Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (12 page)

After canvassing at least a part of the field, Washington decided on Jonathan Boucher, a clergyman who was angling for appointment to a church in Virginia. He would be ordained in 1769, and he would gain his own church soon after. Meanwhile he kept himself alive as a tutor in Latin and Greek to the sons of planters before moving to Annapolis, Maryland.
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Washington, though fond of Jack, held no great hopes for him, but despite his doubts about his mental ability he wished to see him master the learning expected of a gentleman in Virginia society. His first appraisal of Jack for Boucher’s benefit described “a boy of good genius,” that is, of good character or spirit, “about 14 yrs of age, untainted in his Morals, & of innocent Manners.” He took the boy to Boucher in June 1768 and shortly after received a letter in which Boucher confessed that he had initially feared that Jack—“of so exceedingly mild & meek a Temper”—might be made uneasy “by the rougher Manners of Some of his Schoolfellows,” but he was later reassured that Jack was “happy” in “his new Situation.” Yet Boucher’s concerns lingered and were of more importance than how Jack responded to leaving the security of Mount Vernon for the rough-and-tumble of a boarding school. He asked Washington if Jack were not “more artless, more unskill’d in a necessary Address than He ought to be, ere He is turn’d out into
a World like this?” By “Address” he meant “bearing,” thinking of the confident attitude men in the eighteenth century expected of its gentlemen. What was desirable in an educated man went beyond knowledge of Latin and Greek, the conventional conception of education; indeed, more than “intellectual powers” required development—it was the “Heart” he aimed at, in the hope that what Jack lost in “Gentleness, Simplicity, & Inoffensiveness” would be replaced by “Address, Prudence, & Resolution.” He had found that Jack “posess’d all the Harmlessness of the Dove” but the boy “wanted some of the Wisdom of the Serpent.”
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These early impressions proved unreliable, and in the next three years, if Boucher did not exactly decide that the Serpent had found a home in Jack’s breast, he soon concluded that the “Dove” did not reside there, either. Jack never proved to be turbulent or disrespectful; he did not lie or steal, he did not drink or debauch girls, but he did not give any more of his time to his studies than he had to, and when he found a way to leave boarding school, he took it and remained away, usually at Mount Vernon as long as possible. Washington hoped for more and remarked on several occasions that Jack seemed to have added little to his stock of Latin and Greek, a failure that especially disappointed him, since there had been so much room for improvement.

Washington indeed wrote Boucher several times in disappointment with Jack’s performance. His own desires accorded well with Boucher’s—up to a point. He felt much less disturbed about Jack’s lack of style or the less-than-impressive manner with which he carried himself; the surface of the boy he believed would take care of itself. He was looking for evidence of learning and the discipline required to get it. At one point he even reminded Boucher that a gentleman should have French, though he himself could neither read nor write the language. Boucher’s reply to these comments could not have pleased him, though he said little in response to Boucher’s statements that more than a schoolmaster’s education was needed to make a gentleman. But after a few months of Jack’s sloth, Boucher seems to have come around to Washington’s opinion that Jack should work harder. As for Jack, horse racing, and an awakening interest in young women, soon replaced whatever interest he had in learning and discipline. “His Mind,” Washington wrote, was “a good deal relaxed from Study, & more than ever turnd to Dogs Horses & Guns; indeed upon Dress
& equipage, which till of late, he has discovered little Inclination of giving into.” Without saying anything explicitly in contradiction of Boucher’s intention of shaping Jack’s bearing or “Address” in accord with his conception of a gentleman’s worldliness, Washington warned against permitting Jack to act in ways “derogatory of Virtue, & that Innocence of Manners which one coud wish to preserve him in.” For the most part, in writing Boucher, Washington maintained the posture of a parent who would not presume to tell an expert schoolmaster how to run his educational program, but by late 1770 his patience showed wear, though it never yielded to querulousness. He was obviously displeased with Jack and perhaps with Boucher as well. To Jack, he said in effect, Get to work. And to Boucher, a flat requirement: Keep him close to those useful branches of learning, for if Boucher did not, Jack “will too soon think himself above countrol.” Nor should he “be suffered to Sleep from under your own Roof, unless it be at such places as you are sure he can have no bad examples set him; nor allow him to be rambling about at Nights in Company with those, who do not care how debauchd and vicious his Conduct may be.”
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Boucher, now made aware of Washington’s anxiety, wrote immediately, agreeing that Jack needed discipline and offering an assessment of his own: Jack was “indolent” and “surprisingly—voluptuous—one would suppose Nature had intended Him for some Asiatic Prince.”
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These discussions of Jack’s learning and discipline were carried on throughout his stays with Boucher. While they occurred, Boucher raised the possibility of a grand tour of Europe by Jack, suggesting that travel abroad would help form and polish his manners and presumably establish the “Address” Boucher had initially found so lacking in him. Boucher generously proposed himself as an appropriate guide, though he had never made such a tour himself. In one of his most forceful letters of advocacy, he also reminded Washington of Jack’s aversion to study and his fondness for a life of indolence. Although Boucher insisted that Jack was “indolent, & voluptuous,” the boy was not so far gone as to be unredeemable—redemption obviously coming from travel abroad, which would break down provincial prejudices and make him a man of the world.
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As the two men explored the possibilities, it became clear that Boucher himself relished the opportunity to see more of Europe. It was also clear that he had failed as a teacher, and that all of Washington’s
urging that “classical knowledge” was the thing for Jack, because gaining it would come only through the self-mastery and discipline required in such serious study, had not affected the teacher any more than the boy.

Jack did not go to Europe, and in 1773 entered the King’s College, New York—later Columbia University. He did not take a heavy load of classical learning with him, nor was he well qualified for studies in a college. But he was George Washington’s ward, and that connection was enough.

Jack received the treatment he thought he deserved—he was in fact much favored, as he explained “There has Nothing been omitted by the Professors, which could be in any means conducive to Happiness, & contentment; during my residence at this place, and I beleive [
sic
] I may say without vanity that I am Look’d upon in a particular Light by them all, there is as much Distinction made between me, & the Other Students as can be expected.” He expected a lot and got it—for example, he dined with President Cooper and the faculty, not with his fellow students.
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Washington’s military service made him a familiar figure in Virginia and rounded out his reputation as a man who could be counted on. Already famous locally and to some extent outside the colony, he stepped forward early in the revolutionary crisis brought on by the changes in colonial policy instituted by the British government. Though he had never been abroad and would never see the British Isles, he knew much about the system that underlay the tension between the mother country and her American colonies.

In fact, the British Empire in America held few mysteries for him. He had seen it close up from 1752 on. He knew its governors in Virginia, and he had dealt with others from Maryland, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. He had seen close up the British army in action, and he had fought alongside its troops. A number of British officers were friends, and one, Thomas Gage, led the army that would fight the opening engagements of the Revolutionary War.

Another source of his knowledge was newspaper accounts of the operations of Parliament and the relations the king’s government managed in the world. Even more important was the information he
gained in talking with captains of British ships that sailed up Chesapeake Bay. These men and British travelers could give him accounts of the affairs of the British Isles and the events that affected policies of colonial governance—and much more.

On the surface of things, he and most planters seemed isolated. But almost all were interested in the world around them, including the world of the empire and the mother country. They might be surprised by what Parliament and the Crown did, but they knew something of the mechanisms of empire—how things worked, even those things across the Atlantic.

Early in the first colonial upheavals of the 1760s, he expressed his dismay that the British seemed unaware that what they proposed to do in Parliament would cost their merchants money. His experience with those merchants, rocky as it sometimes was, led him to distinguish their exploitation of commercial advantage from that of the government. That government, the ministry and Parliament alike, seemed heedless of American rights under the British constitution and of imperial welfare in its determination to tax the colonies for revenue. The first attempt, in the North American Revenue Act of 1764, known since as the Sugar Act, aroused few in Virginia. It had no immediate effect there, for its central provisions reduced the old duty on molasses of six pence per gallon to three pence and came with plans to collect it. The original duty, levied in 1733, had been prohibitive, designed to exclude molasses from the French West Indies; it was in modern parlance a protective tariff—protective of British sugar planters in the islands.
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American distilleries, virtually all located in the New England colonies, New York, and Pennsylvania, had responded since 1734 by bribing customs collectors, who were British imperial officials, to look the other way. The new statute was not to be easily evaded. The king’s minister, George Grenville, ordered the collectors in America to do their jobs and replaced most of them with men he knew would comply with his orders. Americans caught trying to avoid paying the taxes by smuggling in the molasses would be tried in vice-admiralty courts, which sat without juries, leaving their fate in the hands of English judges appointed by the Crown.

If Washington knew of these new arrangements at the time, he failed to reveal his knowledge. He soon became aware of them, but in 1764 and probably for several years afterwards, most Americans,
including political leaders in the southern colonies, said little about the new statute. It contained other regulations that had nothing to do with taxes, and thereby presented a rather obscure, even murky, picture of what it was actually about.

The Stamp Act, passed in 1765, was another matter entirely—a clear attempt to tax and to extract revenue. It imposed a tax on legal documents, business papers, newspapers—a reach into economic and political life that left no doubt about what was intended or who was affected. It was to take effect on November 1, 1765. Long before that, the House of Burgesses had made known its displeasure in the Virginia Resolves, passed at the end of May. Washington, a representative from Fairfax County, was not present, nor were most of the members who ordinarily ran the House. A rump group, led by Patrick Henry—then a young man well known in the colony through his legal pyrotechnics in courtrooms but new to the Burgesses—presented at least four resolutions, which were eagerly passed by his followers. Most of the burgesses, decidedly not his followers, had gone home before he offered his resolutions. The essence of Henry’s draft resolutions held that the people of Virginia possessed “all the Liberties, privileges, Franchises, and Immunities, that have at any Time been held, enjoyed, and possessed, by the People of Great Britain.” Much followed from this premise, most notably that only a legislative body in which the people were represented could tax them. This body in Virginia was of course the House of Burgesses; in it, the people might tax themselves through their representatives—“Persons chosen by themselves to represent them, who can only know what Taxes the People are able to bear, or the easiest method of raising them, and must themselves be affected by every Tax laid on the People.” Such an arrangement, Henry’s third resolve stated, did more than offer protection to the people—it was “the distinguishing characteristick of British Freedom, without which the ancient Constitution cannot exist.”
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The fourth resolve claimed that this constitutional right had enjoyed long-standing approval—the king and his subjects in Great Britain had always favored it. Henry wrote at least two other resolves, much more controversial in wording, one insisting that anyone outside of the burgesses who said that any other “person or persons” had the authority to impose a tax on the people should be considered an enemy of the colony. This statement, along with the others, found its way into most
colonial newspapers up and down the coast. The
Maryland Gazette
printed them all, as if they expressed the received wisdom of the House of Burgesses.

It is not clear when Washington heard—or read in the Virginia or Maryland newspapers—of the action of the Burgesses. He had a variety of sources of information besides the newspapers—the records of the House and the testimony of visitors to Mount Vernon, as well as conversations with neighbors, near and far. By late summer and probably before, his own ideas were clear, and they were expressed in his letters of September. “The Stamp Act,” he wrote, “engrosses the conversation of the speculative part of the Colonists, who look upon this unconstitutional method of Taxation as a direful attack upon their Liberties, & loudly exclaim against the Violation.”
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He repeated this statement in different terms in the years that followed. He did not mention Patrick Henry and he did not quote the reports in the newspapers, but his initial reaction was to see British action, in its implications for American freedom, just as Henry and his radical young colleagues had. But Washington looked further into a more complicated future that included the effects of political action on the empire’s economy. What would occur, he asked, if the British government persisted in its course? The colonies, moved by the threat to their freedom, would not pay the tax—indeed,
could
not, for they lacked the money required. Rather than comply, they would forgo imported luxuries and manufacture the necessities they required. In such events, British merchants and manufacturers would suffer as their profits disappeared.