Patriots (42 page)

A half hour after Prescott’s men had been dislodged from the fort, a British officer, Lieutenant John Dutton of the Thirty-eighth Regiment, sat down on the grass. He suffered from gout and wanted to change his stockings. Dutton’s orderly saw two men moving toward them, carrying muskets. He knew from the crudeness of their clothes that they weren’t British soldiers and ran to warn Dutton. The lieutenant scoffed at him. The Americans were coming to surrender and give up their arms, Dutton said. After all, an entire British unit was only fifty yards away. But the men raised their weapons and shot the lieutenant and his servant dead. John Dutton became the last British soldier to die that day on Breed’s Hill.

—

James Otis, in and out of asylums since 1771, had been passing his days lethargically at his sister’s house in Watertown. When he heard rumors of war that morning, Otis roused himself, borrowed a musket from a nearby farmer and set off to join in the excitement. His brain was still disordered, but he escaped the British guns and returned home that evening about ten o’clock. He had apparently spent the day with American snipers near Charlestown.

By now, any threats James Otis might have made fifteen years ago were irrelevant. In the shadow of Breed’s Hill, Otis had seen the province in flames, but the best part of him had perished long before the fire.

George Washington at the battle of Princeton, by Charles Willson Peale

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

G
EORGE
W
ASHINGTON
was still in Philadelphia when he heard reports of the battle on Breed’s Hill. He had been confirmed by the Congress and was preparing to take up his command in Cambridge. From the casualty figures, he could tell that the British had paid an exorbitant price for their victory. A British colonel who was dying from his wounds had said,
“A few such victories would ruin the Army.” Another British veteran of the battle wrote home, “We have got a little elbow room, but I think we have paid too dearly for it.” Nathanael Greene, an American commander from Rhode Island, said, “I wish we could
sell them another hill at the same price.”

Nearly one third of the British soldiers sent from Boston had been killed or wounded—more than eleven hundred casualties. British
losses at the rail fence had run to seventy percent. And yet William Howe remained extremely popular with the men who had
survived his three assaults. The day after the battle, he congratulated them on their bravery. As they repaired their gear and cared for the wounded, Howe’s men went about their duties with good humor.

For all the heroism on Breed’s Hill, the American camp was filled with accusations and reprisals. Colonel Prescott wanted Israel Putnam court-martialed, but Putnam was too well liked for that. General Artemas Ward was severely criticized for not bestirring himself during the engagement. Had he provided coherent tactics, his men said, the Americans could have held the hill. When the Congress debated whether to appoint George Washington as commander in chief, some members had worried that they might be slighting General Ward, given how esteemed he was by his men. By the morning of June 18, three days after Washington was unanimously elected, Ward’s popularity was no longer an obstacle.

—

That same day, Washington wrote to his wife to inform her of the honor being conferred upon him. He seemed eager to reassure her of his devotion: “I should enjoy more real happiness and felicity in one month with you, at home, than I have the most distant prospect of reaping abroad if my stay was to be
seven times seven years.” Washington promised to return safely to her in the fall. But he enclosed a will. He allowed himself more candor with his favorite brother, John Augustine. “For a while,” Washington wrote, “I am embarked on a wide ocean, boundless in its prospect and from whence, perhaps, no safe harbor is to be found.”

One of Washington’s traits that had impressed the Congress in Philadelphia was his modesty. He seldom joined in their debates; his education had been limited, and he wasn’t a fluent speaker. He asked his fellow Virginian Edmund Pendleton to draft his acceptance speech, but the tenor and sincerity of his words were his own. He spoke as frankly to members of the Congress as he would to his brother.

Washington said he was distressed that his abilities and his military experience might not be adequate for the trust they were conferring upon him. Still, he promised to exert his every power in the glorious cause. But if—here Washington revealed a lifelong dread—he failed, if his reputation lay in ruins, the Congress should
remember that he had warned them on this day that he wasn’t equal to the command. In concluding, Washington refused the monthly salary that the Congress had voted for him. Instead, he promised to keep an exact account of his expenses and be reimbursed only for them.

His brief speech was favorably received. John Adams thought it was noble, particularly the part about renouncing his pay.

Washington’s candor to the Congress had not been mere humility. At the age of forty-three, he was honest with himself. He knew that he was not a master of military strategy. He didn’t disagree that he could perform better in this new post than either John Hancock or his rival from Virginia, Colonel William Byrd, but his country was asking him to defeat men who had given their lives to the art and science of war.

—

Washington had been raised for the ambiguous life of a Virginia gentleman with a limited fortune. He wasn’t the eldest son in his family, nor had he been born to his father’s first wife, who had died after giving Augustine Washington two sons and a daughter. Three years later, the widower married an orphan, Mary Ball, who was twenty-three and a little past the usual age for marriage. She gave birth to a boy on February 11, 1732, a date that would be moved forward to February 22 when the calendar was revised. That first son of Augustine’s second family was named George to honor Mary Ball’s guardian, a lawyer named George Eskridge. Three more sons and a daughter survived.

Augustine Washington prospered as a planter. He was no Byrd or Lee or Randolph, but he acquired more than ten thousand acres of land and fifty slaves. He sent his two older sons to his old school in England. He might have intended to provide the same education and social finishing for the sons of his second marriage, but he died when George was eleven, making a British education impossible. Although Augustine Washington’s will favored his first family, George was not ignored. At twenty-one he was to inherit the family house at Ferry Farm, along with ten slaves and twenty-five hundred acres of not especially fertile land. Until that time, his property would be controlled by his mother. As a widow, however, Mary Ball Washington seemed to combine an enthusiasm for money with an indifference to the way it was managed. In her
thirty-five years Mary Washington had lost both of her parents and her husband; now she was determined to cling to her oldest son. Under the terms of the will, she and her other children were to live with George at Ferry Farm. But within a year or two George began to mature rapidly and cast about for an avenue of escape.

The young man’s Latin was sketchy and his spelling uncertain. He had grown into a remarkably fine horseman, however, and a fair shot. Early in his teens it was clear he would have an impressive physique and would stand well over six feet. His face was square, with a thrusting jaw and a florid fair skin that was often regarded as the English ideal. But what set George apart from other tall and robust Virginians was the intensity of his determination to better himself. He copied rules into a notebook that would guide him in making his way in the world. When speaking to men of quality, for example, he was not to look them full in the face. At meals, he shouldn’t clean his teeth on the tablecloth. The easiest rule for George to observe was a warning against biting humor. Life with Mary Washington had left him a serious young man.

For a time, he considered becoming a lawyer and filled pages with drafts of legal papers. He also copied out several
verses on true happiness from an author who defined it as a good estate on healthy soil and a quiet wife.

At the age of fourteen George tried to break away from Ferry Farm. His half brother Lawrence suggested that George could make his fortune by shipping out on a tobacco freighter and tried to cajole Mary Washington out of her opposition to the idea. Lawrence, who was twice George’s age, had already sailed to the West Indies to fight in Admiral Edward Vernon’s expedition against the Spanish fleet. Many of Vernon’s men died of yellow fever, but Lawrence came back to Virginia with stories of adventure at sea and named his estate for his commander—Mount Vernon. Mary Washington’s self-absorption was well known to her neighbors, and her coldness terrified their children. No appeal could move her now. George could not go to sea. But two years later, when he turned sixteen, she began allowing him to spend many of his days at Mount Vernon.

There George met Lawrence’s brother-in-law, George William Fairfax, who was seven years older than George and living
nearby at Belvoir, his family’s plantation. Through the Fairfaxes, George Washington was introduced to a grander life than anything at Ferry Farm. At Belvoir he learned to play billiards and whist and became addicted to dancing. Lawrence Washington had become an amiable substitute for George’s father and was already living a squire’s life at Mount Vernon on land that included the four thousand acres his wife had brought him in marriage. To have a similar estate George would have to earn it—or marry it—for himself. Like many Virginians of his background, he ached to buy land, but that took money.

At Belvoir he came to know Lord Fairfax, an Oxford graduate in his midfifties, who had come to Virginia to look after his far-flung properties. Young Washington made an engaging companion for riding and hunting, and Fairfax asked him to travel beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains and help survey the Fairfax forest land there. At sixteen, George Washington took his first job, running lines for his lordship’s estate.

Even for a hardy young man, frontier life was rigorous. During that first trip, George usually made terse entries in his diary—“Nothing remarkable happen’d”—but he recognized a joke when it was on him. The first night out, he had stripped off his clothes for bed, as though he were a house guest at Belvoir. But his bed was only matted straw with no sheets and a threadbare blanket heavy with lice and fleas. George jumped up in the dark, dressed again and settled down to sleep in his clothes like the more experienced surveyors. He wrote to a friend that most nights he bunked on a little hay or on a bearskin, along with a frontier family huddling together like dogs and cats. Happy, George said, was the man who got the berth nearest the fire. But he considered his pay generous—a doubloon a day. In time he earned enough to take a claim on four hundred and fifty-three acres of wild land in Frederick County.

When he returned to the luxuries of home, George found a disturbing surprise. George Fairfax had married a tall and lively eighteen-year-old named Sarah Carey. Everyone called her Sally. Washington had been susceptible to girls for some time. Schoolmates accustomed to his stolidity had remarked on the times he romped with one of the neighborhood girls. But
Sally Fairfax was not one for romping. She was only two years older than he, but she was married and her husband would inherit lavishly. Sally
wasn’t beautiful, but her long face was alight with intelligence and humor and she moved with a mature grace. Her teasing overtures stirred George Washington profoundly.

For the next four years, Washington divided his time between surveying the countryside and weeks of indulgence at Mount Vernon and Belvoir. There always seemed to be a host of pretty girls on hand, not least Mrs. Fairfax. Washington acquired more land and was named a county surveyor. But he appeared doomed to fall in love easily and lucklessly. He wrote to one young woman in Fredericksburg three times and got no answer. As he took up his pen for a fourth attempt, he confessed to her that he was almost discouraged. Nearing his twenty-first birthday, Washington seemed to have inherited his mother’s intense will and was on the way to harnessing it.

Then George’s prospects improved abruptly for a distressing reason. Lawrence Washington’s three children had died, and now he was suffering from a persistent cough that suggested tuberculosis. He sailed to the West Indies hoping that the sun would cure him. George went with him to Barbados while his wife stayed behind to tend their frail fourth infant. The trip mocked their expectations. Lawrence became worse and sailed on to Bermuda alone because George had contracted smallpox, a light case that left a few scars across his nose. On his return to Virginia, George found that he had also developed pleurisy. Meanwhile, Lawrence gave up his quest and came home to die.

The foresight of Lawrence’s will reflected his recent losses. During his wife’s lifetime she would live on at Mount Vernon as guardian for their surviving child. If that daughter also died, Mount Vernon and the rest of the estate passed to George upon the death of Lawrence’s widow. Lawrence had been one of the four majors in Virginia’s militia. As his heir, George sought that commission, and the Fairfax family helped him get it. Within six months, Lawrence’s infant daughter had died and his widow had remarried and moved away. George Washington began to assume responsibility for Mount Vernon. He had become a prosperous gentleman farmer, complete with a gentleman’s military rank.