George Washington Part 1

George Washington.

by William Roscoe Thayer.

PREFACE

To obviate misunderstanding, it seems well to warn the reader that this book aims only at giving a sketch of George Washington's life and acts. I was interested to discover, if I could, the human residue which I felt sure must persist in Washington after all was said. Owing to the pernicious drivel of the Reverend Weems no other great man in history has had to live down such a ma.s.s of absurdities and deliberate false inventions. At last after a century and a quarter the rubbish has been mostly cleared away, and only those who wilfully prefer to deceive themselves need waste time over an imaginary Father of His Country amusing himself with a fict.i.tious cherry-tree and hatchet.

The truth is that the material about George Washington is very voluminous. His military records cover the eight years of the Revolutionary War. His political work is preserved officially in the reports of Congress. Most of the public men who were his contemporaries left memoirs or correspondence in which he figures.

Above all there is the edition, in fourteen volumes, of his own writings compiled by Mr. Worthington C. Ford. And yet many persons find something that baffles them. They do not recognize a definite flesh and blood Virginian named Washington behind it all. Even so st.u.r.dy an historian as Professor Channing calls him the most elusive of historic personages. Who has not wished that James Boswell could have spent a year with Wellington on terms as intimate as those he spent with Dr. Johnson and could have left a report of that intimacy?

In this sketch I have conceived of Washington as of some superb athlete equipped for every ordeal which life might cause him to face.

The nature of each ordeal must be briefly stated; brief also, but sufficient, the account of the way he accomplished it. I have quoted freely from his letters wherever it seemed fitting, first, because in them you get his personal authentic statement of what happened as he saw it, and you get also his purpose in making any move; and next, because nothing so well reveals the real George Washington as those letters do. Whoever will steep himself in them will hardly declare that their writer remains an elusive person beyond finding out or understanding. In the course of reading them you will come upon many of those "imponderables" which are the secret soul of statecraft.

And so with all humility--for no one can spend much time with Washington, and not feel profound humility--I leave this little sketch to its fate, and hope that some readers will find in it what I strove to put in it.

W.R.T.

CAMBRIDGE, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS _June 11, 1922_

GEORGE WASHINGTON

CHAPTER I

ORIGINS AND YOUTH

Zealous biographers of George Washington have traced for him a most respectable, not to say distinguished, ancestry. They go back to the time of Queen Elizabeth, and find Washingtons then who were "gentlemen." A family of the name existed in Northumberland and Durham, but modern investigation points to Sulgrave, in Northamptonshire, as the English home of his stock. Here was born, probably during the reign of Charles I, his great-grandfather, John Washington, who was a sea-going man, and settled in Virginia in 1657.

His eldest son, Lawrence, had three children--John, Augustine, and Mildred. Of these, Augustine married twice, and by his second wife, Mary Ball, whom he married on March 17, 1730, there were six children--George, Betty, Samuel, John Augustine, Charles, and Mildred.

The family home at Bridges Creek, near the Potomac, in Westmoreland County, was Washington's birthplace, and (February 11, Old Style) February 22, New Style, 1732, was the date. We hear little about his childhood, he being a wholesomely unprecocious boy. Rumors have it that George was coddled and even spoiled by his mother. He had very little formal education, mathematics being the only subject in which he excelled, and that he learned chiefly by himself. But he lived abundantly an out-of-door life, hunting and fishing much, and playing on the plantation. His family, although not rich, lived in easy fashion, and ranked among the gentry.

No Life of George Washington should fail to warn the reader at the start that the biographer labors under the disadvantage of having to counteract the errors and absurdities which the Reverend Mason L.

Weems made current in the Life he published the year after Washington died. No one, not even Washington himself, could live down the reputation of a goody-goody prig with which the officious Scotch divine smothered him. The cherry-tree story has had few rivals in publicity and has probably done more than anything else to implant an instinctive contempt of its hero in the hearts of four generations of readers. "Why couldn't George Washington lie?" was the comment of a little boy I knew, "Couldn't he talk?"

Weems pretended to an intimacy at Mount Vernon which it appears he never had. In "Blackwood's Magazine" John Neal said of the book, "Not one word of which we believe. It is full of ridiculous exaggerations."

And yet neither this criticism nor any other stemmed the outpouring of editions of it which must now number more than seventy. Weems doubtless thought that he was helping G.o.d and doing good to Washington by his offensive and effusive support of rudimentary morals.

Weems had been dead a dozen years when another enemy sprang up. This was the worthy Jared Sparks, an historian, a professor of history, who collected with much care the correspondence of George Washington and edited it in a monumental work. Sparks, however, suffered under the delusion that something other than fact can be the best substance of history. According to his tastes, many of Washington's letters were not sufficiently dignified; they were too colloquial, they even let slip expressions which no man conscious that he was the model of propriety, the embodiment of the dignity of history, could have used.

So Mr. Sparks without blushing went through Washington's letters and subst.i.tuted for the originals words which he decided were more seemly.

Again the public came to know George Washington, not by his own words, but by those attributed to him by an overzealous stylist-pedant. Well might the Father of his Country pray to be delivered from the parsons.

One of the earliest records of Washington's youth is the copy, written in his beautiful, almost copper-plate hand, of "Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior, In Company and Conversation." These maxims were taken from an English book called "The Young Man's Companion," by W. Mather.

It had pa.s.sed through thirteen editions and contained information upon many matters besides conduct Perhaps Washington copied the maxims as a school exercise; perhaps he learned them by heart.

They are for the most part the didactic aphorisms which greatly pleased our worthy ancestors during the middle of the eighteenth century and later. Some of the entries referred to simple matters of deportment: you must not turn your back on persons to whom you talk.

Others touch morals rather than manners. One imagines that the parson or elderly uncles allowed themselves to bestow this indisputably correct advice upon the youths whom they were interested in. A boy brought up rigidly on these doctrines could hardly fail to become a prig unless he succeeded in following the last injunction of all: "Labor to keep alive in your heart, that little spark of celestial fire called conscience."

When he was eleven years old, Washington's father died, and his older half-brother, Lawrence, who inherited the estate now known as Mount Vernon, became his guardian. Lawrence had married the daughter of a neighbor, William Fairfax, agent for the large Fairfax estate. Fairfax and he had served with the Colonial forces at Cartagena under Admiral Vernon, from whom the Washington manor took its name. Lord Fairfax, William's cousin and head of the family, offered George work on the survey of his domain. George, then a st.u.r.dy lad of sixteen, accepted gladly, and for more than two years he carried it on. The Fairfax estate extended far into the west, beyond the immediate tidewater district, beyond the fringe of spa.r.s.ely settled clearings, into the wilderness itself. The effect of his experience as surveyor lasted throughout George Washington's life. His self-reliance and his courage never flagged. Sometimes he went alone and pa.s.sed weeks among the solitudes; sometimes he had a companion whom he had to care for as well as for himself. But besides the toughening of his character which this pioneer life a.s.sured him, he got much information, which greatly influenced, years later, his views on the development, not only of Virginia, but of the Northwest. Perhaps from this time there entered into his heart the conviction that the strongest bond of union must sometime bind together the various colonies, so different in resources and in interests, including his native commonwealth.

From journals kept during some of his expeditions we see that he was a clear observer and an accurate reporter; far from bookish, but a careful penman, and conscious of the obligation laid upon him to acquire at least the minimum of polite knowledge which was expected of a country gentleman such as he aspired to be.

Here is an extract in which he describes the squalid conditions under which he pa.s.sed some of his life as a woodsman and surveyor.

We got our suppers and was lighted into a Room and I not being so good a woodsman as ye rest of my company, striped myself very orderly and went into ye Bed, as they calld it, when to my surprize, I found it to be nothing but a little straw matted together without sheets or any thing else, but only one thread bare blanket with double its weight of vermin, such as Lice, Fleas, etc. I was glad to get up (as soon as ye light was carried from us). I put on my cloths and lay as my companions. Had we not been very tired, I am sure we should not have slep'd much that night. I made a Promise not to sleep so from that time forward, chusing rather to sleep in ye open air before a fire, as will appear hereafter.

Wednesday 16th. We set out early and finish'd about one o'clock and then Travelled up to Frederick Town, where our Baggage came to us. We cleaned ourselves (to get rid of ye game we had catched ye night before), I took a Review of ye Town and then return'd to our Lodgings where we had a good Dinner prepared for us. Wine and Rum Punch in plenty, and a good Feather Bed with clean sheets, which was a very agreeable regale.

The longest of Washington's early expeditions was the "Journey over the Mountains, began Fryday the 11th of March 1747/8." The mountains were the Alleghanies, and the trip gave him a closer acquaintance than he had had with Indians in the wilds. On his return, he stayed with his half-brother, Lawrence, at Mount Vernon, or with Lord Fairfax, and enjoyed the country life common to the richer Virginians of the time.

Towns which could provide an inn being few and far between, travellers sought hospitality in the homes of the well-to-do residents, and every one was in a way a neighbor of the other dwellers in his county. So both at Belvoir and at Mount Vernon, guests were frequent and broke the monotony and loneliness of their inmates. I think the reputation of gravity, which was fixed upon Washington in his mature years, has been projected back over his youth. The actual records are lacking, but such hints and surmises as we have do not warrant our thinking of him as a self-centred, unsociable youth. On the contrary, he was rather, what would be called now, a sport, ready for hunting or riding, of splendid physical build, agile and strong. He liked dancing, and was not too shy to enjoy the society of young women; indeed, he wrote poems to some of them, and seems to have been popular with them. And still, the legend remains that he was bashful.

From our earliest glimpses of him, Washington appears as a youth very particular as to his dress. He knew how to rough it as the extracts of his personal journals which I have quoted show, and this pa.s.sage confirms:

I seem to be in a place where no real satisfaction is to be had.

Since you received my letter in October last, I have not sleep'd above three or four nights in a bed, but, after walking a good deal all the day, I lay down before the fire upon a little hay, straw, fodder, or bearskin, which ever is to be had, with man, wife, and children, like a parcel of dogs and cats, and happy is he who gets the berth nearest the fire. There's nothing would make it pa.s.s off tolerably but a good reward. A doubloon is my constant gain every day that the weather will permit my going out, and sometimes six pistoles. The coldness of the weather will not allow of my making a long stay, as the lodging is rather too cold for this time of year. I have never had my clothes off but lay and sleep in them, except the few nights I have lay'n in Frederic Town.[1]

[Footnote 1: Hapgood, p, 11.]

Later, when Washington became master of Mount Vernon, his servants were properly liveried. He himself rode to hounds in the approved apparel of a fox-hunting British gentleman, and we find in the lists of articles for which he sends to London the names of clothes and other articles for Mrs. Washington and the children carefully specified with the word "fashionable" or "very best quality" added.

Still later, when he was President he attended to this matter of dress with even greater punctilio.

One incident of this early period should not be pa.s.sed by unmentioned.

Admiral Vernon offered him an appointment as midshipman in the navy, but Washington's mother objected so strongly that Washington gave up the opportunity. We may well wonder whether, if he had accepted it, his career might not have been permanently turned aside. Had he served ten or a dozen years in the navy, he might have grown to be so loyal to the King, that, when the Revolution came, he would have been found in command of one of the King's men-of-war, ordered to put down the Rebels in Boston, or in New York. Thus Fate suggests amazing alternatives to us in the retrospect, but in the actual living, Fate makes it clear that the only course which could have happened was that which did happen.

In 1751 the health of Washington's brother, Lawrence, became so bad from consumption that he decided to pa.s.s the winter in a warm climate.

He chose the Island of Barbados, and his brother George accompanied him. Shortly before sailing, George was commissioned one of the Adjutants-General of Virginia, with the rank of Major, and the pay of 150 a year. They sailed on the Potomac River, perhaps near Mount Vernon, on September 28, 1751, and landed at Bridgetown on November 3d. The next day they were entertained at breakfast and dinner by Major Clark, the British officer who commanded some of the fortifications of the island. "We went," says George Washington, in a journal he kept, "myself with some reluctance, as the smallpox was in his family." Thirteen days later, George fell ill of a very strong case of smallpox which kept him housed for six weeks and left his face much disfigured for life with pock marks, a fact which, so far as I have observed his portraits, the painters have carefully forgotten to indicate.

The brothers pa.s.sed a fairly pleasant month and a half at the Barbados. Major Clark, and other gentlemen and officials of the island, showed them much attention. They enjoyed the hospitality of the Beefsteak and Tripe Club, which seems to have been the fashionable club. On one occasion, Washington was taken to the play to see the "Tragedy of George Barnwell." This may have been the first time that he went to the theatre. He refers to it in his journal with his habitual caution:

Was treated with a play ticket by Mr. Carter to see the Tragedy of George Barnwell acted: the character of Barnwell and several others was said to be well perform'd there was Musick a Dapted and regularly conducted by Mr.

But Lawrence Washington's consumption did not improve: he grew homesick and pined for his wife and for Mount Vernon. The physicians had recommended him to spend a full year at Barbados, in order to give the climate and the regimen there a fair trial, but he could not endure it so long, and he sailed from there to Bermuda, whence he shortly returned to Virginia and Mount Vernon. George, meanwhile, had also gone back to Virginia, sailing December 22, 1751, and arriving February 1, 1752. Even from his much-mutilated journal, we can see that he travelled with his eyes open, and that his interests were many. As he mentioned in his journal thirty persons with whom he became acquainted at the Barbados, we infer that in spite of bashfulness he was an easy mixer. This short journey to the Barbados marks the only occasion on which George Washington went outside of the borders of the American Colonies, which became later, chiefly through his genius, the United States.[1]

[Footnote 1: J.M. Toner: _The Daily Journal of Major George Washington in 1751-2_ (Albany, N.Y., 1892).]

In July, 1752, Lawrence Washington died of the disease which he had long struggled against. He left his fortune and his property, including Mount Vernon, to his daughter, Sarah, and he appointed his brother, George, her guardian. She was a sweet-natured girl, but very frail, who died before long, probably of the same disease which had carried her father off, and, until its infectious nature was understood, used to decimate families from generation to generation.

To have thrust upon him, at the age of twenty, the management of a large estate might seem a heavy burden for any young man; but George Washington was equal to the task, and it seems as if much of his career up to that time was a direct preparation for it. He knew every foot of its fields and meadows, of its woodlands and streams; he knew where each crop grew, and its rotation; he had taken great interest in horses and cattle, and in the methods for maintaining and improving their breed; and now, of course being master, his power of choosing good men to do the work was put to the test. But he had not been long at these new occupations before public duties drew him away from them.

Though they knew it not, the European settlers in North America were approaching a life-and-death catastrophe. From the days when the English and the French first settled on the continent, Fate ordained for them an irrepressible conflict. Should France prevail? Should England prevail? With the growth of their colonies, both the English and the French felt their rivalry sharpened. Although distances often very broad kept them apart in s.p.a.ce, yet both nations were ready to prove the terrible truth that when two men, or two tribes, wish to fight each other, they will find out a way. The French, at New Orleans, might be far away from the English at Boston; and the English, in New York, or in Philadelphia, might be removed from the French in Quebec; but in their hatreds they were near neighbors. The French pushed westward along the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, and from Lake Erie, they pushed southward, across the rich plains of Ohio, to the Ohio River. Their trails spread still farther into the Western wilderness. They set up trading-posts in the very region which the English settlers expected to occupy in the due process of their advance. At the junction of the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers, they planted Fort Duquesne, which not only commanded the approach to the territory through which the Ohio flowed westward, but served notice on the English that the French regarded themselves as the rightful claimants of that territory.

In 1753 Governor Dinwiddie, of Virginia, had sent a commissioner to warn the French to cease from encroaching on the lands in the Ohio wilderness which belonged to the King of England, but the messenger stopped one hundred and fifty miles short of his goal. Therefore, the Governor decided to despatch another envoy. He selected George Washington, who was already well known for his surveying, and for his expedition beyond the mountains, and doubtless had the backing of the Fairfaxes and other influential gentlemen. Washington set out on the same day he received his appointment from Governor Dinwiddie (October 31, 1753), engaged Jacob Van Braam, a Hollander who had taught him fencing, to be his French interpreter; and Christopher Gist, the best guide through the Virginia wilderness, to pilot the party. In spite of the wintry conditions which beset them, they made good time.

Washington presented his official warning to M. Joncaire, the princ.i.p.al French commander in the region under dispute, but he replied that he must wait for orders from the Governor in Quebec. One object of Washington's mission was to win over, if possible, the Indians, whose friendship for either the French or the English depended wholly on self-interest. He seems to have been most successful in securing the friendship of Thanacarishon, the great Seneca Chief, known as the Half-King. This native left it as his opinion that

the colonel was a good-natured man, but had no experience; he took upon him to command the Indians as his slaves, and would have them every day upon the scout and to attack the enemy by themselves, but would by no means take advice from the Indians. He lay in one place from one full moon to the other, without making any fortifications, except that little thing on the meadow, whereas, had he taken advice, and built such fortifications as I advised him, he might easily have beat off the French. But the French in the engagement acted like cowards, and the English like fools.[1]