Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (2 page)

Virginian

Prologue

The Young Washington’s World

Long before George Washington’s death, Americans began writing about him in terms resembling the descriptions the New England Puritans had used to describe God. The Puritans never claimed ultimate insight into God’s essence—God, no matter how thoroughly studied, no matter how lovingly worshipped, remained unknown and unknowable. He could be approached, in a manner of speaking, by listing his attributes—his power and justice, for example—but the list could never be more than a beginning, certainly not a full understanding. George Washington, a mere man, was called godlike while still alive—meaning that he had been chosen by Providence to do great things; he was the being created to take the leading role, indeed the essential part, in leading his country out of the British Empire and into the new world of republics.
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The world in which he was born—the British colony of Virginia—was hardly one of republics. On the surface, at the time of Washington’s birth, Virginia appeared to conform to the understanding of many in Parliament of what a royal colony should be. The Crown appointed the governor, who almost always was of high social standing in England, and there was a bicameral legislature composed of a Governor’s Council, appointed by the Crown, and a House of Burgesses, a lower chamber, elected by and from property owners. There was also a general court, the councilors sitting in a judicial capacity. The republican element in this structure, if indeed it could be called that, was the House of Burgesses.

At the time of Washington’s boyhood, the Virginia gentry increasingly controlled the government and much else in the colony. Since the late seventeenth century, the Crown and its local agent, the governor, had struggled to maintain royal authority. They did not exactly lose the struggle, but as the years passed they had to concede that their
power had slipped gradually into the hands of men who considered themselves an elite, a group that had amassed land and slaves and in the process set the tone of society.

Compared with Virginian society of the previous century, that of the eighteenth was stable. It was stratified, with a landed group providing most of the government and fashioning a society indebted in several ways to English institutions and attitudes. It was also a slave-owning society, with Africans providing the bottom of the social order and almost all of the manual labor.

There were no conflicts within white society that led to large-scale violence during the years of Washington’s youth, but there were fears of a slave uprising. Many plantation masters may have recognized the injustice of holding men in slavery, but few felt guilt, and almost none felt compelled to explain their conduct. Indeed, they seemed to feel little uneasiness in resorting to whipping and chaining their slaves when discipline was called for.

Despite the lack of open conflict, there was a latent tension in the social system, which owed only a part of its nature to slavery. It arose from the system of plantation agriculture itself. One of the assumptions of planters held that the social order in Virginia should remain unchanged, because it expressed the natural order of things. The planter class owned the land and the labor force, and it welcomed new members to its number only if they met well-understood rules and conduct. Standards of behavior and life were to be found in the preferences of this class. The economy underlying this system centered on tobacco.

Growing tobacco had implications that went unrecognized during much of Washington’s early years. Seemingly a simple agrarian activity, managing a plantation and producing a crop (later, grains and other commodities began to supplant tobacco) led to activity not ordinarily associated with agrarianism or pastoralism: The crops had to be sold abroad, both in England and on the European continent, involving arrangements with British firms—no small matter when the market lay across the Atlantic Ocean and when no currency was readily available. Then there were the local problems, the management of a slave labor force, and replacing lands quickly worn out by the destructive force of tobacco. To sustain such a system was not a small affair for a class sometimes pictured as a leisured group.

Behind such a system, there had to be a propelling force, and there
was—an ethic that valued leisure but also demanded effort and saving. It was a commitment primarily to acquisition and work—in a real sense the Protestant ethic. Planters sometimes fancied that their plantations were simply large families governed by a patriarch, but in fact the life of the average planter was often made up of transactions, not of the contemplation of flocks grazing on green fields. Indeed, there was much hurly-burly in a planter’s daily existence.

Their dealings with British merchants brought home to planters that their rights—indeed, their welfare—depended in part on circumstances far removed from the province. In this broad setting—Virginia and western Europe—they learned of their vulnerability, an awakening not always welcomed. In a sense, their business dealings taught them what it meant to live in an empire. Much of the time, that awareness provided reassurance as they saw British power used in ways that served their interests. But at times the lessons of imperial life were different—as they discovered in the 1760s.

The plantation system had taken firm hold of the colony when Washington was young. He took to it almost instinctively, though in his twenties he looked to a career in the British army—not in the cultivation of tobacco. The French and the Indians were the enemies of these years, and he made his early reputation fighting both. Because he was a younger son in a second-level family, he could not find the clear passage to wealth and power that lay before sons of great planters. He was born on the margins of planting society, and if he was not quite an outsider, he was far from the center of the elite.

Two qualities seem decisive in Washington’s character—neither had emerged fully in his youth, but both were well developed by the time of his marriage. They were his will and his judgment. Whatever their deepest sources, they remained firm throughout his life. They have to be seen together to be understood; only a few men have them in the proportions found in Washington. His will was an independent force, a compound of energy and hardness. He was not aggressive in a violent way, but he possessed a desire, a forceful impulse, to force action and not give way when resisted. In many men, such a will is often violent, at least in verbal expression and sometimes in physical aggression. Countering, or holding down, even controlling, Washington’s will was a sense of restraint—a brake on unrestrained impulse that could yield destructive or self-defeating action. For much of his
life his temperament was peaceful—he was not an angry man, and he seldom if ever gave way to uncontrolled passion. He did occasionally seem reckless in battle, and even to lose control, but these were moments only, and they passed in a minute or two as far as we can tell. (A battle at Kips Bay, New York, in 1776 marked one such episode, but it quickly yielded to the self-mastery that distinguished Washington’s behavior at virtually every critical moment in the combat of the Revolution.)

Such shifts in conduct may have revealed a glimpse of the passions within him. What comes through in both his inner life and the life visible to others is a prevailing steadiness. He gave no evidence, under almost any circumstances, of deep mood swings. Rather, he seems always to have been given to implacable constancy. The people around him near the end of the French and Indian War, when it seems he gave up all hope of further military service, thought of him in rather romantic terms. He had apparently been a dashing soldier in the war and had shrugged off the dangers of fighting both the French and the Indians. He had in print declared that “I heard Bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.”

Washington had reached his twenty-second year when he wrote these words. He had wanted to find acceptance in the British army as a commissioned officer, and, failing that, he turned to the traditional role of Virginian planter. He had little idea where such a calling would carry him. At this moment he was a conventional Virginia provincial—not a man who knew the wide world well, but one who had got a taste of it while serving in the wilderness.

The Revolution would offer much more. At its beginning he was a provincial, and during its course he became an American. But he was a most unusual American by war’s end: He was an established citizen of the world. This membership in the European world pleased him. It owed much to the French, in particular to the French he had come to know in the Revolutionary War, men of the Enlightenment. He was proud of the connection, just as he was proud to be a Virginian and an American. His feeling was fully justified, for there was substance behind it, a commitment clear in his service to enlightenment and liberty.

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Young Washington

Boys in George Washington’s Virginia grew up fast. If they were black, they were slaves and had little choice; they were meant for work, and work they did or they perished. At an early age they went to the fields, most commonly tobacco fields, where they helped put in the crop and then helped tend it, pulling the suckers off plants, weeding, and eventually harvesting it. Most boys with black skin could look forward to an existence that revolved around tobacco, and those few who did not go to tobacco fields performed tasks connected to the needs of its cultivation. These boys might learn a craft—black craftsmen shoed horses, others made hogsheads or manhandled them when they were full of tobacco. Some planters, eager to diversify the economy of their plantation, occasionally turned to small-scale manufacturing. A few young blacks learned to make things with their hands—for example on Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello, where he had set up a nailery.

There were many tasks to be done on tobacco plantations. Boys like George Washington recognized that they had to be done, but of course George Washington and his kind did not do them. Boys of Washington’s status—he was the son of a tobacco planter—were usually destined to become estate managers. Running a plantation came down to managing land and slaves. By 1732, the year of Washington’s birth, tobacco cultivation had been carried on for more than a hundred years, and as a boy he almost instinctively began preparing himself to take his place in the long line of planters. His father, Augustine Washington, who owned land and slaves, was securely in this line, and young Washington hoped he would be.

In fact, Augustine Washington had several fields of interest in speculation and business. Born in Virginia, he had been taken to England
for schooling when he was three years old; after a few years he was taken back to Virginia, where he grew up. Augustine Washington’s father, Lawrence, had been an attorney who did business in Virginia with English merchants, and Augustine inherited his father’s estate. As an adult, he bought and sold land on his own; among his holdings was a section that contained iron. To develop it, he entered into a partnership with Principio Company, an English firm. His relations with Principio proved troublesome to both sides, with disputes carried out across the Atlantic.
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In 1729, hoping to resolve the problems with the company, Augustine Washington went to England, leaving behind a wife and three children: Lawrence, Augustine Jr., and Jane. When he returned a few months later, he was a widower, and not long after that his youngest child, Jane, died. Planters widowed did not usually remain without a wife for long, and Augustine followed conventional practice by marrying again. This time he chose Mary Ball, a woman of twenty-three and of a good but not distinguished family. George Washington was her first child, born February 22, 1732, on a plantation sometimes called Pope’s Creek, the name taken from a stream that fed into the Potomac River.

Augustine Washington moved often in his son’s first years. His family grew as he looked to improve his fortunes, with five more children coming after George—two girls and three boys. The younger girl, Mildred, died, still a baby, in 1740. Augustine was on the move looking for wealth in these years, and though he did not get it, he did not fall into poverty. We cannot tell how he might have fared, for he lived only a little more than eleven years after George’s birth, dying in 1743.

Washington’s education departed from the usual model preferred by Virginia planters who thought of themselves as gentlemen and hoped that their offspring would prove equal to their examples. What these planters had in mind for their sons was a grammar school education—learning in Latin and Greek and a certain style that demonstrated their promise as leaders in government and polite society. They would also learn, outside of their formal training in school, to manage land and slaves. Displaying comfort and skill in the larger world of politics and society, including overseas commerce, was essential.
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Augustine’s death removed the possibility that his son would follow his example and attend a grammar school, or board with a tutor who
taught the classical languages in either England or America. George’s mother, Mary Ball Washington, did not have genteel status, nor did she seem to hold such aspirations for her son. Virtually all of the great founders from Virginia, most notably Jefferson, Madison, and George Mason, were better educated, according to the usual standards, than George Washington. But almost all of these men came from families of greater distinction than the Washingtons.

George Washington was, in his early years, on the fringe of genteel society and to some extent an outsider. As far as one can tell, matters of status did not interest him in the first twelve to fifteen years of his life. Nor did his temperament set him apart, and as a boy and adolescent he resembled in most ways his peers in Virginia. He probably was a quiet youth, perhaps quieter than most of his age. If he wanted to rise in status, it must have seemed that he would have to do it on his own. His father had been a minor planter looking for the main chance; no great forebears could be summoned up to elevate his status, and there was little wealth in the family and no impressive achievements in politics or society.