The War That Made America

Believing that their sacrifices of blood and treasure entitled them to share in the fruits of victory, the colonists of British North America assumed that they had a stake in the empire’s future. Few of them felt that conviction more keenly than Colonel George Washington of Virginia. His postwar career illuminates how, in the aftermath of Britain’s greatest victory, men who regarded themselves as committed British patriots would defend their vision of the empire, and their understanding of their rights within it, with such fervor as to bring about a Revolution.

So far as the twenty-seven-year-old colonel was concerned, retirement from command of the Virginia Regiment at the end of 1758 marked the end of military ambition. He hoped, as he wrote to a British merchant the following year, “to find more happiness in retirement than I ever experienced amidst a wide and bustling World.” By “retirement,” of course, he merely meant living on his plantation and minding his own business, not withdrawing from the world; for in fact Washington’s goal remained what it had always been, to become a leading member of his colony’s ruling elite. The important role he had played in the war had established his reputation for the public-spiritedness that Virginia’s leaders were supposed to demonstrate, but in the end there was no real power in Virginia without a great fortune to sustain it. With marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis he made rapid progress on that front in early 1759. Over the following decade he used Martha’s wealth to expand his Tidewater properties from about five thousand acres to more than twelve thousand, and to double his holding of slaves.

Washington proved less successful in growing tobacco that could command a premium price in London, however, and found his debts with British merchants mounting even as he expanded his estates. Reluctantly he shifted from planting tobacco to growing wheat in 1767, but the effect proved less dramatic than he wished. Even when he supplemented farming with flour-milling, textile-weaving, shad-fishing, and brandy-distilling, his profits remained slender, his debts stubbornly substantial. In response he pitched ever-greater hopes on land speculation, an enterprise he had engaged in since his late teenage years, but which he now practiced with ever-increasing enthusiasm.

His most secure basis for speculation lay in the colony’s promise to grant 200,000 acres in the Ohio Valley to men who served under him in 1754. As colonel, Washington had personal rights to twenty thousand of those acres. He spent the decade after the war buying warrants—certificates that entitled each captain to nine thousand acres, and individual privates to four hundred acres apiece—from his former subordinates. Eventually he accumulated rights to an additional twenty-five thousand acres. By 1767 he thought it prudent to engage an old comrade, Captain William Crawford, to identify and survey prime parcels that he could claim along the south bank of the river. That the Proclamation of 1763 forbade white settlement west of the Appalachian crest did not concern him. As he explained to Crawford, the Proclamation was but “a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians” that “must fall of course in a few years.” When it did, he intended to be in a position to profit from the immense westward surge of settlers that was sure to follow. With this in mind, he visited the Ohio Valley himself in the fall of 1770, carefully examining lands from Pittsburgh to the mouth of the Great Kanawha, two hundred miles downstream.

Washington’s acquisition of lands on the Ohio had its counterpart in his ambitious plan to improve transportation links between the Potomac (on which Mount Vernon and his primary Tidewater holdings were located) and the Ohio country. Key to this scheme was the formation of a canal company to make the Potomac “the Channel of conveyance of the extensive & valuable Trade of a rising Empire” in the West, connected to the Ohio by Braddock’s Road and the Youghiogheny and Monongahela rivers. That this rising empire would be British went without saying. A pair of agreements negotiated between the crown and major Indian groups in 1768 seemed to suggest that it was only a matter of time before the Proclamation would be rescinded. The Treaty of Hard Labor and the Treaty of Fort Stanwix both grew out of attempts to define a secure boundary between Indian and white settlement in the aftermath of Pontiac’s War. By the former the Cherokees, and by the latter the Six Nations ceded their claims to certain lands south of the Ohio to the crown in return for large diplomatic gifts. Since neither group exercised any real control over the Ohio—the Delawares, Shawnees, Mingo Seneca, and others who lived there remained stubbornly unwilling to forgo their own claims to independence, and to the land—these treaties marked only a partial advance toward stabilizing Indian relations in the interior. Nonetheless, to Washington and other speculators, they seemed to herald an era in which the Ohio country would be opened to white settlement. Washington accordingly devoted immense attention to positioning himself to take advantage of his claims when the longed-for day finally dawned.

Robert Dinwiddie, “A PROCLAMATION, For Encouraging MEN to enlist in his Majesty’s Service . . . February 19, 1754.” Virginia offered shares in 200,000 acres of land near the Forks of the Ohio as an inducement to enlist in the 1754 campaign. Following the fall of Canada, Washington began purchasing fellow veterans’ certificates, amassing claims to 45,000 acres of western land. His ability to secure possession of this vast estate depended on the impermanence of the 1763 Proclamation Line and the cooperation of imperial officials. (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

Washington’s future-oriented thinking disposed him to political moderation when Parliament once again tried its hand at reforming imperial governance in the Townshend Acts, and triggered a second postwar crisis in colonial-metropolitan relations. Washington helped draw up the covenant of the Virginia Non-Importation Association in 1769 and joined in boycotting trade with Britain as a means of protesting the Townshend duties, but this still indicated no revolutionary sentiments. He objected not to the empire but rather to the way it was currently being run. Meanwhile the trade boycott gave him and his fellow gentlemen a chance to reduce their consumption of the manufactures that were running them ever more deeply into debt. When a new ministry headed by Frederick, Lord North, repealed all of the duties except a symbolic tax on tea imports to the colonies in 1770, Washington gratefully joined with other moderates in relaxing the nonimportation agreements. As business-as-usual resumed within the empire and the long postwar recession seemed finally to be at an end, support for nonimportation declined. By mid-1771 the boycotts had collapsed altogether and colonists resumed their habit of consuming vast quantities of affordable, high-quality British manufactures.

The arrival that autumn of John Murray, Lord Dunmore, as Virginia’s new governor offered cause for further optimism about the future. Dunmore had an intense interest in developing the Ohio country, and no excessively scrupulous view of the Proclamation of 1763. Over the next year and a half Washington and Dunmore built a cordial relationship around their common goals in the West—so much so that Washington offered to act as the governor’s personal guide on a tour of the Ohio Valley in the summer of 1773.

A family emergency—the sudden death of Martha’s daughter Patsy—kept Washington from making good on that offer, and in the end Dunmore went west himself. What the governor saw in the vicinity of Pittsburgh—by his estimate, at least ten thousand white settlers illegally inhabiting lands that were supposed to be reserved for Indians—made him determined to extend Virginia’s jurisdiction over the region by expanding the bounds of Augusta County to the north and west. The Penn family, who as proprietors of Pennsylvania had as plausible a claim to the region as Virginia, did not relish the thought of another colony’s government issuing patents to legalize the holdings of the local settlers and thus depriving them of the opportunity to sell the land and diminishing the tax base of Pennsylvania as well. The Penns therefore moved to organize the area around Pittsburgh as Westmoreland County, appointing magistrates to counter those of Virginia. By the spring of 1774 competition between the two colonies over control of the area had grown so intense as to suggest that civil war might break out between pro-Pennsylvania and pro-Virginia settlers.

Meanwhile the empire had entered a third phase of crisis with Parliament’s passage of the Tea Act. Lord North’s administration had intended this measure to bail out the British East India Company, which had sustained such expenses as a result of the Seven Years’ War that by 1773 it was in immediate danger of going bankrupt. His Majesty’s government lacked surplus funds to offer as a direct subsidy, and the company had no assets to liquidate, apart from the 17,000,000 pounds of tea that lay in its English warehouses—an amount so vast that to sell it would have glutted the British market, rendering the tea worthless. The Tea Act was brilliant insofar as granting the company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies could be expected to transmute those 17,000,000 pounds of otherwise unmerchantable leaves into the money it desperately needed. Yet inasmuch as the one duty that remained unrepealed from the Townshend Acts was a tax on tea imports, the Tea Act was a fiasco. Protests erupted everywhere in the colonies over what the colonists (their ideological sensitivity raised by the two previous crises of empire) understood as a subtle and devious parliamentary effort to tax them without their consent. The protests largely remained contained, except in Boston, where, for a variety of local reasons, things got out of hand. On the night of December 16, 1773, radical protesters disguised as Mohawk Indians destroyed tea worth £11,000 sterling by dumping it over the gunwales of East India Company vessels, into Boston Harbor. It was a provocation too extreme for His Majesty’s government to ignore. For the good of the empire as a whole, Lord North and his fellow ministers agreed, Boston had to be chastised, and shown the error of its ways.

The example Britain made of Boston taught a very clear lesson indeed, but not one that wiser heads might have chosen, for it demonstrated above all the extent of Britain’s sovereign power over the colonies—precisely the sort of unlimited power that colonial radicals had warned against since 1765. In swift sequence North’s ministry closed the port of Boston, rewrote the Massachusetts charter to reduce the extent of representative government, limited the authority of Massachusetts’s courts to prosecute royal officers accused of crimes, assigned more than four thousand soldiers to occupy the town, and appointed the American commander in chief, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, as the governor of the province.

Everywhere protests blossomed in support of Boston. In Virginia even moderate politicians (including Colonel Washington) joined in passing a resolution in the House of Burgesses on May 24, 1774, calling for a day of prayer and fasting in solidarity with the suffering Bostonians. Governor Dunmore, furious at what he regarded as an offense against the king’s majesty, summarily dissolved the House. Washington joined his fellow burgesses in adjourning to a nearby tavern. There they reconstituted themselves as a Convention and voted to invite Virginia’s “Sister Colonies” to meet with it in a Continental Congress, so that they could jointly consider “such Measures as shall be judged most effectual for the Common Rights and Liberty of British America.”

It was in this context of political unrest that Dunmore, thinking he could defuse opposition to the crown and Parliament, ordered the militia regiments of western Virginia to stand ready to defend the frontier against Indian attacks and called for twenty-four hundred volunteers to undertake a campaign against the Shawnee Indians in the Ohio Valley. The occasion for this expedition, and what came to be called Lord Dunmore’s War, was entirely trumped up. Disorganized violence between natives and whites was endemic on the Ohio, so the killing of three traders by Cherokee warriors in April had been far from an unusual event. But Lord Dunmore’s supporters in Pittsburgh quite calculatedly chose to blame the murders on the Shawnees who lived north of the Ohio in the Scioto Valley and claimed lands on the opposite bank as their hunting grounds, because the Shawnees had taken no part in the Treaty of Hard Labor or the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. Not participating in those agreements had made the Shawnees the last plausible Indian claimants to the lands immediately south of the Ohio; because they actually used the region for their livelihood (unlike the Cherokees and the Iroquois), they were unlikely to surrender their rights to it. It therefore made enormous sense to Dunmore and his supporters at Pittsburgh to force a war against them, no matter how specious the grounds were, so that Virginia could claim the area by right of conquest. To do so would clear the way, once the Proclamation of 1763 was revoked, for Virginia to extend its jurisdiction over the whole southern half of the Ohio Valley.

This titanic landgrab was precisely what Dunmore had in mind when he ordered the raising of more troops than Virginia had ever fielded to defend its frontier during the last war; but more than mere conquest was on Dunmore’s mind as he led the troops west to attack the Shawnees in September and October 1774. It was at that same moment exactly that the delegates of the First Continental Congress, George Washington among them, were meeting in Philadelphia. What Dunmore intended was to join the interest of the land-speculating gentry in acquiring Ohio lands with the impassioned Indian-hating of white Virginians generally, in order to divert attention from the Continental Congress’s protests and build support for himself and the empire.

Lord Dunmore knew that the irritation of the Virginians with Parliament had at least as much to do with restrictions on western settlement as it did with the occupation of Boston and the summary remodeling of Massachusetts’s governmental institutions. He was gambling that a successful strike at the Shawnees would make him a hero and yield such a fund of goodwill for the empire that Virginia’s leaders would back off from their support of the Bostonians and let matters take their course. Once that wretched city had been taught its lesson and Britain’s sovereign authority had been firmly reestablished, both he and the power of the crown would be in a stronger position than they had ever been in Virginia. It was true, of course, that Dunmore was launching an utterly unauthorized war of conquest to attain these ends. It was also true that the stakes were high enough that he was prepared to risk censure or dismissal in order to attain the rewards, for the empire and himself alike, that a successful campaign might bring.

Dunmore very nearly succeeded; indeed, had success not tempted him to overplay his hand, he might well have done so. A battle between Shawnee warriors and half of the Virginia forces at a bend in the river called Point Pleasant, on October 10, 1774, enabled him to claim a victory. The subsequent decision by peace-minded Shawnee chiefs to accept an armistice, temporarily suspend hunting south of the Ohio, and attend a peace conference the next spring created an illusion of conquest sufficiently strong that upon his return Dunmore found himself lionized among the gentry. When a new Virginia Convention assembled in March 1775 to choose delegates to the Second Continental Congress, the members issued a formal resolution that praised Dunmore “for his truly noble, wise and spirited Conduct on the late Expedition against our Indian Enemy.” Colonel Washington, whom the Convention chose as a delegate to the Congress precisely because his views were so temperate, joined in the applause. He continued to nurture the hope that the divisions within the empire could be amicably resolved and that settlement in the interior might at last proceed in the way he had longed to see.

Three occurrences following closely upon one another in April destroyed Washington’s faith that all might yet be well. The first was personal. On April 18 Governor Dunmore, believing himself in a strong position, declared his intent to invalidate, on purely technical grounds, Washington’s title to the forty-five thousand acres of Ohio land he had patented within the Virginia Regiment’s claim. It seems clear that Dunmore had thought that doing so would force Washington to reconsider his connection to the intercolonial protest movement, and perhaps to absent himself from the upcoming Congress. Washington, astonished and outraged, was still trying to understand the meaning of the governor’s act when Dunmore struck again. On April 21, in an evident attempt to bring the population of Virginia’s capital to its knees, he ordered Williamsburg’s entire stock of gunpowder to be secretly removed from the town’s magazine and taken on board the Royal Navy’s station ship, H.M.S. Fowey. This was ostensibly to protect the powder supply, but it happened when rumors of a slave conspiracy were flying up and down the James River Valley, and it set not only the capital but the province in an uproar. Virginia’s leaders were still attempting by pleas and threats to make Dunmore return the powder when news arrived on April 28 that formations of Massachusetts militia had clashed with His Majesty’s troops outside Boston nine days before. The disorderly day-long Battle of Lexington and Concord had left seventy-three regulars and forty-nine militiamen dead, and hundreds more wounded. Reports that followed in rapid succession revealed that thousands of militiamen from all four New England colonies had massed outside Boston, laying siege to the city and effectively trapping General Gage and his soldiers inside.

John Murray, Fourth Earl of Dunmore, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1765. The Scottish Lord Dunmore (1732-1809) found common cause with George Washington in asserting Virginia’s control of lands in the Ohio Valley. Dunmore’s 1774 campaign against the Shawnee Indians in the Ohio country, which opened the prospect of seizing lands between the Appalachian Mountains and the Ohio River, boosted the governor’s popularity with the Virginia gentry. (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh)

All three events, occurring within ten days’ time, help explain Washington’s decision to attend the meetings of the Second Continental Congress wearing the blue-and-buff uniform of the Fairfax Independent militia company. At every level he could understand—as a speculator, as a Virginian, as an American colonist—these events had shown the abusive exercise of power that such radicals as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had warned against. Unlike those men, Washington was not a particularly sophisticated political thinker. But he was a matchlessly astute judge of men and events, and what he had seen told him that arguments alone would no longer protect his and other colonists’ rights. It was now clear that the empire he and other Americans had dreamed of since the war—the transatlantic partnership of Britons who would carry English institutions and laws into the heart of the conquests they had won together—had no place in the thinking of the men who made imperial policy at Whitehall and Westminster.

The master of Mount Vernon had seen enough of human bondage to understand that what distinguished free men from slaves were the rights that protected individuals from those who wished to exercise absolute power over them. He had seen enough of war to know that once men had shed each other’s blood in a dispute over fundamental principles, they were unlikely to stop until one side had bent the other to its will, or both sides had reached exhaustion. The hard schooling he had undergone between 1754 and 1758 had taught him that wars could best be won by those who fought by the disciplined codes of European regular officers, and indeed that military professionalism was perhaps the only way to limit the destructiveness of armed conflict.

Washington knew war too well to welcome it in 1775, but when his fellow delegates at the Congress offered him the command of the provincial troops besieging Boston, he accepted with little hesitation. Better perhaps than any other delegate present at Philadelphia on June 16, 1775, the day he formally took up his commission, he understood what suffering and sacrifice lay ahead. Because he understood so much, he doubted that his experiences and training had adequately prepared him for what he called “the Command I am honoured with.” Yet because his honor was at stake and his countrymen’s rights and the future for which he had striven were at risk, he could not decline.

And there was another factor in his decision as well. He hinted at it on June 18 when he wrote to tell Martha that he would not be coming home as planned, but leaving for Massachusetts and the provincial forces who had just been designated as the Continental Army. “I shall rely . . . confidently,” he wrote, “on that Providence which has heretofore preserv[e]d, & been bountiful to me, not doubting that I shall return safe to you in the fall—I shall feel no pain from the Toil, or the danger of the Campaign—My unhappiness will [only] flow, from the uneasiness I know you will feel at being left alone.” Washington was not a particularly religious man in conventional terms: he attended Anglican services dutifully enough, but consistently left church before communion, rarely spoke of Christ, gave little credence to miracles, and seemed lukewarm even in his affiliation with the Freemasons. Nonetheless, he deeply felt that the power he called Providence (or, on other occasions, the Author of the Universe, the Great Ruler of Events, the Supreme Being, God) ordered the world and its events. He knew that in the late war his life had been spared on several occasions. He did not understand why, but trusted that there must have been some reason behind his survival, some purpose he had yet to serve. God knew what purpose that might be; he did not. But that did not make him believe in it less.

A year later, when the siege of Boston had been carried to its successful end and Washington had moved his headquarters to New York to oppose the coming British invasion, it would at least have been clear to him that his role in an unfolding drama of revolutionary war was no incidental one. Nor, obviously, was it to be any easier than the difficult part he had played in the war for empire. That was why, on July 9, 1776—the same day he ordered his men to assemble on parade to hear the Declaration of Independence read out by their battalion officers—he paused to make a “grateful remembrance” of his “escape . . . on the Banks of Monongahela,” twenty-one years before. This was why he hoped, as he wrote to the old comrade who had shared in that adventure, that “the same Provedence that protected us” then, would “continue his Mercies, and make us happy Instruments in restoring Peace & liberty to this once favour’d, but now distressed Country.”

Great as the perils that faced him in 1776 were, and as long as the odds against success seemed as twenty-five thousand redcoats backed by the most powerful fleet on earth prepared to attack his much smaller army, there is no indication that Washington worried much about what, precisely, his destiny might be. There would have been little point in doing so, for as he explained much later, “the great ruler of events” alone knew the purpose of whatever happened on earth. Therefore, he believed, “we may safely trust the issue to him, without perplexing ourselves to seek for that, which is beyond human ken; only taking care to perform the parts assigned us, in a way that reason and our own conscience approve of.”

Holster pistol, c. 1750. The British general Edward Braddock gave this pistol to his young aide George Washington during the 1755 campaign against Fort Duquesne. In 1777 Washington (or one of his servants) temporarily misplaced it, revealing his sentimental attachment to the piece. “His Excellency is much exercised over the loss of this pistol,” an associate noted, “it being given to him by Gen. Braddock, and having since been with him through several campaigns, and he therefore values it highly.” (Smithsonian Institution)