, Rhode Island, where he visited another old Virginia friend, Godfrey Malbone. As winter weather worsened, he sailed on a British man-of-war to Boston. The Boston Gazette announced his arrival, introducing to its readers "the Hon. Col. Washington, a gentleman who has deservedly a high reputation for military skill and valor though success has not always attended his undertakings." Unofficially, there was gossip he was meeting Governor Shirley to discuss a strategy for dealing with the southern Indians. He had to wait to be received by Shirley. He played cards at the Governor's house — and lost again. By now, he was counting his change.

Finally summoned to pass through the iron gates of Province House at the head of Milk Street, he rode past rows of bare trees, then climbed the twenty red sandstone steps that led to the imposing three-story brick building. In his elegant new uniform, Washington bowed deeply to Governor Shirley, the royal official he had found so kind when he had met him at Alexandria. He presented Shirley with the petition he and his officers had signed asking to be put on the royal military establishment and a copy of Dinwiddie's letter about Dagworthy. Shirley was surprised. Hadn't he already asked Governor Sharpe to deal with the matter? Washington was stunned to learn that Dagworthy had already been told he was not in command at Fort Cumberland. The Governor said he would need some time to consider Washington's requests. An aide then ushered Washington out.

On March 5, 1756, Governor Shirley called him back to Province House. He could not issue royal commissions. He had just learned from London that he was to turn over his duties as head of all British troops in America to Governor Sharpe of Maryland. Furthermore, he lacked the power to grant Washington even a brevet regular army commission. That had to come from London. He handed Washington a document that forbade Dagworthy to attempt to give orders to Virginia troops. If he stayed at Fort Cumberland or went anywhere in Virginia, Dagworthy was to follow Washington's orders. There was nothing else Shirley could do for him, so Washington left Boston immediately. He overtook Benjamin and William Franklin on the road and they exchanged ideas about breaking the stalemate with the French. He reached Williamsburg exactly sixty days after he had left Mount Vernon.

The carnage on the frontier resumed with springtime. Washington's little army, no matter what he did, was largely ineffectual. He wrote bluntly about his helplessness in his April 7, 1756, report to Governor Dinwiddie:

The enemy have returned in greater numbers, committed several murders not far from Winchester and even are so daring as to attack our forts in open day. Five hundred Indians have it more in their power to annoy the inhabitants than ten times their number of Regulars. For, besides the advantage they have of fighting in the woods, their cunning and craft are not to be equaled neither [are] their activity and indefatigable sufferings. They prowl about like wolves and, like them, do their mischief by stealth. They depend upon their dexterity in hunting and upon the cattle of the inhabitants for provisions.

As the war continued to expand, Washington urged that the settlers be compelled to live in towns, driving their cattle into "the thick settled parts" and "working at each others' farms by turn." They could only be protected by soldiers drawn not from the dregs of English society, but from the American mainstream: "As I apprehend you will be obliged to draft men, I hope care will be taken that none are chosen but active, resolute men — men who are practiced to arms and are marksmen." Washington began to beat his drum for a professional soldiery in America to replace the militia, which he considered an undisciplined mob of one afternoon-a-week warriors who did as little as they could but drink and desert and were utterly unreliable under attack. "Such men as are drafted should be taken only for a time," he argued. "We shall get better men [who] will in all probability stay with. us;" In a letter to Speaker of the House Robinson he was more specific: "They should only serve eighteen or twenty months and then be discharged. Twenty months will produce two full campaigns." His letter to Dinwiddie, he knew, would go to the executive council; that to Dinwiddie's rival, Robinson, to the. Assembly. He was learning that a military commander must besiege politicians as well as fight and he was becoming fearless in his paper battles with the royal Governor, knowing he had growing support in the House of Burgesses. To Dinwiddie's consternation, he carried his campaign personally to Williamsburg. Back at Winchester, he wrote Pennsylvania Governor Morris, "Our Assembly have voted £20,000 more and [our] forces will be increased to 2,000 men."

Washington had convinced the Assembly that, at the bare minimum, he needed two full regiments and a string of forts within easy reach of settlers. After visiting Pennsylvania and talking with the Franklins, he submitted a comprehensive defensive plan to Governor Dinwiddie that called for construction of twenty-two forts on a line from Fort Cumberland along Patterson Creek then down the south branch of the Potomac to its headwaters and following the tributaries of the James to the Roanoke River and then its tributaries to the North Carolina border. The forts were to be from ten to thirty miles apart. Their garrisons were to be made up of a core of trained members of Washington's Virginia Regiment augmented by militia garrisons of twenty to five hundred men. The largest fort was to be built at Winchester and would be strong enough to serve as the depot for all the frontier forts and be the natural place of refuge for all the settlers of the lower Shenandoah Valley. Washington and his troops built it during the summer of 1756. Washington used some of his own money for the effort.

The work on four of the forts began, but the Governor ignored Washington's strategic plan. The ranks of his regiment remained a thin 1,000, far too few to garrison such a large number of posts. Washington believed that his only recourse was to enlist the aid of natives. Braddock had scoffed at the aid of Delawares sent him by the Six Nations, and many of them had gone over to the French. Yet Washington had come to believe that Indians "are the only match for Indians." "Without these, we shall ever fight upon unequal terms." He complained that there was no coordinated attempt by the royal Governors to persuade the natives to support his efforts.

Forced to work with the 1,000 men he already commanded, Washington vowed to whip them into an effective fighting force. He imposed British army discipline so far as the laws of Virginia permitted and argued for even harsher sanctions against desertion and drunkenness. He ordered brutal floggings not only for these, but for swearing, looting, and a long list of offenses. Gambling and dereliction of duty brought five hundred lashes. Washington made all his troops line up to watch the whippings, which sometimes continued until the onlookers were in tears. When desertions continued, he lobbied the Assembly for the death penalty His letters to officials in Williamsburg brimmed over with complaints about poorly paid, inadequately fed and clad troops who had no respect for their officers and whose terms of enlistment were too short If the government stopped wasting money, he maintained, and used it to increase soldier's pay, he could attract better soldiers. His pleas for more forts, more tools to build them, and more men to guard them began to irk the budget-minded burgesses, who were also the same planters who did not want to pay more taxes. Some of them were even willing to believe that Washington was making up atrocity stories just to get more money.

Amid his constant complaining, Washington was probably the only soldier in America who was trying to puzzle out how to build a new model army that suited frontier warfare. Since settlers were strung out over vast distances, his idea of closely placed stockades with small, highly trained garrisons of fast-moving rangers to carry out constant patrols and periodic surprise sweeps of the frontier could have at least retarded Indian attacks. He knew that nothing could end the attacks entirely until the Indian base at Fort Duquesne was destroyed once and for all, but the legislators would not spend the money to raise a. large enough professional force, and the British government, which had taken over the war, gave priority to other campaigns. Washington had to be content with fighting a defensive war with a skeleton force. As his troops responded to ceaseless alarms they sustained heavy casualties. In the course of the year 1756 nearly one-third of his men were killed or wounded.

The mounting casualty toll and the absence of a single demonstrable success left some Virginians looking for a scapegoat. They turned on Washington. His mentor, Colonel Fairfax, had warned him to tone down his constant grousing. Shortly after Washington submitted his fort-building plan to the Governor and his council, Fairfax reported "some jealousies" among the councillors over Washington's appointment of an aide-de-camp and secretary, and among burgesses there were rumblings of an investigation of Washington's recruiting practices and his cashiering of men "at pleasure." The Virginia Gazette ran a long letter essay signed "Virginia Centinel," which attacked Washington without mentioning his name. Its author accused him of abusing his men and claimed his officers were engaging in "all manner of debauchery, vice and idleness" while frontiersmen suffered and died. Washington was unfit for command. More attacks soon found print. Washington was away from the front too much. He lived in high style in a fine headquarters in Winchester while settlers starved and their cabins burned. It did not help that there was some small grain of truth in each charge. In addition to his long sojourn to the north Washington rode to Williamsburg to politick for his army and took side trips to Mount Vernon, Belvoir, and his farm at Bullskin Creek. He had not yet learned to live without interruption with his troops and to suffer conspicuously with them.

Stung, Washington wrote a rebuttal to "Centinel" and sent it to his brother Augustine for advice. Should he print it? Augustine did him a big favor and destroyed it. But no one could dissuade George Washington from once again threatening to resign — this was his sixth threat — but then once again he reconsidered, unaware that each time he rendered it the threat was more meaningless. His officers could quit, however. When Washington went undefended in the pages of the Gazette, all sixteen company commanders signed a pledge to resign unless Governor Dinwiddie published a public defense of his commander in chief. Their threat compromised Washington, who would be forced to resign if they did. He promised them he would ride into Williamsburg and negotiate their demands with Dinwiddie. In time, fresh Indian raids distracted the captains and he did not have to make good his promise, but he decided to confront Dinwiddie anyway. He stopped off at Belvoir, where Sally Fairfax gave him several shirts she'd had made for him, and then he followed the groove he had worn to the Governor's palace.

There, even before he could see the Governor, he received quite a shock. Dinwiddie, he was told, believed "Centinel's" censures were true. He ordered Washington to go back to the front at once. He was to move his headquarters from the comforts of Winchester to Fort Cumberland Gap, which Dinwiddie correctly believed sat astride the main Indian invasion route into Virginia. Washington was to take 100 of the 160-man Winchester garrison to Fort Cumberland, and he was to stay there. Furious, Washington did not try to see the Governor. He rode straight back to Winchester. For once, he did not threaten to resign, even if he was never more justified. He, the commanding officer of Virginia's only armed force, believed that he must obey the orders of the civilian Governor.

Back at Winchester, he got himself under control and wrote the Governor. His tone seemed polite; his style self-criticizing. He began with an apology. Dinwiddie must have been momentarily disarmed as he read:

If my open and disinterested way of writing and speaking has the air of pertness and freedom, I shall redress my error by acting reservedly and shall take care to obey my orders without offering it more.

But then Washington became sarcastic: "So, to comply with my order (which I shall do literally if I can) not a man will be left [at Winchester] to secure the works or defend the King's stores, which are almost wholly removed to that place."

Washington no doubt knew what the Governor did not: the enlistments of the sixty men left at Winchester expired in two weeks. If he followed the Governor's order, no one would be left to defend the largest town in the west Washington waited a few more days at Winchester while he cooled down. He realized that he had enemies in the capital who wanted him to quit or be intemperate enough to provoke the Governor, who had the backing of many influential Virginians. Without disobeying his orders, Washington listed all the shortages that made the move to Fort Cumberland impracticable. Hardly able to bridle his anger, he lashed out at critics: "I am tired of this place, the inhabitants and the life I lead here."

In the end Washington won a partial victory. Dinwiddie rescinded his order to go to Fort Cumberland and Washington gained new support in Williamsburg. But Speaker Robinson urged him to "allow your ruling passion, the love of your country, to stifle your resentments." And Dinwiddie would no longer be giving Washington military orders. The British army was taking control of every detail of the war for America and the new commander in chief, Lord Loudoun, was counting on Washington's services. Loudoun needed him to hold Fort Cumberland until he himself could reinforce it.

Gathering up all his belongings, including a new puppy he had just bought, Washington rode off to the Cumberland Gap, but he could not resist firing a parting shot at his cowardly unseen critics:

All my sincerest endeavors for the service of my country [are] perverted to the worst purpose. My orders are [considered] dark, doubtful and uncertain, today approved, tomorrow condemned. Left to act and proceed at hazard, accountable for the consequence and blamed without benefit of defense, I am determined to bear up under all the embarrassments some time longer.

Miserably unhappy because he was incapable of making any successful move against the far more mobile enemy, Washington hung on. At a time when advancement in a military career usually depended on birth and patronage, he continued his untiring search for the right patron.

At no time in his life was he more abject. His original patron, Colonel Fairfax, could do nothing more for him. His next patron, Governor Dinwiddie, he now considered a spent bullet. Old and sick, Dinwiddie considered Washington a rank opportunist. When Washington reported to Dinwiddie that he had shifted his headquarters to Fort Cumberland, Dinwiddie said scornfully: "It gives me great pleasure that your going to Fort Cumberland is so agreeable to you, as without doubt it's the proper place for the commanding officer."

Now Washington was about to switch allegiance again. When he learned that the new British commander in chief was John Campbell, Earl of Loudoun, he wrote His Lordship probably the most obsequious letter of his life. Washington criticized almost everyone involved in the Virginia frontier stalemate. In the recitation, only he was blameless. Soon after Loudoun arrived in America in March 1757, Washington wrote what started out as a long list of complaints Dinwiddie had ignored over the years. The missive soon descended to a new and groveling level: "Hence it [is that I draw my hopes and fondly pronounce your Lordship our patron. Do not think, my Lord, that I am going to flatter. Notwithstanding I have exalted sentiments of your Lordship's character and respect your rank it is not my intention to adulate. My nature is open and honest and free from guile."

Washington informed Lord Loudoun that just before he died General Braddock had personally promised to promote him. "Had his Excellency General Braddock survived his unfortunate defeat, I should have met with preferment."

As if this letter were not enough, Washington wanted to leave his post at the Cumberland Gap on a second midwinter trip to deliver it in, person. If his latest putative father figure could not come to Washington, Washington would go to him. Dinwiddie begrudgingly let him go. "I can't possibly conceive what service you can be of in going there." But since Washington was determined to go, "I now give you leave as you will be able to give him a good account of our backcountry." Washington was unaware that he could not even get an interview with Lord Loudoun unless fellow Scot Dinwiddie put in a good word for him. Off again to Philadelphia, this time at Dinwiddie's side, Washington had to cool his heels in an expensive inn for four weeks before Loudoun would see him; meanwhile, Dinwiddie briefed Loudoun thoroughly.

To Washington, Lord Loudoun was a highly placed, well-educated, experienced soldier who would at last advance his military career; to Loudoun, Washington was a troublesome young provincial with little or nothing to offer. The squat, fifty-two-year-old general made short work of the lanky young Virginian. He did not let Washington speak. Instead, he peppered him with orders that sounded almost identical to Dinwiddie's. There was only one new item: move the command back to Winchester. After he briefly questioned Washington, Loudoun turned his back on him. The meeting obviously was over. An aide gestured to Washington to leave the room.

Shunned, stunned, his search for patronage and promotion at an end, Washington rushed back to Virginia. Lord Loudoun had no intention of launching another expedition against Fort Duquesne. There was nothing more he could do but his job and he would do that with a vengeance. Whenever he felt rejected — by the Governor, Sally Fairfax, Governor Shirley, or Lord Loudoun — Washington rushed to the frontier, often reacting angrily. He introduced harsher discipline at his frontier outposts. He had a young ensign who had been caught cheating at cards (he concealed two cards under his: thigh) cashiered for "acting inconsistently with the character of a gentleman." He used the episode as a pretext for assembling his officers and reading them a lecture on honor that is probably his most succinct utterance on the subject of an officer's duty. In his dress uniform, he pointed out that too many of them, still wearing buckskin, were remiss for not wearing the prescribed uniform: "I am determined as far as my small experience in service, my abilities and interest of the service dictate, to observe the strictest discipline through the whole economy of my behavior!”

Only the unexpected arrival of southern Indians after a series of Indian conferences finally stopped the raids from the Forks of the Ohio. But after more than two years of uninterrupted warfare, by early 1757 Washington seemed unable to draw comfort from the sudden slackening of what he called the "horrid devastation." Two hammer blows in quick succession had only added to his frustration. Governor Dinwiddie, had launched a bitter personal attack on him. "You know I had reason to suspect you of ingratitude, which Pm convinced your own conscience and reflection must allow," he wrote Washington. When Washington asked Dinwiddie permission to come to Williamsburg to defend himself, Dinwiddie flatly refused it. Washington had been absent from his duty too frequently. "Surely the commanding officer should not be absent when daily alarmed with the enemy's intent to invade our borders."

Cooped up at backwater Fort Cumberland far from the British army's vast counterattack against the French, George Washington was wretched. When he received the news in the autumn of 1757 that his oldest friend and mentor, Colonel Fairfax, had died, Washington, unable to attend the funeral, became so depressed he became physically ill. His chronic dysentery returned, sapping his strength. Washington later described this "inveterate disorder in [my] bowels" as the worst bout since the Braddock fiasco. By November, he could no longer walk. He was also suffering from "violent pleuritic pain" — recurrent pleurisy in the drafty, smoky fort — and thought that he, like his brother Lawrence, was dying of tuberculosis. Dr. James Craik, his University of Edinburgh–trained neighbor from the Northern Neck and his closest comrade-in-arms since the days of Fort Necessity, bled Washington three times and then ordered him home for a long rest, not waiting for permission from Governor Dinwiddie. George Washington, heartily sick of the frontier war, his military career obviously going nowhere, went home at the end of 1757 to his sanctuary at Mount Vernon. It was the lowest point: of his life.

Even at the times when it seemed to him that he had wasted nearly four years on the frontier, George Washington learned to his surprise that he had won a new kind of support from his officers and from many of the planters he had protected. Away from the frontier in December 1755, Washington had his first brush with politics. He served as an election official on behalf of his friend and neighbor George William Fairfax. On election day, he sat by the poll where. Fairfax voters lined up and, as Fairfax poured them punch, Washington recorded the names of some 674 men from the Northern Neck who got to see him and shake the hand of their young military hero. It was a close race for a seat in the House of Burgesses_ His friend Fairfax lost by only two votes. Tempers ran high and one account says a supporter of another losing candidate knocked Colonel Washington to the ground with a club. But Washington had had his first tantalizing taste of rough-and-tumble Virginia politics. He came away believing he could count on strong support from veterans as well as from many planters interested in speculating in the western lands he was fighting to keep out of the hands of the French.

Washington's first successful harvests at Mount Vernon also gave him a fresh reason to reconsider his military ambitions. He yearned for the life of a planter by late 1757, for the days of riding through the fields and woods and afternoons of ease, and for all the little day-to-day luxuries that contrasted so sharply with the raw confined life of a frontier fort. When his first crop came in, he went on a long-distance shopping spree. He shipped three hogsheads of tobacco (about 3,000 pounds) to a cousin in London to sell. He asked him to use some of the proceeds to buy, among other things, fine cloth and have it made up into livery for two manservants. He also ordered "one set horse furniture with livery lace and the Washington crest on the housing." He ordered silk stockings, cambric for ruffles, "three gold and scarlet sword knots" to drape from his saber, and "one fashionable gold laced hat." At this point he was still contemplating the possibility of a British officer's career. He also now ordered his own copy of Bland's Military Discipline. The next crop, a year of hardships and rebuffs later, was four times larger. This time, Washington bought slaves."

He had obviously given up his aspirations for a military career and was laying the groundwork for a civilian career. During the summer of 1757 he entered his name as a candidate for a seat in the House of Burgesses from Frederick County. While he did not reside there, he worked a farm at Bullskin Creek. He was well known to the county's electorate. For three years he had defended their frontier farms. But many farmers were still bristling at his confiscations of livestock for Braddock's expedition, and a majority of his natural constituency, the veterans, were scattered in Virginia units from Maryland to South Carolina. Washington still might have won over enough votes, but he did not campaign and refused to provide the customary refreshments at the polls. He lost.